Matt McCarten’s Public Revenge Against Exploitative Employers

Utu. Noun: Revenge, revenge, retaliation, refund, retribution, cost, price, salary, fee, pay, salary, reciprocity

Too.. compensation, reward, reparation.

It is a serene and sunny Sunday summer morning in the suburbs. Only the song of the birds and the occasional lawnmower mark the serenity. Then a fiery red truck rolls around the corner and throws a uniformed squad of union activists, who hand out pamphlets to their neighbors, sing, sing and picket the front fence.

This, says Matt McCarten, is utu. After three years of “conspiring in the dark” since his departure from the Labor Party high command, this is his solution to the exploitation of workers.

The targets of his Sunday “church for sinners” will be recalcitrant employers who he cannot reach the bargaining table to hear complaints against him for harassment, sexual harassment and migrant exploitation.

With a computer forensics expert and a private detective, he has compiled a list of nine wealthy employers whom he has accused of serious labor law violations and intends to protest in front of all their homes before Christmas. “They are leeches, absolute leeches,” he says, “and they are destroying our country.

“We will focus directly on the crime boss and expose them, because I’m sick of everyone doing it in the dark.”

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* Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway urges migrant workers to join unions

He will only do so when he is absolutely sure, he says. Only when they have rejected all pleas to negotiate. Only when you know they are guilty of gross exploitation, sexual harassment or intimidation, and they have the money to pay for their crimes.

You will post stories on Martyn Bradbury’s daily blog, use a social media team to spread the word, post your names, photos, address and phone numbers. “I’m going to be pretty tough on this,” he says, “and I know there will be a pushback.”

The words of a warrior on the face of coal. McCarten, former founder of New Labor, president and leader of the Alliance Party, connoisseur of the Mana and Maori Party, chief of staff of the Labor Party and creator of the Unite Union has created another union.

His One Union aims to address the cases of unrepresented low-wage workers in small businesses. It has two offshoots: It has consumed the Migrant Workers Association, probably the most important of a handful of migrant rights groups campaigning, and McCarten has also created Utu, his direct action squad on the red truck.

He says he has about 40 volunteers lined up, with veteran Unite organizer Joe Carolan as ‘captain of the guard’, and another 30 poised to run the social media of name and shame. The idea came to him, he says, after first considering the possibility of setting up a French Revolution-style People’s Court.

He expects to be accused of vigilantism, like the judges and juries who go after pedophiles. He has an answer for that: He would go after pedophiles too if they could make a small payment, never admit their guilt, be allowed to remain anonymous and carry on like they did before.

Because that’s what often happens in a cumbersome system where it can take more than a year to secure a date for mediation, the first mandatory step when an employee complains that an employer has violated their rights.

It may take another year before a case is heard at the Labor Relations Authority, while the Labor Inspectorate, which handles many cases of exploitation, is overloaded with case work and has a backlog in investigations.

Financially, it is a difficult road. Most exploited workers are low-wage workers who cannot afford $ 15,000 to pay for attorney costs until a full hearing. Mediation settlements are often for only a fraction of the debt, barely cover costs, and come with confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses.

That leaves most dependent on advocates like McCarten, many of whom are working on a percentage of the deal. McCarten says One Union will take a case to mediation for $ 500, payment will be deferred if the client cannot pay, and will request a voluntary donation of 10% of any settlement to the union fight fund, and he will cover his. salary demanding its costs from the employer.

Since leaving the office of Labor leaders, McCarten has handled about 100 labor exploitation cases. Never, he says, the employer admits his guilt: everyone lies to the end.

Mediation hearings are confidential. What is said cannot be used in court and certainly cannot be shared with the public.

If a worker steals $ 100,000 from his boss, McCarten says, he is arrested, convicted, embarrassed and fined. If the opposite happens, the boss can get away with paying a percentage and agreeing to confidentiality and a non-disparagement clause.

McCarten doesn’t like those compromises. You want to get everything back and walk away with your client feeling that justice has been served, and that the employer is paying enough to “hurt.” It considers that its offers are several times better than others.

Start telling funny stories of past negotiations. He is ruthless. In one, each time the other party made an offer, he increased his own claim by another $ 5,000. In one where the crime was particularly vile, he told the other side that he knew about her affairs and his regular visits to prostitutes. “Nothing scares me, they can’t threaten me.”

His approach is to open a mediation hearing with a short korero. That, he says, is “changing the battlefield,” rebalancing the power equation of the employer with his hundreds-per-hour attorney toward the worker and his humble defender.

“I say ‘I am a Utu man.’ Let me explain what utu is. When you take mana from someone … you must restore it. This guy you stole 100k from? You have trampled his mana and must restore it. That is utu. In Maori terms, it means recognition, responsibility, reparations, reciprocity. That is that way.

“Then there is the other way, which most Pakeha understand: revenge. It’s about correcting it, but if you don’t, there’s another reaction. “

So if they don’t make sense, he’ll take the truck out.

But, he says, it is reasonable and pragmatic. He knows that in many cases the exploited worker shares a certain guilt. He has some sympathy for a small business owner on the corner who is just trying to stay afloat: “I live in a world where there are shades of gray and I always let them find a way out of the situation they have gotten into.”

But when they don’t, “we have to campaign to get people to think, ‘Damn, they better not do that again.”

“I am braver”

Raised in orphanages, McCarten became politicized as a teenager by reading Steinbeck’s novel about the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath. He developed the belief that work brings dignity and hope, and began a life rooted in the union movement.

At twenty, he says, he was helping migrant workers in his spare time outside of union work, and now that he’s done with general politics, he’s back in the same place. “I started as a union activist and will end as a union activist.”

A decade ago, McCarten, now 61, was dying of liver cancer. And then it wasn’t. Says it didn’t really change it. He considers. “It made me feel less fearful,” he says. “I haven’t changed much, but I think I could be more focused. I’m braver. “

He’s been sued and lost four times, he says, and he never paid. He told an attorney that he would occupy his office and picket his client, and every time a bill came in for the costs, he would write ‘f-off’ and return it. He is happy to be invaded and sued by those who are visited by the Utu truck.

“This is my life’s work,” he says. “This is what has always motivated me.”

Change, he says, must come from the people, not from Parliament. He wants to campaign for a simple law change, one he suggested while within the Labor elite: For any claim under $ 20,000, there should be a hearing within two weeks, with the decision of a binding mediator and no right to appeal to neither party.

It would be a way to counteract the stultifying delays in the ERA system and the ability it gives employers to run out of time, knowing the pressures of an expiring visa and the need to earn a salary that the applicant will have.

But first, the Utu truck. “The way the exploitation will end is when the community says we don’t want to have this … here. People want to do something about it … this is not the country we set out to build. This poison that is seeping into our land has to be eliminated. “

McCarten says Labor has shown little political will to solve the problem and is disappointed with the choice of Kris Faafoi and Phil Twyford to take over the immigration portfolio. But he thinks that once the wealthy neighbors of his targets are on board and public opinion rises, something can happen.

“Change the way the community thinks, then the parliamentarians will change the law. They won’t do it first … they test the wind, is this popular? Is it unpopular?

“So first you have to change people’s minds … So I’ll go to those leafy suburbs and I won’t let people think it’s okay.”