1,000 service workers in New Zealand hospitals have gone on strike, and then been locked-out. Service workers are some of hte lowest paid workers in any hospital. In this case the workers have been trying to get one contract to cover orderlies, cleaners, and so on, at public hospitals throughout New Zealand. They’ve got agreement with the Hospital Boards, and all but one of the companies that subcontract this work, but one company, Spotless, is still holding out. Hospital workers at Spotless have gone on strike.
Any time 1,000 workers get locked out it’s important that we win. The fight for a single pay scale for service workers in the hospitals is an important one. Raising the starting rate of these low-paid workers to $14.25 an hour would be a great victory. But this is also a fight against contracting-out, and it’s a fight we have to win.
Theoretically businesses, and government organisations, contract out services. They contract a company to clean, or to perform a certain task. But in reality they’re contracting out employment.
Cleaning is a really good example of this. It’s a low capital industry, and large cleaning companies don’t get huge economies of scale. Companies get their printing done by a contract because they don’t print enough to justify having the equipment sitting around all day. It takes about the same amount of equipment to clean a hospital whether the equipment is owned by Spotless or the Hospital, and neither of them can use the equipment elsewhere. In fact, by contracting out companies, and government organisations have to pay extra, to cover the profit that any cleaning company is going to make.
So why do hospitals (or businesses or anyone else) contract out their cleaning? Because they can use the tendering process to drive down the cost. To win tenders, and bid lower than other cleaning companies, the winning company has to either pay their workers less, or get their workers to do more cleaning in less time.
Contracting out is so effective, because everyone can claim that they’re not responsible. The cleaning companies aren’t responsible, because they can’t afford to pay any more than they’re given. The hospital that contracts out its cleaning isn’t responsible because it’s up to the sub-contractor how much money to pay.
It’s a vicious way of keeping wages and conditions down, and the only way workers can fight it is by organising. Hospital workers in the SFWU have fought really hard to get this far. An agreement with the DHBs, and all but one of the contractors is a huge step forward. But it will be meaningless unless they can get Spotless to agree to the same terms and conditions, otherwise Spotless will be able to undercut other companies up and down the country, and wages will go on a downwards spiral again.
Contacting out can affect all workers. Although low-paid workers like cleaners are the most vulnerable, all sorts of jobs can be done on a contracting out basis. So it’s really important that all workers support the hospital workers in this battle against contracting out, and for one wage scale for all workers.
Or, what she said:
All amounts are in NZ dollars, so I don’t want to hear anything about how it’s a reasonable amount of money – because it’s not.
Just for reference purposes, 1 NZD$ = $0.78 USD. So you’re right, $14.25/hr is not a particularly high wage.
What do people with this set of skills earn in non-hospital work in New Zealand? (I know, you don’t care what the market thinks, but the world does.)
According to the worldbank, GNI per capita is as follows for 2006:
# 04 USA = USD 44.970,-
# 34 New Zealand = USD 27.250,-
Generally, income in New Zealand is known to be considerable lower than in Australia, Japan, Germany or in USA. Population is only about 4 million people.
I think, for the same work you get USD 10,- to USD 12,- in New Zealand, you might get maybe USD 15,- to USD 18,- here in Japan.
Contracting out various jobs, like cleaning, guards and similar is not unusual here in Asia. Often such workers are part-timers, who are not interested into a full-time job, like students or mothers with children…
These jobs are all low paid here in Asia, on the other side, there is no long-term obligation for the employee, he/she might resign anytime, as payment is per hour.
You left out the most evil part.
The present employees get the right of first refusal to keep their jobs – for a pay cut to the new wage of course.
Just playing Devil’s Advocate here, but from a top-down look, what is the value of the work being done? Is all work, like cleaning, worth a medium level income? How low is too low and how high is too high?
If the agreement between the contractor and the hospital doesn’t have a minimum pay arrangement at the level that they are striking for, then after the strike there is nothing to prevent a new company coming in and undercutting their contract and pushing them out of a job completely. There is a finite basement to wage levels, and the “market” is usually good at finding what that basement is. I hope this works out for them and they get what they’re after, but I think little attention is being paid to what the increased costs can do to their future employment.
Bryan: “There is a finite basement to wage levels, and the “market” is usually good at finding what that basement is.”
The market determines what the economy is willing to tolerate, not what is right, fair, and humane.
Minimum wage, collective bargaining, etc. are about justice and how we as a society value human beings.
Bryan, thanks to minimum wage, labour negotiation, and sundry other worker protection laws, we never have to find exactly where that basement is. Third world countries that do not have a better idea, though it disturbingly resembles slave labour.
Also, we could question the social or abstract value of what other people do for a living all day long, but don’t be taken aback if others start with jobs at the top of the heap with debatable functional merit.