The Cost of Living: unions, crisis and the left, 1975–87 with Ross Webb

In the mid-1970s the Federation of Labour spoke for nearly half of New Zealand’s workers and was a major force in New Zealand’s political economy. It led national wage cases before the Arbitration Court, coordinated the wage rounds, and stepped into major industrial disputes, sometimes to broker a deal and sometimes to mobilise workers.

Even as they clashed publicly, the FOL’s leaders commanded the attention of prime ministers and ministers of labour. They were household names, walked the halls of power and appeared in the media alongside business leaders and economists. The FOL took progressive stands at home and abroad, and it was, sometimes uncomfortably, the ‘industrial wing’ of the Labour Party.

Drawing on his new book, The Cost of Living, Ross Webb traces how the FOL wielded, defended and then lost that power amid inflation, rising unemployment, anti-union politics and radical economic reform. From Muldoon’s wage freezes to Rogernomics, he places that story within the defining economic battles of the era, over wages, inflation, economic policy, and who should bear the cost of crisis.

The talk provides a survey of the key developments, the way people have explained that crucial period, and finally, what it can – and can’t – teach the left today.

Ross Webb is an historian based in Lower Hutt. He holds a PhD in history from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. He is a co-author of Te Hau Kāinga: The Māori home front during the Second World War (Auckland University Press, 2024) and the author of The Cost of Living: Union politics and economic crisis in New Zealand, 1975-1987 (Otago University Press, 2026). He is currently writing a biography of the economist and public intellectual, Wolfgang Rosenberg.

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