Layoffs at Air NZ-Just the beginning?
What fantastic times we live in. Air New Zealand has announced plans that they will make 617 workers redundant. By outsourcing these jobs to China, the corporate and state interests at the top can make mega savings that will allow these pricks to buy new cars, houses and designer clothing. The best part of it is, that the lay offs could just be the beginning.
With the sixth negotiating round of talks with China to begin in early March, it appears that the government is anxious to close the free trade agreement with China, which will cause a tidal wave of job losses and factory closures rather similar to what’s happened at Auckland and Christchurch airports. And expect more of the same from the EPMU, a union that thinks that telling Air New Zealand to “Don’t be rash”, is solidarity with over six hundred workers about to lose their jobs.
So what’s at risk then? Only about 300 000 engineering and manufacturing jobs to Chinese sweat shops, a country that refuses to ratify all eight core principles of the International Labour Organization. For the six hundred Air NZ staff it is a sad day, their government and their union has betrayed them. The majority of the left is strangely silent on the issue (the Alliance Party a noticeable exception, who should be commended for it, another exception was the CWG who took it one step further by recommending a course of nationalisation like in Venezuela). The “fix our planes at home” was a total disgrace to the labour movement, it involved turning the workshops at our airports into virtual sweatshops wit pay cuts and long hours. No wonder the workers voted it down.
Notice I put a question mark in the headline. The question mark is a tentative optimistic question mark that is struggling to be there. It feels out of place. Can you see the weight on that question mark? The question mark isn’t directed at the government or the EPMU or in fact is it a rhetoric question.
The question is aimed at you and me. It asks us, what are we going to do about it? Are we going to allow this to be just the beginning? What are we going to do to derail the free trade agreement with China? What are we going to do to stop outsourcing people’s jobs to a virtual prison state? What are we going to do in solidarity with the people of Tibet or the dissidents and unionists in China? It asks us whether we have the courage and the perseverance to stand up to the combined might of corporations and a neo-liberal state.
If we fail to act on the job losses at Air New Zealand it sets a bad precedent for the left resisting the Free Trade Agreement with China and the tens to hundreds of thousands of job losses that will follow. I haven’t got the answers to the question either. I’ve never derailed a free trade agreement or stopped the outsourcing of hundreds of jobs and am at a loss as to what could be done. I know I wont be flying on Air Zealand ever again, and will be encouraging my family and friend to boycott Air New Zealand as well. However, more drastic action is needed, whether it involves locking on to aeroplanes, occupying airport terminals, digging up runways, blocking roads to Airports or smashing Air NZ billboards. All these actions have been used to good effect overseas against neo-liberalism so maybe its time we tried it over here.
Neo-liberalism must be stopped at all costs, just ask the families of the 617 engineers including 122 cleaners who will find themselves eking out a meagre living on the unemployment benefit. I can remember when as a nine year old my mother was made redundant and the hardship it brought on my own family. If we continue to remain silent on the China New Zealand Free Trade Agreement and this outsourcing then we condemn the world and ourselves to corporate rule, with limited liability corporations plundering our home and the homes of our brothers and sisters in China and across the world. Is this just the beginning of job losses to China or is it just the beginning of our resistance to neo-liberalism? The choice is ours.
ABOVE-In Thailand throughout January this year protestors brought trade negotiations to a halt by storming the hotel where US-Thai FTA talks were being held.
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Re: Layoffs at Air NZ-Just the beginning?
Omar a plan of action should have a strategy in mind. Actions against Air NZ and governemnt is lobbying parliament against free trade. That's asking the bosses and their government to stop making profits. We think that the answer to neo-liberalism (really the US dominated global economy) is neo-socialism. The difference is a question of ownership. Whatever action should start with what the workers need now, and not what we can lobby the government for, and which should point to socialism as the solution from the start.
Otherwise we end up as Workers Charter Clark Kents driving round looking for a phone booth that works.
The problem is that Air NZ, the government and EPMU are all working on the assumption that the airline has to be efficient and competitive on the bosses' terms. So long as this holds Air NZ will always be heavily subsidised to stay afloat, and since its all workers (not only Air NZ workers) who are producing the wealth to pay the subsidies, we should demand that it be nationalised outright under workers control. That is workers ownership.
So the answer for Air NZ is complete re-nationalisation under workers control with no compensation to the private owners. Occupations like in Argentina and Venezuela are the start of the process, but they happened because the plants were closed down by the bosses as their economies went bust. Even so most are still being run as cooperatives or co-managed state enterprises. But at least this has opened up a big fight over the need to go all the way to expropriate these plants. Also, this struggle is happening in a much wider context of a popular swing to the left in Latin America and Chavez' attempts to build alternative trading arrangements to the FTAA which could partially break with the IMF, WB, WTO dominated global market.
