Workers' struggle in the age of climate change and peak oil

Kia ora koutou, As we look back a hundred years and try to take some lessons from the Blackball strike, perhaps the main one we should be extracting is that for workers and their families, nothing comes without struggle.

We must not allow ourselves to be lulled into believing that strikes and protests are just an interesting historical artifact, that somehow we're past all that.

The capitalist media and commercial TV keep trying to cocoon us and persuade us that the days of protest and activism are over except perhaps for a few fringe deranged people.

But what all of us here I'm sure have learned, and need to keep remembering and passing on, is that no matter what kind of Government we have, it is essential that the political struggle on the streets and in our workplaces and communities continues.

It's quite mindbending in its own way to think that back in 1908 when our courageous Red Fed forebears went on strike for a proper lunch break and for the right to take collective action in their own interests, they would have had no concept that in a hundred years' time we might be facing the realities of peak oil and irreversible human induced climate change.

Nor would they have had any idea that the very work they were doing, the coal mining that sustained and still sustains so much of the life and culture of the Coast, in fact plays a key role in heating up and endangering the very life of our planet.

There are still a few people around who believe that climate change is not man made, that it is just part of nature and we should simply get on with the business of making money and looking after ourselves — but the weight of international research and experience makes it very clear that this is not some future apocalypse we're talking about, but a present reality for many of the world's people.

At the same time we've got peak oil — the point where half the oil in the world has been extracted and global maximum oil production is reached.

This is not the end of oil, but it is the end of cheap oil, as we see every time we go to fill our cars up at the petrol station.

We'll be paying $2 a litre within months, and I think the climb to $3 will happen quite quickly after that.

Runaway global warming now seems inevitable — the only question is how fast we can work to mitigate its impacts.

Most of the world is addicted to oil, including us here in Aotearoa NZ.

Endless economic growth cannot continue, whatever form of ideology it's based on — capitalism, communism, socialism of any of their manifold permutations.

Peak oil is imminent or is likely to have already passed.

The desperate search for oil and gas continues, but there will be a continuous decline in supply.

Biofuels will not replace oil in most parts of the world without taking up arable land needed for food, or destroying forests badly needed as carbon sinks.

If we focus on coal as a prime energy source as long as it lasts, we'll only cook our planet and ourselves even faster.

'Climate shocks' as they are called, oil shortages, and rising prices of fuel, food and transport are all happening.

So are the beginnings of global recession.

You might have noticed Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz has been in NZ over the past week.

He is saying he expects the situation precipitated by the crisis in the US financial markets to get a whole lot worse as banks hold tight to what they have, restricting lending and deepening the downturn — while of course the war in Iraq is draining billions out of their economy at the same time.

This is the rich world beginning to wake up to the crisis.

In the developing world it's already happening.

There the cost is counted mainly in hidden suffering, with disasters often gradual and underreported, if they are noticed at all.

Poor people in Africa and Asia and Latin America are already adopting emergency coping strategies — and suffering huge loss of life.

Droughts have driven 14 million people from their homes in Africa in recent times.

George Bush's home state of Texas, population 23 million, has a bigger carbon footprint than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, population 720 million.

Last year American farmers diverted 20% of their maize crop, one of the world's main food sources, to ethanol.

Rich nations continue to keep other countries' agricultural exports out of their markets, ensuring more of the poorest people face starvation at home.

Food riots have broken out in Mexico, India and elsewhere.

Our dairy industry is benefiting hugely at present, with the price of milk powder doubling in the past year.

We all see the impact of this in the supermarket each week with our very own milk, butter and cheese well on the way to becoming luxury items that only the well off can afford.

Workers and unions in this country cannot hide from what is facing us any more than farmers or employers can.

I would very much like to acknowledge the forward thinking that has been going on for a while now in places like the EPMU under Andrew Little's leadership and in some parts of the CTU and other unions, including the NDU and the Maritime Union.

Shipping, like rail, is going to play a huge role in all our futures.

We all need to face that future head on, with a clarity of thought and purpose which is not evident as yet.

We need to bring the same culture of solidarity and hope, and sense of daily urgency that the Blackball miners brought to the mine bosses in 1908 to our work today in dealing with the impacts of peak oil and climate change on workers, beneficiaries and their families in Aotearoa in 2008.

I cannot help but notice as I'm sure many of you have too, that most of the discussion around these issues in our country so far has been focused, for example, on the science of climate change and our responses in terms of mitigation — and of course the ascendancy of emissions trading schemes as a big part of the answer.

Now that's a big topic - but what I'd like to concentrate on here today is not the technology and science - and capitalist takeover - of all this, but the fact that what has been missed in most public discourse are the impacts of peak oil and climate change - and their friendly sidekick global recession - on ordinary people in this country.

