Capital versus labour
The lie we have all accepted for far too long!
As a young student I worked as a table-hand in a bakery supplying products for what was then the two British airline divisions of B.O.A.C. and B.E.A. It was a really convenient arrangement since I was pretty well guaranteed work every seasonal holiday period, plus weekend work if the bakery was short staffed during term time. It wasn’t my first student employment, but it became a defining job in my understanding of how wages for workers were not linked to productivity but rather a pecking order in an unjust hierarchy. The ‘dough maker’ which at this bakery consisted of three shift workers, without whom no product could ever be produced, was on the lowest hourly rate. Next came the specialist pastry makers for puff and choux pastry, followed by table-hands (like myself) then the packers and finally the delivery drivers. Of course above every one were the office staff and management. Then there was another hidden layer in this orthodoxy, whispered, but never officially recognised. Factories at this time could employ intellectually or physically challenged or impaired people at a much lower rate, part of the costs of which were met by government under the disabilities act provisions. The firm employed three such people during the time I worked there. All three were as productive as every other table hand and in the case of one, twice as productive. Yet all three suffered the indignity of a lower hourly rate. Then there were the two students me and my school friend, who had got me the job. Both Roger and I were on better wages than most of the other table hands on the basis that we were fast, reliable and diligent. We would be the first to volunteer to work a double shift if the factory was short-handed, to work seven day weeks back to back, and Christmas morning and Boxing Day shifts, because the airlines never stopped flying!!
The period was 1967 through to 1973 in the tiny town of Hanworth near Heathrow airport, a time in Britain where there was still work to be found for a semi skilled and unskilled labour workforce. By the mid 1980’s with the introduction of brand new food production facilities that were mechanised, could produce the same products twice as fast, at half the costs, and with a massively reduced work force, A. T. Hillier’s Bakers & confectioners’ closed its doors forever.
This period of course coincided with the elevation of Margaret Thatcher (milk snatcher) to Britains Prime Minister a role she would hold for thirteen years. A defining utterance by her during this time was asking “who is society? there is no such thing! There are only individuals There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.” At this same time Thatcher oversaw a massive privatisation of all nationalised industries that saw the transfer of wealth from the collective to the few and a dramatic slashing in the size of welfare state provisions. Unionism, that had been a foundational support for the improvement of wages and conditions of service in a post WW2 Britain were attacked by Thatcher and her government and one by one neutered, culminating in the N.U.M. Thus rendering defective what had hitherto been a brake on the exploitation of labour by capital
.Since 1990 there has been no let up in an economic policy that dictated supply and demand, market forces and privatisation became the sole drivers of all fiscal orthodoxy. Any ‘social’ considerations towards supporting people in work, as a better alternative to unemployment, fell on deaf ears, whilst at the same time those forced out of work were cast as dole bludgers and parasites. It was also a time where the independence of a Fleet Street newspaper industry was destroyed, first by de-unionising the work force and then by selling off the vehicles of public information and debate to a very small cabal of Thatcherite acolytes.
The proof that Thatchers vision of ‘no society’ was realised has been seen the massive inflation of a small rich elite alongside a huge and growing army of under or unemployed people caused as a direct result of her policies.
Neither, Blair, Brown and now Starmer have or are offering any solution to this devastating economic robbery of the vast majority of workers in Britain. As yet no one is offering an alternative!!!
This tragedy has occurred in New Zealand in EXACTLY the same manner. First by two Labour administrations and followed by National and then both National and Labour lead coalition governments. So similar it’s as though New Zealand used the British experience as its blueprint to rob the collective in favour of the few.
Any economic system that fails to place labour at the very top of all theories is by definition robbing from a collective to enrich individuals.
Evidence of the way in which the collective in New Zealand has been robbed can be illustrated by the power industry. All major infrastructure built in NZ was paid for by tax dollars from the collective work force. Over the years it has seen some of the most fantastic engineering feats undertaken to harness natural resources, feed the power to a national grid and then distribute to both industry and individuals. All the profits from these ventures and usages went straight back into treasury purses to support the next development. The privatisation of power distribution across the motu has resulted in an unfair redistribution of wealth away from the collective and into the hands of individuals. Simple mathematics informs us that if the wealth of a nation and the service provided by that wealth is diverted to private ownership that demands a dividend several things are inevitable
Profit becomes paramount
Labour is rendered an expendable commodity
Conditions of service that impede the first directive are removed
Aging infrastructure in need of replacement is socialised (ie paid for by the taxpayer) whilst profit remains privatised
The cost of the product to the consumer will rise irrespective of the production costs
The theft of our collective is also to be found in our health service where private practice is being paid top dollar to funnel waiting patients through the private system at vastly inflated costs to the tax payer. If the right amount of funding had been set aside to maintain the quality of infrastructure and number of health care staffing in the first place then the use of private hospitals would be unnecessary. Primary health care provisions in New Zealand in particular are a disgrace. A consultancy fee of $58 in the tiny low waged rural town I live in effectively bars many people from appropriate interventional health care at the top of the cliff and guarantees a larger bill to the tax payer picking up the pieces at the bottom!