But in the absence of a collapsing economy and a broad left swing in this country, how to get Air NZ workers under the sway of the pro-boss EPMU and probably prepared to make some concessions to save their jobs, to leap forward to strike action and occupations? They are fairly well paid highly skilled workers who could probably get jobs overseas.
To test the level of fight at Air NZ we should use whatever influence we have to get all the workers, not just engineers and cleaners at Air NZ to form an inter-union rank and file group like the Soldiers of Solidarity in the auto workers in the US ( http://www.soldiersofsolidarity.com/) as the way to mobilise rank and file control of the unions. This means challenging the deal being done between the union heads, the government and the company. SOS line is 'no concessions'!
This group should demand that the EPMU leadership open up the negotiations with management and the government (which will probably now try to force further concessions) to an elected bargaining team which reports back daily to the membership.
Instead of employing a team of private consultants to find ways to cut costs, the workers should demand that they take control of the operations open up the books and plan the future of the airline. If they find no work available from the big private airlines, they could look to doing swaps with Venezuela, say oil for engineers, like the Cubans do with their doctors, or China etc. This would immediatly raise the need to run the airline to meet the travel needs of ordinary workers (for cheap, safe travel) and not the profits of private owners subsidised by workers wages.
Of course there would be widespread resistance all round to going down this road, not just from the union bosses and Labour but from the banks, and of course from our very, very, very good friend, but it if it led to some rank and file activity and got a serious political debate going about nationalisation and social ownership which we badly need right now, we would be ahead rather than further down the drain, and better prepared for the other fights ahead.
What do you think?
Re: Layoffs at Air NZ-Just the beginning?
today...
"Up to 300 dairy workers face losing their jobs under plans by one of the country's largest employers to shut down three of its manufacturing plants...It has proposed closing factories in Auckland, Dunedin and Taranaki, and focusing work at a second Taranaki plant."
i think a rank and file group of unionists could be good. i think it could be more effective if it was a broad community based anticapitalist coalition like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, http://www.ocap.ca/ this is the type of organisation that i could forsee actualy working in auckland in our current situation. from what i have read it includes all sorts of low income people, students, homeless and is a model of communists and anarchists working together. this may have been what i was trying to get at in my other post, that there are all these tiny left groups in auckland out there who would love to be able to take direct action against the neo-liberal onslaught but cant because they are all too small. the actions i describe above would just be part of the sort of direct action advocacy for people that inspires people to really want to shake off their chains. the most serious threat to workers here and in the pacific region is PACER, PICTA, assecion to the WTO, climate change, free trade agreements with the ASEAN countries and china. organising communitties and workplaces most at risk is the first step. direct action on the ground would need then to challenge both the immediate threat of layoffs and closures and the raft of trade agreements that most in aotearoa have no idea about.
Now threats of closure of ChCh workshops
Here we have it. Next stage is to threaten those who voted 'no' to selling their jobs with the closure of their workshops. Bloody blackmail.
What's the unions line, 'workers are fractious'
This shows that the only way to deal with a boss/union conspiracy to sell jobs is for workers to take over the workshops and run them under workers control.
NZ Herald 23 Feb 06
"Staff at Air New Zealand's Christchurch engineering base are being asked to agree to a restructuring plan or face losing their jobs.
Air New Zealand has threatened to close the base, unless workers agree to the restructuring plan at a scheduled vote today, The Press reported this morning.
If not, they face losing their workplace and engineering work to Auckland, staff and unions said.
More than 460 airline staff are employed at the Christchurch engineering centre.
Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) secretary Andrew Little said there had been two threatening letters on Tuesday and yesterday from the airline implying the Christchurch base could be closed.
One of the letters, obtained by The Press, written by Air New Zealand Engineering Services general manager Chris Nassenstein, said he would only interpret a "negative" vote "as an unwillingness to commit to a positive future for the Christchurch base and its staff".
"Combined with the results of recent financial analysis that indicate there are very significant savings available in a single-base strategy, I would then initiate consultation with Christchurch staff on the future of the base," he said.
Mr Little said the airline's statements were stirring up "a fractious workforce in Christchurch".
Air New Zealand engineers failed on Monday to agree on a new proposal to save 300 jobs from being out-sourced overseas.
Air New Zealand engineering staff from Auckland and Christchurch voted last week on the new proposal which gave concessions in pay and conditions.
The ballots were counted and the results announced at Auckland International Airport on Monday afternoon.
