Dunedin: It's Bitter with the King

On Saturday the 26th of August along George Street, Dunedin, a rather important protest took place. This protest was regarding the sub-standard way that Burger King is treating its hard-working staff, something that must be analysed seriously by the citizens of any democratic nation. This includes, but is not limited to: paying Burger King staff minimum wage for years and years, regardless of if they're a supervisor, or sometimes even manager (in one case about 15 years!), paying under minimum wage under the guise of "training modules", and trying to push their workers away from Trade Unions. Every worker has the right to join a union. 
     
Unite Union and ISO organised and performed this as Burger King staff did not want to protest personally for fear of retribution. The protest started organising itself around the Robbie Burns Statue, we jokingly placed a Unite Union flag in Robbie Burn's hand, and then we descended into George Street, finishing at the Meridian Shopping Mall, which has a Burger King on the bottom floor, making the chants and general protest very well heard by the staff, and hopefully management.  
 
The protest was generally considered to be quite well done, as we gained a lot of public attention, spread awareness, and hopefully gained support among Dunedin workers and shoppers. People from the street even started protesting alongside us! From the Robbie Burns' statue to the Meridian shopping mall, we marched and chanted "Burger King, get stuffed! Minimum wage is not enough!" "Grill your burgers, not your workers!" "When workers' rights are under attack! STAND UP! FIGHT BACK!" "When I say Union, you say power! Union! POWER! Union! POWER!" All of this was performed in the hope that Burger King staff knows that they deserve to be treated better, and so the bosses know they can't treat their workers like punching bags full of cash. 

Find out more about the campaign at Unite Union news. 

Jasper Auld

[Image credit: Unite Union flickr stream.

Marching for Marriage Equality

At least a thousand people showed out today to support a bill being introduced to parliament today, which would amend the Marriage Act to allow marriage between same sex couples. While many would argue that marriage is an institution best avoided, that doesn't change the fact that it is a right, with many associated legal benefits, denied to many couples simply because they are of the same gender. 

But there are no fundamental rights - only what we win in struggle. Equal marriage is the right to marry who you want. It matters in a million petty bureaucratic ways to the couples and it matters to everyone who is hates injustice. When bigots are beaten, everyone wins.

The thousand who turned out today was composed not only of those who are directly affected - queer individuals and couples - but also a great many straight supporters. The message was clear - you don't need to be queer to support equal rights, and this is borne out in every poll on the issue in NZ over the last few years. Marriage equality is but the first step in a long struggle for equal rights for queer individuals, but unlike 30 years ago, when the very right to legally exist had to be fought for, tooth and nail, today the pressure is on parliament to get with the times. But that's not to say there won't be resistance. 

The social conservatives and the religious right would have us return to the days when it was illegal to be gay, and marriage was when a wife was a chattel sold by her father to the highest bidder. No way!

This bill needs to pass, and we need to build organisations which will not only ensure that Marriage Equality becomes a reality, but also be prepared to tackle not just the next struggle for queer rights but to fight, arm in arm, straight and queer, for equality for all.

Massacre at Marikana Mine - Solidarity with Labour in South Africa!

Amandla! Ngawethu!

I, and most people in the anti-apartheid movement in New Zealand, took part in the boycott campaigns not to simply change the colour of the faces of those who ruled South Africa. We didn’t face batons and barbed wire to replace race-based apartheid with economic apartheid. Our intention wasn’t to stop the apartheid gravy train for the wealthy just long enough for a tiny number of the black elite to jump on.

John Minto recently made public his correspondence with the organisers of a conference happening in Wellington this weekend celebrating NZ’s role in the struggle against apartheid. How tragically immediate these words are!

Police in South Africa have massacred over 30 striking miners in the Marikana platinum mine, one of the most violent attacks on labour since the end of apartheid, and a horrific act reminiscent of the Apartheid state’s brutalities at the 1960 Sharpville massacre in the Gauteng (Transvaal).

