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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Trade Unions and Unemployment

Trade Unions and Unemployment

Some time ago, when the New Zealand Government was putting into force some rapidly conceived solutions for long-standing economic difficulties, a number of unions issued statements condemning these changes, and showed a readiness to oppose them. I was particularly interested in the reaction of New page 279 Zealand Catholics to this situation. I was able to make out two broad currents of opinion – a general notion that another Government had not been handling well its stewardship of our affairs; and a further less general notion that, while this might be so, the unions were acting in a sectional and anti-social way in directly opposing economic measures designed to meet a national difficulty.

The first current I can go along with; it is the second that makes me stop and think, because a long study of the unions has led me to put some trust in their type of prudence and belligerence. And I would like to set down some broad and tentative comments on the phenomenon of unionism for the consideration of my fellow-Catholics.

I recall one occasion when, being out of work and without money, I had taken on a job grinding brass taps. It was a small, ill-equipped workshop. The labourers were given aprons and gloves; but the aprons did not keep our clothing clean, the gloves already had holes worn in them from touching the emery wheels on the hands of those who had come before us, and there was great difficulty in obtaining new pairs from the management. Furthermore, the machines designed to draw away the brass dust from the air of the workshop did not function very well; the heating of the shop came from a drum of coke which also distributed carbon monoxide fumes; and in cold weather one’s hands became numb and clumsy, so that the probability of getting grazes from the emery wheel was very great. The men in their shapeless clothes were oldish and worn down like the machinery. The foreman’s personality, understandably enough, was truculent and unfriendly. The men were unable to exchange a word while the machines were in motion, because of the constant noise; and at the smoko or lunchtime break they rarely conversed, and when they did, the content of their communication was very meagre. I lasted in the job a few days; but some of the men had been in it for years.

I do not wish, however, to stress the objective conditions of employment, which were perhaps exceptionally poor; I wish to stress rather a profound subjective sense that one had entered a void, a situation where human beings were dispensable objects. For such men the value of unionism can by no means be measured solely or chiefly in terms of an objective improvement in working conditions or increases in wages. Its very strong subjective value lies in the fact that by unionism they are able in some measure to re-enter a communal framework and recreate a situation where they are subjects rather than objects.

If the management of a factory decides in prudence to employ an efficiency expert to smooth out hitches and speed up production, their overt intention can hardly be faulted. Increased production will (one hopes) be of benefit to all those social units who are also men. But when certain union members put the efficiency expert into a barrel of offal and wheel him off the premises, they too have some right on their side. They may be considering Old Mac who dodders round in the freezing chamber, or young Wiri who works well when page 280 he is on the job but has a weakness for the booze; and they will be seeing these members of the community subjectively and measuring without clear thought a hundred obscure and incalculable factors. To the efficiency expert the men are themselves essentially objects, however well this blasphemous matter may be disguised in talk about the bigger pay packets that will come with increased production.

I think the greatest single obstacle, on the natural level, which is likely to prevent a modern unionist from seeing the Church as his defender is the obstinate identification, by him and by others, of Catholicism with middle-class norms. This is not really because Catholics tend to be politically conservative; rather, I think, because they tend to be apolitical. To get a good white-collar job; to be an obedient clerk and deplore the aggression latent in a stop-work meeting; to render to Caesar whatever Caesar can legitimately demand within the broadest definition of his societal authority – this may be a natural Catholic tendency, since our authorities within the Church are on the whole humane and disposed to regard us individually as subjects rather than as objects. The Catholic then very often grows up like a good child who regards all bosses as friends and father figures.

The patron saint of many modern Catholics should be Joseph the Provider, who was a good servant to Pharaoh, and told him how to gain economic and political control legitimately by holding the harvest over from the good years to the barren years. How often, at the crisis of a union battle, has a fellow-Catholic not scarified my heart by sliding quietly over to the side of the bosses? – not because they were in the right of it (if he had thought so, the time to say that was when we first discussed our tactics) but because an unconscious preference for strong established authority had taken charge of him. One could say to the other men – ‘Look, Mick can’t help it; he’s a bit scared; he’s a simple man and he had it hard when he was young’ – but they would still see the image of the Church in him, and in me a unionist who had unaccountably accepted an archaic and conservative authority. They would pity me for what they supposed to be a divided allegiance.

