The rise of Unite Union

One of the country’s newest trade unions, Unite, is credited with successfully organising workers who are usually considered to be either unorganisable or what industrial relations specialist Dr Peter Haynes describes as “a very difficult proposition”.

The union, led for six years by former Alliance politician Matt McCarten, has built a membership of up to nine thousand – many of them young, casual, and on low wages. They include workers in the fast food industry, cinemas, language schools, hotels, security and call centres.

Left-wing commentator Chris Trotter, an associate of McCarten, says: “He’s done it by going to workers that the other unions either didn’t think would join a union or would be too hard to organise in a union.”

Unite’s growth has been despite the generally static state of trade union membership in New Zealand.

The movement has never recovered from the Bolger National Government’s Employment Contracts Act of 1991, which scrapped the centralised system of compulsory arbitration and national awards, and replaced them with collective or individual employment contracts. Unions were reduced to the status of optional bargaining agents, and their membership halved during the decade that followed. 

Although Labour’s Employment Relations Act in 2000 restored some union rights, it failed to restore union strength. The proportion of wage and salary earners who belong to unions has been almost static at 21 or 22 percent ever since, and in the private sector it is only about 10 percent.

Dr Haynes, a senior lecturer at the Waikato Management School, says: “The Employment Relations Act really just gave the unions a platform on which to make a pitch to the workers. It really didn’t do much more than that.”

One of Unite’s current campaigns is on behalf of employees of the Australian-owned JB Hi-Fi chain, who according to the union earn just 75 cents per hour above the minimum wage and have had no increase for more than two years. The union regularly stages brief strikes in JB Hi-Fi stores, with colourful protests outside to target customers.

“That’s what makes us different from other unions,” McCarten says, “because we put the acid on the customers as well.”

Unite has also regularly protested outside Auckland’s SkyCity casino, sometimes alongside the Service and Food Workers’ Union.

SFWU general secretary accuses Unite of poaching its members in the early stages, although he says they now have a successful working relationship.

Grainne Troute, SkyCity’s general manager, human resources, says Unite’s tactics sometimes go too far, citing two occasions on which members have protested on the gaming floor.

“From an employer’s standpoint,” she says, “you tend to go ‘right, that’s it; until you guys settle down we’re actually not going to talk’.”

Acknowledging the challenges now faced by the union movement, Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly says the current industrial relations legislation has made it almost impossible to cover hundreds of thousands of workers.

“That is a real challenge to us,” she says.