Margaret Thatcher’s insistence that it’s not the job of government to house people is as preposterous a claim as placing financial constraints on access to immediate interventionist health care for all in New Zealand.
The drive to create more and more charter schools is yet one more example of how the collective is being robbed to finance the few. For those unaware, each student in state schools attracts a certain funding per head which is known as the operating grant for a year. Charter schools being promoted by David Seymour attract SEVEN TIMES MORE TAX PAYER MONEY THAN THE STATE SYSTEM. Yes that’s right ! Read it again! So whilst your local school may struggle to staff or supply basic essential teaching aids for your child, the Charter schools are bursting at the seams with YOUR TAX DOLLARS.
In every instance in our capitalist driven system all costs to industry are socialised by our labour through tax dollars, whether it be through cheaper interest rate loans, cheaper access to power supply, preferential use of local water supplies, paid for by YOUR TAX DOLLARS, the infrastructure of roading to ferry their products to market, policing to safe-guard their factories, the payment of tax dollars via working for families because the enterprise doesn’t provide a living wage.
Under the capitalist system there are no constraints on pricing since ‘the market dictates’. Unfortunately the reality in New Zealand is most prices are inflated precisely because there is no competition (the food distribution chains being the clearest example if price gouging!) Many work safe aspects are overlooked or eased in order to chase the maximum profit per unit. Workers conditions of service are slashed to the bone and tenure becomes a moveable feast that places all the power in the hands of capital.
If I return to my original demonstrator of A.T. Hillier’s Bakery & confectioners, that factory over three shifts employed probably a maximum of 200 workers from Management to office staff, stores person, oven setters, dough-makers, table hands, packers in despatch and delivery drivers. Nothing could be achieved without the participation of every cog in the engine of production and delivery. NOTHING. So why weren’t each of these workers paid the same? Who says that a labelled ‘challenged’ person working at the same rate as anyone else should not be paid the same rate? Why should my readiness to work on weekends or on statutory days off mean I’m afforded a higher hourly rate? (After all I get paid more anyway because of overtime rates and the extra days I choose to work!) My manager was a very charismatic person, generous to fault in buying rounds on a Friday after work, but was his contribution any more valuable to the profits of the enterprise than each individuals contribution to the collective good?
The original draught of Clause IV written by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1917 and adopted by the Labour Party in 1918 read:
‘To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.’
The subsequent attempts and eventual alteration of this simple message reveals the collusion of revisionist Labour Party members to trample on what is a very simple and inarguable truth, that is; those who make the cake deserve an equal share of it so that each person is able to enjoy and take part as a full member of the communities they inhabit. The capitalist model denies this simple ideal whilst at the same time informing us we can all be better off under a laissez faire, bugger thy neighbour approach, and like the illusory promise of lotto, tricks us all into believing if we only tried that little bit harder we too can be winners.
Both here and across the globe, western hegemony has turned its back on collective responsibility. Altruism is seen as a weakness and concepts such as collective ownership are frowned upon as being the rantings of fools. And yet aboriginal cultures existed on these foundations for Millenia. An Australian Aboriginal in a school setting who needs a pen, for example, will take the nearest one they see, use it and when finished, leave in a place for the next person. It makes perfect sense of course since we don’t cart around tables and chairs for personal use in schools. I use this as an example of a real areas of conflict within the South Australian school system during my stay in Adelaide in 1985. The clash between two fundamentally different notions of ownership.
Communalism is not new even in New Zealand. There are many examples where communities have pooled their individual incomes to a collective, where the nuclear family is as outmoded a concept as attempting to reinvent the wheel every time we wish to go somewhere.
We simply could not have survived as a species by individual labour alone. Homo sapiens survived by collective wisdom, work, and community. There is no denying that individuals who became infirm or too old to move with the group were dispatched to the earth, but collectively the tribe survived. To be cast out was the ultimate penalty that condemned the individual to certain death.