On the other side of the fence, I can recall reading a magnificent article by a Jesuit in the Indian Catholic periodical The Examiner, written when the sweepers of Bombay were striking in the hope of improving their abysmally poor wages and conditions. Their leaders had been thrown into gaol. But this priest laid down calmly five necessary conditions for a just strike, and concluded that these conditions had been amply fulfilled in the case of the sweepers’ strike. He made also a most valuable point that a union member is morally obliged to act on the decisions of his union executive unless he has a clear objection to those decisions on grounds of conscience. On the Papal, hierarchical and clerical level, the Church’s definitions and directives in such matters have generally been lucid and uninfluenced by any class bias; it is among the laity that her image is most darkened

It is necessary to distinguish clearly between three kinds of unionism – liberal, militant and political. The vision of liberal unionism is a situation where the representatives of the employers and the union representatives sit down amicably at a table, calling each other by their Christian names, and work out a compromise in a non-aggressive atmosphere. I grant that on the face of it this seems to be just what a Christian would hope for. But in practice two things almost inevitably happen. First, the employers, who are basically in the strongest bargaining position, get a compromise which is far too much to their advantage. Secondly, the union representatives tend to lose touch with the rank and file, becoming mere officials, and may even (as a result of their isolation from their communal group) begin to bargain for a safe position in the Company or Departmental structure to which they can shift when their term as union representatives expires.

Liberal unionism tends to corrupt the union representative. It is not a clearcut process. Problems or injustices that are painfully evident at the grass-roots level of unionism tend to be lost in an abstract fog at the liberal bargaining level. A union representative is away from his home territory – the amenities, the physical surroundings in which the bargaining takes place, have about them the subjective colour of the authoritative pyramid structure to which his opponents belong. He has to have a clear, hard and fundamentally aggressive mind to keep his bearings. Though the Marxian theory of an ineradicable class conflict is itself erroneous, the area of negotiation is still an area in which conflicting interests have to be expressed honestly, and the recollection of actual conflicts and what he has learnt from them about himself and his opponents is very helpful to the union bargainer; he has to have an instinct like that of a boxer in the ring, and be quite incapable of being intimidated.

What distinguishes militant from political unionism is that the militant unionist deals with specific issues and does not rely on a Party line or a rigid social theory. Curiously – or not so curiously – the employers’ representatives often respect the militant unionist more than they do the liberal. They too are fighters and can recognise the calibre of an opponent. In the public view, however, militant unionism tends to be downgraded. The issue here is fairly complex. If either the employers, or the Government, put up the price of bread, there are newspaper headlines but no obvious social disruption. But the militant unionist is most sensitively aware that any improvements he has been able to achieve in wages or conditions can be negated in a hidden fashion by the raising of prices. He has the choice of arbitration or strike action; and in either case, it will hit the newspaper headlines.

In most cases there will not be a strike unless other methods have failed, and unless there are a number of subjective facts – broken time among the wharf workers, for example, affects their family life adversely – which pile up cumulatively and may be the occult and real reason for the strike. With union leadership they might go on strike for three cents an hour extra; and page 282 this may seem unwarranted in a relatively affluent society; yet experience of many strikes has taught me that the aggression behind strike action invariably springs like pus from an old, obscure and basic wound – the awareness among modern working men that they exist as dispensable objects in a world made for things rather than for men.

In Asia unionism is commonly political – though not necessarily Marxist – because a non-political militant unionism has never been allowed to exist: and because conditions intolerable in human terms have sharpened aggression to a cutting edge. But in this country the two or three Communists in any big union will never get a backing unless the rank and file already feel that good reasons exist for action. Communists, when they are valued by other union members, are not valued for their Communism, but for other accompanying qualities – incorruptibility, a flexible and intelligent militancy, or simply at times qualities of social warmth and Samaritanhood. But Communism has little to do with the main stream of militant unionism in this country; and those who think it has are, in my opinion, under-rating the intelligence of the average unionist. It troubles me that some of the internal policies of our present Government may be based on a fantastic view of local unionism.

And what of the businessman? He, too, like his employee, may be a solitary person, may feel that he is an object rather than a subject, though not in so obvious a way. The structure of a Company will never give him communal support. If he has a bad hangover and trouble at home, whom will he discuss it with? With his chief clerk? Perhaps.

The man who works at a lathe in his factory may find it easier. If the communal atmosphere in that factory is strong, he may be able to sort it out at lunchtime with the man who works beside him. Money has nothing to do with it. And the union is in some degree the objective expression of this kind of subjective communal bond.

