EPMU members to vote on merger with SFWU

The New Zealand Amalgamated Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union's members will vote on whether to merge with the Service and Food Workers Union Nga Ringa Tota to create the second-biggest workers' advocate, with the outcome flagged for early August.

The Wellington-based union's national conference today endorsed the merger with 82 percent support, meaning the EPMU's more-than 30,000 members will now decide on whether to pursue the merger. The union's members will vote through a postal ballot that will be sent out next week and through until Aug. 9, while at the same time the SWFU will host a roadshow across the country where its members will decide on whether to proceed.

If the merger gets the go-ahead, the new union will be launched in October, to operate in an environment where industrial relations have changed dramatically over the past 25 years, yet the labour movement has struggled to catch up.

"If the intention was simply to have the merger to join the two organisations together and then carry on with business as usual, there'd be no point doing it," EPMU national secretary Bill Newson told BusinessDesk. "The intention is to use the merger process to be transformational, that's why we deliberately talk about creating a new union - so out of the two rises the new."

A merged union would have more than 50,000 members, making it second only to the New Zealand Public Services Association, which has 58,000 members. Private sector union membership has shrunk to about 9 percent, while public sector unionism sits at around 58 percent, meaning about 13 percent of the nation's workforce is part of a union.

Policymakers last year introduced changes to employment law aimed at lifting labour market flexibility and cutting compliance costs for small- and medium-sized businesses, chiefly through new working arrangements where employees can request work hours that suit them, the ability to negotiate rest breaks to meet work flows, provisions to protect vulnerable workers, a faster turnaround for Employment Relations Authority decisions, and a series of changes to collective bargaining to reduce ineffective negotiations.

Government advice in 2012 found the changes to collective bargaining faced the biggest impact from dropping the requirement to conclude an agreement and introducing partial pay cuts for partial strikes. Department of Labour officials said that was "likely to have the biggest impact on the bargaining environment" and would reduce bargaining where there were strained relationships between employers and unions or low unionisation, stoking litigation in the short-term to test the legal boundaries. Workplaces with productive bargaining relationships would likely see little impact. 

EPMU's Newson said the new union would look at ways to make itself relevant to a raft of workers excluded from collective bargaining with the changing face of the labour market, where independent contractors, casual and part-time staff and zero-hours contracts have become more common.

"This is not about all employers being bad people, it's about how trends of work are moving towards pushing more and more the risk and overhead costs on to the heads of workers," Newson said. "We have to be able to respond to that and be relevant to those workers and to be able to help them to position themselves more effectively in the labour market, and we've been unsuccessful at that at the moment."

A merged union would be able to draw on economies of scale in representing its existing members, and Newson said those cost savings would go into supporting its members.

"We are quite clearly positioning this new union to be more active in the non-union sector and more active for workers who are union but are getting a raw deal, and actually make a difference," he said.

The EPMU attracted about $10 million in subscriptions in calendar 2014, down from $10.2 million a year earlier, while SWFU reported subscriptions of $4.9 million in the year ended Jan. 31, 2014, down from $5 million in 2013.

The unions have set a three-year timeframe to integrate their systems, move union staff to standard employment conditions, lift membership, and generate financial surplus, according to EPMU's May 'The Metal' newsletter.

(BusinessDesk)