Amandla, a radical magazine in South Africa, call this "a brutal tragedy that should never have happened," and editoralise:

No event since the end of Apartheid sums up the shallowness of the transformation in this country like the Marikana massacre. What occurred will be debated for years. It is already clear the mineworkers will be blamed for being violent. The mineworkers will be painted as savages. Yet, the fact is that heavily armed police with live ammunition brutally shot and killed over 35 mineworkers. Many more are injured. Some will die of their wounds. Another 10 workers had been killed just prior to this massacre.

This was not the action of rogue cops. This massacre was a result of decisions taken at the top of the police structures. The police had promised to respond with force and came armed with live ammunition. They behaved no better than the Apartheid police when facing the Sharpeville, 1976 Soweto uprisings and 1980s protests where many of our people were killed.

The aggressive and violent response to community service delivery protests by the police have their echo and reverberation in this massacre.

This represents a blood-stain on the new South Africa.

Media coverage has stressed the complexity of the inter-union rivalries, but the involvement of the police – and the shooting down of striking workers – makes it clear what is involved. “The Marikana action is a strike by the poor against the state and the haves”, argues Justice Malala.

The old slogans from the anti-apartheid struggle have a new relevance. Once again, we say “Solidarity with South African labour!”

Amandla! Ngawethu!

***

Striking South African mineworkers were gunned down by police on Thursday. Charlie Kimber looks at events leading up to the massacre—and the business interests behind it

Police in South Africa have opened fire at striking workers at the Marikana platinum mine near Rustenburg, leaving at least 18 people dead. Ten people have died over the last few days in other clashes.

This disgusting slaughter evoked memories of how the police acted during apartheid. All the hope at the end of that vile racist regime has come to this.

The recently appointed police chief Mangwashi Victoria Phiyega visited the mine a few days ago and she is believed to have coordinated Thursday’s action.

But the decision by the heavily armed police to use live rounds must have been endorsed at the highest level—perhaps even by the ANC’s President Jacob Zuma.

Zuma said he regretted the killings. But disgracefully he made no reference to the handling of the situation by the police.

There must be justice for the strikers killed at Marikana—and those who ordered the deaths must pay for them...

[Read the full background story and analysis from Charlie Kimber at Socialist Worker]

Honouring Past Struggles: Whangamata Protest 2008

In July 2008, Hauraki Māori and other community members of Whangamata occupied the proposed car park area of the Whangamata marina. What led them to this point?

Te Matatuhi (the marina site) is the ancestral name of tangata whenua for the specific lands subject to the proposed marina. Te Matatuhi is land of particular significance to Ngāti Whānaunga. ‘Mata’ in both Whangamata and Matatuhi refers to the black volcanic rock obsidian. Mata has long been a principle reason for why Maori live in Whangamata, as the rock was widely sought after for its fine cutting edge. The harbour facilitated trade and many battles were fought in the area.

Various Pākehā business figures had eyed up the Te Matatuhi as a place to build a marina from the mid-twentieth century, but it wasn’t until 1992 that the Whangamata Marina Society was formed and approved the district council to buy the land. In 1996 hearings began on the Whangamata Marina Proposal. Te Rūnanga a Iwi o Ngāti Tamaterā, Ngāti Whānaunga, Te Kupenga o Ngāti Hako, the Whangamata Maori Komiti and other iwi groups consistent in their opposition to the marina proposal from the start and made many submissions and appeals.

The reasons for the iwi groups’ opposition to the marina were extensive, and included the following concerns: that the marina would destroy traditional fishing grounds due to significant and ongoing dredging of the channel where their kaimoana grounds are, a lack of respect of the ancestral ties to Moanaanuanu Estuary and Whangamata Harbour, destruction of wetlands which are important to bird life and the endangered moko skink, and removal of public access to the beach.