The relationship between the employer and the unionist changes radically whenever there are eleven men standing in line for ten jobs. And in this context I was much amazed by the statement of a certain well-known M.P. that ‘the present tight employment situation (is) the best thing that could have happened to this country’. Certainly his opinion is unlikely to lose him any votes, since he represents one of the most affluent town electorates; but his statement seemed to me both unimaginative in the ugliest sense conservative. I wish to examine some of the peculiar social myths and contradictions which may have lain behind it.

There is a tendency for a certain school of economic theory to place an apparent public economic good before the good of the individual. Up to a point this view makes sense. If it can be shown to me, for example, that by paying higher taxes, or doing without luxury goods, I will be helping the stability of the national economy, then I have no real right to complain. Certainly I may grumble a little; but I will recognise some underlying principle of justice.

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It is quite another thing if I lose the job I am accustomed to do and cannot find another. Pope John has made it quite clear that modern societies have an actual responsibility to provide their members with a decent living wage – and where is the living wage to come from if one does not have a job? It would be different in a small peasant community where each householder had a plot of land to till. But in our own large, depersonalised, centralised, industrialised societies the man who has only his labour to sell is directly and terribly dependent either on business firms or on the State itself to provide him with a livelihood. Since business firms can readily fail, the paternal protection of the State is his only final safeguard against a condition of near-destitution. To allow this safeguard to disappear, in a country as affluent as our own, is an act of all-but-criminal public negligence.

It is the labouring men who are the hardest hit by unemployment. To take the case of greatest hardship, let us suppose that a labouring man has been supporting a wife and six children on a wage of thirty-five dollars a week. If he is put off work and cannot find another job, the unemployment benefits available will be insufficient to support him and his family at what is more than (for this country) a subsistence level. Moreover, the benefits will not be paid until a fortnight has elapsed from the time when he lost his job. A grave disruption and fragmentation of family life may easily occur; and all those who have studied the psychological effects of unemployment emphasise a dangerous element of personal demoralisation. If work is available in some other part of the country, then this husband and father may have to leave his family in order to go and work there; or if the entire family decide to shift there will be many other financial and social problems associated with the enforced change.

Any attempt to justify these effects in terms of the public good is surely sophistical. An acrid and only too familiar bureaucratic voice may interject that the man in question had no business to saddle himself with a large family (or perhaps to marry at all) when he could not be sure of keeping a steady job. I think we may disregard this arrogant intrusion. I have in mind particularly some of those Maori parents who are rearing large families under difficult economic conditions. Some of them will be the ones to suffer most from unemployment.

There is one social fable commonly touted around with which I have little patience – namely, that a good many labouring men are slack workers, and so a situation where there are eleven men for every ten jobs will guarantee that these supposed loafers will either have to work harder or be fired. In my time I have worked in at least twenty labouring jobs. I doubt if the M.P. who favours unemployment has done the same. And I have never seen a man kept on who was not prepared to do an ordinary day’s work. In the cases of alleged victimisation the unions themselves distinguish sharply between the man who may have had a legitimate difference with the boss and the man page 284 who has not been doing his share of the work. Indeed, when I was young and a heavy drinker, I was several times sacked from labouring jobs because of a lackadaisical approach that came from persistent hangovers; and I have no complaints to make about it.

In general I have been time and again struck with admiration for my fellow workers – for the way in which they tackled hard jobs, in all weathers, uncomplainingly; for the basic endurance and self-respect that kept them going in jobs that had very little to offer them either financially or in terms of human creativity. I have, however known special cases where men who were old or sick or otherwise partially disabled were ‘carried’ to some extent by their fellow workers; and I can understand that this situation could be very irritating to a management bent on maximum efficiency and productivity.

But do we want to give first priority to efficiency or humanity. The Christian answer to this question is not, for me at least, in any doubt. The unions rightly fear unemployment for two main reasons – because of the obvious hardships of those who lose their jobs; and because when there are eleven men for every ten jobs, union solidarity suffers gravely and men will accept poor conditions and dictatorial treatment, out of fear, which they would never accept if they were free agents. There is the danger also, in the event of a strike, that managements will easily be able to recruit strike-breakers.

