Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 41 No. 9. April 24 1978

What Happened with the Freezing Workers?

What Happened with the Freezing Workers?

One major area of state activity in times of crisis is the economy. While content to let increasing numbers of small businesses and small farmers become bankrupt, it steps in smartly, as with Tasman's, to prevent the same happening to big business. Overall it acts to protect and raise the rate of profit by depressing wages.

Last year we had the wage freeze. In a change of tactics we then got the FoL-National Government policed "social contract". Now we are faced with the new Arbitration Court and a 12 month delay clause for rises in award wages. Meanwhile inflation is still well into double figures.

It would be wrong to argue from the general premise that because the Government is committed to depressing wages that it will do so in every particular case. This becomes clear if we look at the freezing works dispute.

In this dispute, one hard line section of big business threatened the interests of the majority of big business. The consequences of an all out battle between the freezing works employers and the freezing workers would have been unbearable for the bourgeoisie, regardless of the outcome. The loss of meat production at the height of the export season in a prolonged stoppage would have driven many farmers to bankrupty and considerably worsened the balance of payments.

State intervention, in this one case, on the side of the freezing workers was in the overall interests of monopoly capital. The state does not act blindly, in the service of every small section of the bourgeoisie that asks for its assistance but in the interests of the whole class.

Because the state appears to occasionally act on behalf of workers there are those that go on to argue that increased state intervention under a 'responsible' government could be the mechanism for reaching a socialist society. This is the false hope raised by the SUP with its slogan "social control of investment" by which they mean exactly that sort of government intervention. It is this type of false socialism which the Federated Farmers official accused Muldoon of when he averted what would have been an economically crippling dispute for the bourgeoisie.

The German revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, warned of those who felt socialism could be gradually achieved through state administered reforms many years ago:

'Social control'... is concerned not with the limitation of capitalist property, but on the contrary, with its protection. Or, speaking in economic terms, it does not constitute an attack on capitalist exploitation, but rather a normalisation and regularisation of this exploitation. "