However, the concessions were too great for some Christchurch members of the Aviation and Marine Engineers Association (AMEA).
Re: Layoffs at Air NZ-Just the beginning?
There have been several attempt to build such broad based movements here in recent years. Poverty Action Coalition was one. ARENA organised anti APEC protests in Auckland a few years back, and came up against armed police. Further back still, the struggles against Rogernomics in the 1980s saw big rallies and wide community opposition. BUt it all fell down because the unions were coopted by the Labour Party and kept in check by bureaucrats like Anderson. Further back still in 1913 and 1951 working class communities were totally united in support of workers struggles, but they could not survive the use of state force to smash the unions.
Unless the rank and file can provide a backbone to such broad movements that carries the community with them nothing will move forward.
The Toronto movement seems similar. There are limits to what can be acheived in such movements unless they are rooted in radical unions. That's why Unite is starting at the right end, even though its methods are still bureaucratic. There is the potential for a broad community movement to be built around the Unite union, especially if it becomes based on workers democracy.
But how to bridge the gap between campaigning political unionism and the big industries where the old unions dominate. The cases of Air NZ and Fonterra present a challenge. Both involve hundreds of workers in cities like ChCh or towns like Eltham that cannot afford to see these jobs go. The commnunity is involved but it is reduced to lobbying unless the workers are prepared to fight for their jobs.
At the moment, the frontline is in defending those CHCH workers who voted 'no' to the sellout deal of Air NZ and the EPMU. If other unions got behind the ChCh workers and voted to puts bans on Air NZ if the workers strike or are locked out that would get them jumping. If the wider 'community' got behind those workers to build a picket and defend them then that would be a huge step forward.
In ChCh unionists should be demanding that the CTU support the workers who voted 'no' to selling their jobs, and offer them strike funding if they decide to reject the ultimatum from the boss. But since there is not much chance of that happening, they need to build a rank and file support committee to strengthen the ChCh workers to encourage them to take a stand.
That's community direct action.
Re: Layoffs at Air NZ-Just the beginning?
what a surprise...
Air NZ – don’t get it wrong again
Friday, 24 February 2006, 12:21 pm
Press Release: Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union
February 24, 2006
Air NZ – don’t get it wrong again
The Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union is challenging Air New Zealand’s latest round of jobs cuts, saying that it’s time the airline worked with its employees for the sake of everyone.
National secretary Andrew Little said that it was unbelievable that the company had today announced another 470 jobs would go, hard on the heels of the drama over contracting out engineering.
“Air New Zealand got that wrong, and it’s probably got this wrong too,” he said.
In October last year, the airline announced that it intended contracting overseas wide-body aircraft maintenance with the loss of 617 jobs. Unions analysed the company’s proposal and found that 300 jobs could be kept here, and last night voted to accept a new collective employment agreement that allowed the deal to go ahead.
Mr Little said that the airline appeared to have learnt nothing from the past four months.
“We had to muscle our way into the decision-making process over Air New Zealand Engineering Services, and we showed that we are capable of finding solutions that the company seems unable to come up with,” he said.
“Yet today Air New Zealand has unilaterally announced that it intends getting rid of 470 people in customer services, without so much as talking to them or their unions.”
The airline is also embroiled in a legal dispute with the EPMU over plans to contract out aircraft cleaning.
Mr Little said that the stakes were too high to allow Air New Zealand to get things wrong.
“All of us – workers, managers, the traveling public, exporters, shareholders and the Government – have a stake in this. Air New Zealand is a pivotal part of our economy and society, and we cannot afford to leave its future up to a handful of managers who might get it wrong again,” he said.
“Air New Zealand’s passenger numbers and yield are up, and the exchange rate is expected to fall, and we can see no justification for this latest round of job cuts.”
Mr Little said that he would be happy to convene a forum bringing Air New Zealand workers and their unions together with managers to discuss the issues facing the airline.
ENDS
The forgettable thoughts of Andrew Little
National secretary Andrew Little said that it was unbelievable that the company had today announced another 470 jobs would go, hard on the heels of the drama over contracting out engineering.
“Air New Zealand got that wrong, and it’s probably got this wrong too,” he said.
"probably"?
“All of us – workers, managers, the traveling public, exporters, shareholders and the Government – have a stake in this. Air New Zealand is a pivotal part of our economy and society, and we cannot afford to leave its future up to a handful of managers who might get it wrong again,” he said.
"might"??
With this sort of lead coming from the top of the workers union only the discovery of a rare giant snail in one of the hangars is likely to stop Air New Zealand's onslaught.