Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 27, No. 4. 1964.

Federation Of Labour Re-asserts Itself

Federation Of Labour Re-asserts Itself

The Federation of Labour's 27th Annual Report includes a clarion call for a return to the full-blooded socialism of Harry Holland (obit. 1933) by the political Labour movement.

Journalistic and academic commentators have searched diligently for some explanation for this extraordinary manifestation of atavism in a body which was being hailed only a short decade ago as "responsible", "moderate", and "in tune with the needs of the times". Press editorials up and down the country have even declared that the fallaciousness of the Federation's new cry lies in the changes which have occurred in New Zealand society since Harry Holland's day—as if they, too, were stout upholders of socialism when things were different!

Shrewdest observation so far has come from Vic's own J. L. Roberts, who suggested on the N.Z.B.C. that what the Federation was after might, after all, only be some more clearcut differentiation between the policies of the two main parties. The glossy finish given by the hired ad men to Labour's campaign at the last elections certainly succeeded in concealing any substantial differences there might have been from the average voter. A straightforward appeal to the social conscience to reverse the current trend of setting social priorities in such a way that insurance companies can go on erecting skyscrapers while the public authorities can't even solve the traffic problem, would undoubtedly have an immediate impact on the electorate.

Any political approach which puts public welfare clearly before private profit is inherently socialist, and is likely to attract the support of a majority of New Zealanders. The experience of successive polls on the trust control issue in the licensing arena proves that.

But there are other factors at work in the Federation's minor bombshell. Nobody will need to be told that "things have been happening" in the Labour movement—both industrial and political—these last few years. The employment of a commercial image-maker to oversee Labour's election campaign for the first time ever, is one outward and visible sign.

The group behind the employment of Mr. Dryden and his department-store sale fechniclucs was (need I say) centred in Auckland. The big levers of power in the industrial movement are situated, due to the decentralisation of authority that has accompanied the historically necessary development of amalgamated national unions, mainly in Wellington.

Resentment at the huckstering appearance of Labour's election campaign thus gave combined expression to two feelings very common in the Wellington Trades Hall—a geographical jealousy of Auckland, and a political intuition that any prolongation of the attempt to present Labour as the pale imitation of National would be likely to keep Trades Hall in the permanent political wilderness. At least a labour Government takes the trade union movement into account as a legitimate pressure group.

But there is more to it than that. The face of the Federation of Labour has changed in recent years more than can be explained by the replacement of F. P. Walsh's overwhelming beetle-browed countenance by the gentler visage of Tom Skinner. For a start, the departure for another place of Walsh's personality, his unplumbed powers of political sagacity and manipulation, and his extraordinary hold over individuals who privately disliked him have left a gaping void.

And in the years inimedialely prior to his death, Walsh had changed the nature of the federation considerably. Nobody ever thought that the epidemic of libel litigation a few years ago was just a game. It was an essential part of a shrewd political adjustment to changed circumstances, which included a National Government with the will and power to toughen the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act and use its penal provisions against recalcitrant workers, and a Labour Party without the political nous to constitute an effective opposition.

At the height of the Walsh era, when relations were closest between Trades Hall and Parliament House (under Peter Fraser's firm control), the Federation top shelf relied on the compulsory trade unionists in the proliferation of tin-pot "moderate" unions to keep the militant power of the older industrial unions in check. But the changed circumstances required a shift of power to the latter group—and it has occurred assisted by Walsh's own shift to the left and open break with the Butler-Neary group, and his adoption of Molineux of the Carpenters' Union as a replacement on the Executive for the ageing and eventually deceasing Thompson of the Plumbers' Union.

Skinner is at a great disadvantage, trying to keep firm control of the Federation from Auckland when its driving apparatus is definitely in Wellington. But this may well be just part of a time-fuse left by the late Mr. Walsh. We must remember that Walsh knew perfectly well that Baxter whom he helped into the secretaryship of the Federation at its inception nearly thirty years ago, was an avowed Marxist—which, indeed, he was himself once.

The pattern begins to emerge of a Federation knowing fairly certainly where it is going, and assisted not a little by the continuing stratagems of a mind that has been interred at Karori these twelve months.

If I was Arnold Nordmeyer, I would pay much more attention to the Federation than the newspaper columnists say he is intending to.