The next milestone of the marina was March 2006, when the then Minister of Conservation refused consent. His decision was judicially reviewed by the marina developers and sent back to him, then passed on to the then Environment Minister in the interests of transparency. He allowed the marina to go ahead in December 2006 provided that strict conditions were met regarding containment of dredged materials during construction and monitoring of the world famous surf break at the estuary's entrance. In the first half of 2008, there were several changes to the proposal.

Approximately 30 Hauraki Maori and community members occupied the proposed car park area of the marina for 18 days in July 2008 until they received assurance from Environment Minister Trevor Mallard that he would review the consent process. One of the reasons they felt occupation as necessary was to raise awareness about the changes to the marina development over recent months that the community had not been privy to because they were all processed on a non-notified basis. Spokesperson Nathan Kennedy [Ngāti Whānaunga] was quoted as asking, “what happened to access for all under the Foreshore and Seabed legislation?”

When the marina was built, Waitangi Tribunal Claim Wai 262 had not yet been completed. This is a wide-ranging claim about the management, use, and commercialisation of indigenous flora and fauna, and thus may have had impact on what happened in Whangamata.

Sadly, the outcome of the occupation was that in September of 2008 the marina society began construction without all obligations being met. Several rare species were displaced or exterminated for the development, including the rare Oligosoma moco skink. The marina opened in November 2009.

Juliet Thomberson

The Revolution in Syria is rooted in popular uprising

by Alex Callinicos

The past few days may have seen the balance of forces tilt decisively against Bashar al-Assad and his regime. Paradoxically, a significant section of the Western left seems to have tilted as decisively in their favour.

Take, for example, a widely circulated interview with Tariq Ali, where he claims that the struggle in Syria is part of “a new process of recolonisation”. Although I have great respect and affection for Tariq, I think this is nonsense.

Undoubtedly, the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 did lead to the country’s temporary recolonisation, under a “Coalition Provisional Authority” headed by a Washington-appointed neoconservative.

But the resistance to the occupation meant this project badly rebounded on its authors. The new regime created by US military power ultimately forced it to withdraw its forces from Iraq.

The idea that Syria is being “recolonised” implies that it is a long-standing Western priority to remove the Assad regime. But there is no evidence of this. Under Bashar’s father Hafez, the Syrian state established itself as a brutal but reliable capitalist manager.

Undoubtedly the outbreak of the Syrian revolution has encouraged the regime’s regional opponents to seize on the opportunity to replace it with something more congenial.

This is particularly true of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, whose Sunni Muslim rulers dislike the Assads’ roots in what they regard as the heretical Alawi sect and Syria’s alliance with Shia Iran.

There is plenty of evidence that the Gulf states have been supplying arms to some of the forces fighting the regime. And the West has stepped in to call for Assad’s removal.

But the chances that the US and Britain will follow this up by sending troops to Syria, or even providing air cover to the rebels as they did in Libya, are remote.

Debacle

This is partly because they are scared of repeating the Iraq debacle. But it is also because of the support Russia is giving the Assad regime, its last ally in the Middle East.

Elsewhere in the interview Tariq says that the Syrian people want neither the Western-backed Syrian National Council nor the Assad regime. I think this is probably true, at least of the majority.
But where is this majority? There is considerable evidence that very large numbers of people are demonstrating against the regime, and sometimes fighting it, but don’t call for Western intervention.
In recent weeks the revolution has spread to the two biggest cities, Aleppo and Damascus. Rebel fighters have tried unsuccessfully to seize the centres of both cities.

Are Tariq and those who agree with him sure that these are all puppets of the US and the Gulf reactionaries? If so, they are being betrayed by their masters, since the regime's forces have been able to beat them back because they lack tanks and heavy weapons.

Nevertheless, the evidence is that the regime is now taking heavy casualties—and not just thanks to spectaculars such as last week’s bomb that took out several of Assad’s top cronies.