What work has been done so far predicts changes in our weather that will impact on our health, agriculture, tourism, and trade? Of course these will flow though to our economy and pose challenges in terms of employment and income.

This is an area that only the Greens appear to have put any thought into at all.

Even the workers' traditional ally, the Labour Party, seems almost completely stuck in an economic mindset that was first embraced by Roger Douglas and has been entrenched as mainstream thinking in this country ever since, in which the success of the economy is judged by a narrow set of indicators that have more to do with the rate of profit being made by a handful of financial institutions than the well-being of ordinary New Zealanders.

There is no doubt in my mind that, whatever government is in power, these parasitical institutions and their colleagues among the hyper rich of this nation will be expecting to make workers pay for the adjustments we will have to make.

We need to keep the pressure on both Labour and National to stand up to these people and institutions so that the Government doesn't again act in the fine old tradition of privatising the profits and socialising the losses.

What we don't want to see here is what the US government has done during their financial collapse in the last few weeks, in which they stand by while thousands of families lose their homes but come up with zillions of dollars of taxpayer money when the rich in the shape of Bear Stearns gets into trouble.

We need collectively, in all the places we live and work, to start thinking ahead about how we are going to deal — again — with the old issues some of us remember from the 80s and 90s of rising unemployment and poverty, alongside others like the high price of fuel and power, the rising cost of basic food, and increasing housing accessibility issues and homelessness.

Some of you here today will remember back to that earlier era, the Great Depression of the 30s.

Overseas commentators are already talking about the current US slow slump of the markets as potentially being even worse than the stock market crash of 1929, and without wanting to be unnecessarily alarmist I think in fact we could be facing a similar situation again in the medium term future.

This is a reality that is hard to contemplate in the comparatively well off economic environment we have at present.

With labour shortages, a TV in almost every home, cheap fashions at the local mall or Warehouse and a younger generation who have no idea what it's like to queue up at Social Welfare or WINZ for a benefit, it's hard for any of us to contemplate what it might be like to go back to such a future.

I believe our task at the moment is to work as hard and as fast as we can - not only to act much faster on things like greenhouse emission reduction, switching to renewables, and striving for energy efficiency — but also on preparing our industrial relations environment, transport, housing, health and welfare systems for what's coming at us at a rate of knots.

We have to start integrating the environmental and human aspects of climate change and peak oil impacts into our political and union lives.

We need to pull out the contradictions and debate them without tearing each other to pieces.

This might express itself in the sort of debates you've bravely had down here in previous years, for example between the Happy Valley protestors and the coal miners, or it might come out as it did on Thursday when Matt McCarten from my own union, Unite!, came out opposing the regional fuel tax for Auckland.

Matt's comments absolutely epitomize some of the contradictions we face.

He was saying, I think, that we shouldn't have the 10 cent regional fuel tax because it would hit low paid workers and beneficiaries the hardest, which of course it will.

The Green Party on the other hand supports the tax, because we are fighting for it to go towards the electrification of Auckland's rail system.

We know how urgent it is to get the trains running from a renewable energy source, and to get them running a lot more frequently - so that the citizens of our largest city can get around in a future where many will be unlikely to be able to afford to take their cars to work or study or play, even if they wanted to.

Alongside this we believe that it is urgent for the gap between rich and poor to be decreased in this country, and that measures to address this are equally urgent.

The minimum wage should be lifted to at least $15 an hour immediately.

The ERA should be overhauled, including strengthening the ability to use multi employer collective bargaining and agreements and to deal more strongly with freeloading.

Workers should have the right to strike legally on matters of political, economic and environmental significance.

Our welfare system should be completely restructured so that benefits are enough to live on, and so that welfare is administered in a much fairer, simpler and in fact cheaper way than it is at present.

Fighting for the rights and welfare of low paid workers and beneficiaries should not be incompatible with fighting for the electrification of Auckland's rail system, or indeed the extension of much needed public transport in all parts of urban, provincial and rural New Zealand.

A day is going to come when people in places like this will no longer accept the almost total dependence on the private motor car — if we are going to keep our rural communities alive, we need public transport here too.

So I look forward to having a bit of an argument with Matt the next time I see him, and to any of the other debates which are likely to keep popping up over the months and years ahead.

The way forward for workers remains the same as it was for Pat Hickey, Robert Semple, Paddy Webb and their mates in 1908.

We must identify clearly who our friends and allies are.

We must debate, organise and mobilise.

We need to extend and deepen our sense of solidarity and use everything we can to organise as fast as we can, or the needs of those who have least will be overlooked once again regardless of who is in Government, as we face a future none of us asked for but all of us are going to get