I would heartily agree with that M.P. who favours it that unemployment brings about a real change in the tone of feeling between employers and employees. A man who is shovelling coke in the gasworks will go on shovelling it for years, regardless of the fact that his lungs are coated with grit, because it is the only job he can get. He will not demand dirt money. He will not ask for screens or masks to improve his working conditions, or even a rota of work so that any one man only has to do the worst job for a short period. If the boss bawls him out for taking time off for a smoke, he will pick up his shovel silently and get to work again, and suppress his feelings of human protest. These are not yet the psychological conditions of employment in this county; but they could well become so if the ingenious M.P.’s dream of an employers’ Utopia based on partial unemployment were to become real. For the labouring man the prospect of such conditions is a waking nightmare, the thing he fears most next to unemployment itself.

Behind those economic theories which favour partial unemployment there is often an arrogant assumption that the unemployed man is a weakling or a fool who has only himself to blame for his condition. It is, I think, an opposite assumption to that suitable to be held by Christian men who are, by the mercy of God, reasonably well endowed with worldly goods. The precise relation of the irresponsible rich to the destitute is clearly shown for all time in Our Lord’s parable of Dives and Lazarus. We may suppose that no Lazarus can be found walking the streets of New Zealand towns; but this may only mean that our eyesight is very poor.

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A young man who has lost his job (whether by some slackness, or lack of skill, or because he has said a word out of place when times are hard, or simply because firms are feeling the economic squeeze) and who has not yet received or has already spent his meagre Unemployment Benefit, can be run into gaol as a rogue and a vagabond without lawful means of support, simply because he has no money. Here there is an obvious gap between legality and morality. If I am able to sit by the fire and read, simply because my economic position is for the time being a good one, while this young man simply because his economic position is different, has to spend a good many days and nights in the cells – then I am Dives and he is Lazarus, and I would have reason to dread the Judgment if I did not use all means that lay in my power, private and public, to help him.

When I was instructed in the Catholic Faith, the catechism then in use told me that there are several sins that cry out to God especially for vengeance – among them, the sin of defrauding a labourer of his hire. One could say of course that the introduction of this absolute element is wholly irrelevant to the present topic; that the present economic state of the country has not been brought about deliberately by any one person or group of people; that one can only defraud a man already employed, not a man who has no employment; that it is absurd to impute culpability to anyone in terms of that particular fault.

Yet – if a man should claim that partial unemployment benefited his business – if he should in any way contribute to the unemployment of others, or at least not do what he could to keep people employed – if, that is, for selfish reasons he should go willingly with a drift towards a situation where labouring men cannot obtain a just and decent wage sufficient to support their families in moderate affluence – a drift, furthermore, towards that economic liberalism which the Church specifically condemns, by which employers are at liberty to determine the wages and conditions of the employed – then I think he would be in real danger of Divine Judgment. It is a possibility that any Catholic businessman would have to consider loosely; and even those who are not Catholics would do well to remember that God is neither an abstraction nor an anachronism.

To my mind the central moral issue of unemployment is this: ‘Why should a labouring man (whatever his personal degree of capability) be obliged to suffer humiliation, hardship and possible family disruption, simply because nobody has taken the time and trouble to make sure that work is available for him?’ Except by the remote control of his vote he has no means whatever to determine and improve his economic environment; but others have the means, and hold authority on his behalf, and it is their responsibility to see that he does not fall into avoidable calamities. If such calamities are unavoidable, in a country as affluent as our own, then it would seem that our economic system is gravely defective and should either be modified or discarded.

It is true that Adam was told that he would have to earn his bread in the page 286 sweat of his brow. Some members of the community (myself and the dogmatic MP included) may be temporarily exempted for special reasons from the need to sweat, at least physically; but this is a privilege which carries with it responsibilities towards those who do sweat, which we can only forget at our own spiritual peril; and we do badly if we cynically shrug off the demand of the unemployed man to be at least allowed to sweat and earn. The economics of unemployment is rather like plumbing in a house. If the plumbing is well looked after, one hardly notices that it is there, and this is the way things should be. But if the pipes leak and the house is flooded, it is time for investigation and repair – time perhaps to get in a more competent plumber than the last one. Not only labourers but also MPs may find themselves unemployed.

Moreover, work is not the whole of a man’s life – each man has also obligations to God, to himself, to his family, to his neighbours – and it is possible that far too many people in this country have to spend an inordinate amount of their time either working or worrying about work to the detriment of other spheres of human action. Let us learn to set on one side the national fetish of business efficiency and look longer and more charitably at our neighbours’ spiritual and social conditions.

1968 (424)