Unionists ‘in bid to keep funds system’

Press, 26 April 1989, Page 2

Unionists ‘in bid to keep funds system’

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington

Trade union activists have been accused by the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Bolger, of mounting “a desperate campaign to maintain the system that compels workers to fund the Labour Party.”

He was referring to comments made last week by the president of the Labour Party affiliates’ council, Mr Pat Kelly. Mr Kelly said he wanted a campaign to tell workers how disastrous a National Government would be for them. It was a fault of the trade union movement that workers attended meetings to discuss industrial concerns but rarely politics, he said. Affiliates planned to use every means available, including stopwork meetings, to argue the case for staying in the Labour Party and supporting the Government. Mr Bolger said Mr Kelly would have a hard time explaining why workers who had been compelled to join affiliated unions should also be compelled to join the Labour Party. Mr Kelly would also have a hard time explain-

ing to ordinary union members why he was supporting a party with policies that had cost 170,000 New Zealand workers their jobs over the last four and a half years. “Mr Kelly blathers on about the class struggle and tries to promote

Labour as a working class party, but the workers won’t forget that National created jobs while Labour has destroyed them, or that National offers them choice about union membership while Labour compels them to join up and contribute to party funds,” Mr Bolger said. The Labour Party, was now so desperate it was prepared to sponsor stopwork meetings, disruption and industrial unrest to try to shore up its support against the inroads National had already made and against the new challenge from the breakaway movement led by Mr Jim Anderton of Sydenham. It was disgusting, he said, that ordinary workers, their employers and the community were going to be put through more suffering because the Labour Party could not manage its own affairs properly.