The fighting bears all the hallmarks of an improvised and desperate armed rising. We can argue over whether it was wise politically for the rebels to militarise their struggle so quickly. We may regret the absence of the independent working class action that has been so important in the Egyptian revolution.
But the way that its Syrian counterpart has so rapidly developed into a civil war doesn’t alter the fact that its roots lie in popular revolt.

One thing the Arab revolutions have revealed is that much of the left in the region is politically dead. The best evidence is provided by those elements in the Egyptian Communist Party who backed the military candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, in the recent presidential elections.

Those in the Western left who allow a reflexive and unthinking “anti-imperialism” to set them against the Syrian revolution are simply confessing their own bankruptcy.

[This article first appeared in Socialist Worker UK]

Another World is Possible - Activist Education in Rotorua

On Saturday, activists from across the Waiariki electorate attended a hui at the Linton Park Community Centre in Rotorua, entitled “Another World is Possible”.  At its peak, around 60 people from as far afield as Minginui and Opotiki attended to hear speakers from across the North Island, and Hone Harawira made the trip up.  The conference was organised by the Mana Party branches in Tauranga and Rotorua.    The key aim of the hui was to build up activists’ knowledge, and it was an opportunity for left activists who have been involved in Mana from the beginning to share their views with the wider Mana Movement.

To that end, one of the first speakers was Bernie Hornfeck, a long-time socialist who spoke on “the whakapapa of socialism,” and explained how oppression and inequality went hand-in-hand with class society, and that socialism is about returning to a society not divided by class. 

Other speakers shared their experiences from struggles in Aotearoa today.  Kawarau school-teacher and long-time socialist George Jones spoke about his experiences as an educator and updated us on the struggles facing teachers, who face increasing hurdles to become qualified.   Pat O’Dea from Action Against Climate Change, outlined a plan to tackle global warming in manageable steps – starting with stopping coal exports.  Other speakers included Roger Fowler (Kia Ora Gaza), John Minto , and Rick Mansell.

Noticeably absent however, was any significant korero on the struggle in the unions.  Awareness of the role workers have in building movements for change still has to be raised, although with all the speakers (and most of the audience) involved in their unions this should fit right in to future hui.  And there certainly will be more! Unanimous support was voiced at the end of the day to turn the hui into a regular event, and the white-board was filled with potential topics in less than a minute – so watch this space!

Cory Anderson

Teachers Stand for Education

Included in the cost-cutting measures the government announced in their May budget were measures designed to cut the cost of primary and secondary education – at the expense of teachers and students. Included in the budget were cuts to teacher numbers by way of “natural attrition”, “performance-based pay” for teachers and alterations to funding ratios that would have seen larger class sizes – especially in intermediate and middle schools where funding for technology subjects was to be seriously reduced.

The reaction from the education sector was swift and damning.  Some schools, especially intermediate schools, stood to lose as many as seven teachers.  Most public schools would lose at least one or two.  Teachers’ unions from across the sector united along with principals’ and parents’ organisations in a series of sector-wide meetings to organise opposition to the assault on education.  They succeeded in squeezing a concession from the government almost immediately.  Only a two days after the budget was released, Education Minister Hekia Parata quickly back-tracked, claiming the government didn’t realise the extent of the damage the cuts would cause and announced measures to limit teacher losses to no more than two per school.

But simply limiting the losses wasn’t enough for teachers, whose jobs were still under threat.  They stuck to their guns and threatened industrial action.  Faced with an educators’ revolt and the threat of strike action, the government was forced to back down.  On June 7 – barely two weeks after the budget – the government announced that it was abandoning its plans to increase teacher-student funding ratios.

Conceding on the issue of class sizes is a blow to the government and their big business backers because it shows up their weakness.  The economic crisis has weakened them considerably but they don’t want to do the one thing that could actually solve the crisis – writing off the debt.  Their only solution is more cutbacks, and when they’re met with staunch resistance – whether at the Ports of Auckland, AFFCO or in the schools – they can be forced to back down.