We live in a corrupted version of our prehistoric forebears. One where whole sections of society are cast out not for wrong doing but because they are unemployed, homeless, the wrong race, the wrong tribe.
To unravel the corrosive exploitation of the many by the few certain draconian steps need to be considered. At the top of this list would be the destruction of the monopoly ownership of organs of the fourth estate. An ill informed population can only enact ill informed decisions. In New Zealand the media continues to be captured by a narrow Eurocentric male dominated ‘winner’ narrative that is deeply racist, misogynist and focused on individual success. ‘No man is an island entire of himself’ each of us owe a responsibility to a collective on whose backs we have made individual progress, and without which we would be nothing . Next the state needs to take back control of all social infrastructure. If a third person, private owner, is making millions in profit over social infrastructure such as power distribution then by cutting them out those profits revert to the collective. Only those who have a vested pecuniary interest in the current status quo would object, because the vast majority of us would benefit from such a move! The food distribution industry needs to be smashed to pieces. If the state intervened and guaranteed farmers a fair price for production and controlled the costs to the consumers both parties would be financially better off! The current ocean of excessive profits made through the monopoly of foreign owned supermarket chains in NewZealand is outrageous and it’s about time they were destroyed!
A comprehensive re-education and reprioritising of individual wealth is required. Our current model says that the accumulation of excessive individual wealth (far more than any one person could ever need in their life time) whilst others remain destitute and impoverished is to be celebrated above all other considerations. This is clearly a lie and a construct to justify the unthinkable. Again the state must move decisively to destroy this narrative beginning with wage differentials and the redistribution of collective wealth. A worker producing goods that accrues wealth must be afforded a MUCH LARGER portion of that wealth.
Contrary to the vile teachings of the likes of Thatcher the state does have an obligation to ensure that EVERY MEMBER is afforded adequate housing, free health and education, and a salary that allows all of us to take an equal part in the communities in which we live. It is part of the price we must all pay for sharing a place on this tiny blue spec as it careens through space.
No one deserves to live without dignity and if that means that many of us have to forego certain excessive accumulated wealth to enact this, then it’s a price we should all agree to pay, and if necessary be forced to pay.
The absurdity of the current economic orthodoxy across the globe that sees wealth stolen from the collective and concentrated in the few has to be challenged. It is unrealistic, having no basis in the long term stability of either the individual or the collective existence.
I believe there is evidence that supports a growing movement towards a collective and egalitarian consciousness, but it is constantly thwarted by a controlled and situated fourth estate. When it is possible to flick between multiple US media channels and hear exactly the same story it is time to question this pervasive mind control in action. We don’t have the multiple channels in New Zealand but the controlling narrative is every bit as pervasive as any Gobbelesque news-speak of the Nazi era because it has perpetuated the myth of the supremacy of personal wealth over collective welfare and demonised the most vulnerable in our societies as the cause of a nations economic woes. If the richest 5% of our population owns 37% of the country’s wealth whilst the poorest 50% own only 4% why are the economic policies of both major parties continuing to reward the few at the expense of the collective?
I never normally watch or listen to he who I never name, but I recently stumbled upon the gift sharing spectacle with Luxon as the fawning cretin.
This is not a world we need to celebrate. These two completely irrelevant rich males who demonstrably have vilified all who don’t share their wealth, don’t embrace Te Ao Māori, despise all things ‘woke’, and who appeal to the lowest common denominator of blind ill-informed prejudices, instead of being lauded, should rightfully be placed in village stocks and have all sorts of putrid flora and fauna hurled at them, then after a suitable period released and chased out of town into a wilderness of oblivion.
My wish for 2026 is that every fair minded New Zealand citizen of voting age looks beyond the rhetoric and propaganda of both politicians and the fourth estate in a search for a truth of the real injustices that are being carried out in their name. For the best part of this, and half the last century, successive New Zealand governments have rewarded the few at the expense of the collective. Rather than believing each of us may one day be elevated to that ranks of the few it is time to reward with our votes the parties who explicitly state they will; redress wealth inequities, honour Te Tiriti, prioritise free health care and education for all, and put an end to individual interests over collective good.
P.s. if you’ve bought into the narrative that TPM or The Greens are the extremists in New Zealand politics, then I would respectfully point out that the fourth estate propaganda machine is alive, kicking and doing its insidious work unfettered by concerns regarding truth
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Thank you Mike.