Market reforms in education

The government’s attempts to cut education spending are part of a set of pro-business ‘neoliberal’ policies that have a long history in the education sector.  Neoliberal reforms in education began after the Labour Party was re-elected in 1987.  Using the language of “parental and community involvement” and “improved learning opportunities”, the Lange government set about extracting what Treasury called “value and efficiency” from the education sector.

The wealthy businessman Brian Picot was appointed to chair a commission tasked with reviewing the management structures and the “cost-effectiveness” of the education system.  Following the Picot commission’s report, subsequent governments restructured the education system.  School zoning was softened and then abolished, a move which in practice allowed wealthiest schools to cherry-pick the highest achievers.  Much of school management was ‘devolved’ to a Board of Trustees for each school, creating competition between schools and encouraging the movement of resources and experienced staff away from rural and low-decile schools.

More recent reforms have also emphasised the degree to which education is supposed to be preparation for entrance to the workforce.  NCEA, while a welcome move away from the old system of norm-referenced testing, was introduced into schools in 2002 with an emphasis on how it would enable potential employers to asses a student’s capabilities.  A new regime of testing primary school children against ‘National Standards’ in the core areas of reading, writing and arithmetic were introduced by the National government in 2010.  Along with limiting the cost of education, this has been the real thrust of education reform, designed to a mass of young workers ready for an increasingly basic, low-wage economy.  Gone are the experimental schools and exploratory learning of the 1960s and in is the “core curriculum”, individual excellence and more and more testing.

Teachers fight back

But none of this has occurred without resistance.  Teachers are one of the best organised sections of the workforce and curriculum changes have added hours to their workload, while budget cuts have put pressure on their pay.  The Post-Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) has led the way in fighting back.  With the introduction of NCEA in 2002 and the increased workload it represented, the PPTA demanded a pay rise and NCEA allowance for teachers in 2001 negotiations for their collective agreement. 

When they were rebuffed by the government, the PPTA initiated a series of one-day strikes that started a national movement.  Stoppages occurred throughout 2002, teachers at several schools took their own initiative in embarking on unauthorised ‘wildcat’ strikes when it became clear that one-day, national actions were not enough.  Dissatisfaction with the haphazard introduction of the new qualification led many students to join their teachers on the picket line and culminated in a series of high-school walkouts that spread like wildfires up and down the country.  Such was the disruption that when the negotiations collapsed again in 2007, the very threat of strike action was enough to bring the government back to the table.

The PPTA struck again in 2010, seeking a 4 % pay increase, measures to increase teacher recruitment and – importantly – a maximum class size of 30.  Thousands of teachers around the country rallied, engaging in a one-day strike followed by rolling stoppages.  Foreshadowing the arguments to be used in the 2012 budget, the government cited studies purporting to prove that the relationship between teachers and their students not class size, was the determining factor in student success; and reprimanded teachers for seeking a pay rise greater than other public servants had been able to win.

While neither the 2002 nor the 2010 strikes were successful in obtaining all their aims, they did succeed in making a number of gains.  They forced the government to grant a small NCEA allowance in 2002 when the government intended not to give one.  Significantly, the PPTA also succeeded in driving government claw backs around class sizes from the table in 2010.  Perhaps most importantly however, their combativeness has enabled teachers’ unions to maintain their organisation and cohesiveness during a period in which most of the union movement has been in decline.  And it was this strength of teachers’ unions that was instrumental in defending class sizes after this years’ budget.

The fight doesn’t end with class sizes, however. The National government remains committed to cutting costs in education, saying that schools will have to find other ways to save money.  National also remains committed to introducing “performance pay” – something teachers have long resisted.  As anyone who has ever been subject to performance pay knows, it is a measure designed to increase workloads at the expense of job security.  But teachers have signalled a willingness to fight – and as the victory over class sizes has shown, if they stick to their guns it’s possible to win.

Cory Anderson

[This article is from the latest issue of our magazine, Socialist Review]