Brooke Van Velden has declared war on workers – the Unions must fight back
Brooke’s war on workers continues after she ignored Treasury advice that repealing the Fair Pay Agreements will be damaging to the most vulnerable workers and she gave bosses the right to sack before 90 days.
This is a glimpse of just how ideologically right wing ACT really are!
When the Treasury Nazgûl’s are warning against free market union busting, you know the policy is a fucking nightmare!
Destroying the Fair Pay Agreements is a direct attack on working people, we are witnessing a class war with none of the political vocabulary to fight it because the middle class woke activists have sucked out all the oxygen for their identity politic virtue signals!
So what are the Unions doing.
Sigh.
This.
Broadly, there is a general consensus that working people in Aotearoa New Zealand want secure, well-paid jobs, better working conditions and fairer economic policies.
At the NZCTU, we are focused on developing a suite of policies that can be picked up by any political party that keeps the needs and voices of working people at the core.
The feedback we’ve heard so far for how we can achieve this included:
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- Protection of pay equity
- Need for increased flexible work arrangements
- Calls for rent control and capital gains tax
- Fairer taxation to address wealth disparities
- Accessible education on employment rights
- Housing affordability and instability as critical issues
- Advocacy for climate action and investment in public infrastructure
- Stronger worker participation in industry planning
- Fostering union awareness and addressing workplace inequality.
I love how ensuring wealthy white women gain the same perks as the boys do at the corporate level is number one.
All very worthy and good for you like vegan tofu, but zero spark, passion or vision, which I suppose for a movement that keeps getting smaller is the grim mercy of low expectations.
We face the most extreme hard right racist climate denying beneficiary bashing Government with an extremist anti-Māori, anti-Treaty, anti-Worker, anti-Renter, anti-Beneficiary, anti-Environment agenda and the best the CTU has is ‘Reimagine Aotearoa Together’???
What are you going to fight Brooke with? Cuddles snd a motion from the Hui?
Yeah.
Look, we are in real fucking danger from this extreme hard right racist climate denying beneficiary bashing Government and I’m not sure anything as toothless as this will excite anyone top defend the Left.
We need bold vision on actual policy.
We need the CTU to be demanding that the Greens, Māori Party and Labour sign up to a shared policy platform that the CTU itself develops.
The CTU should be hiring Max Harris to put together a 10 point shared policy platform that they then heavy Labour, Greens and Māori Party to adopt and then start using for the 3 to use MMP strategically the way the French Left just did in France.
We need more democratic infrastructure, we need universal union membership for every migrant worker with a 30%-70% cut in membership fees to CTU and the Migrant Unions so that every Migrant Worker is covered by a union to ensure there is zero exploitation of these migrant workers.
We need universal union membership at Universities and tertiary Institutes so that young people have an access route to politics.
We need universal left policies.
We need a new taxation structure that taxes the rich and not the poor! Financial Transaction Tax, Wealth Tax, Sugar Tax, Ghost House Tax.
We need to lower GST.
We need Renters Rights.
We need free public transport.
We need free dental.
We need a national economic strategy towards total electrification from renewables and a food security infrastructure.
We need far bigger ideas and vision to bring a people together who felt betrayed by Labour’s incremental bullshit which the fucking Unions blessed and did nothing about.
Voters handed Labour an unprecedented political majority under MMP and that was squandered, so they now want to see solutions that will be forced upon the political establishment.
A wish list from a national hui seems terribly underwhelming of the challenge in front of us.
This Government represents an existential level threat to our political and economic agenda and this is the response?
Wow.
We have some way to go to get this Revolution moving Comrades.
Meanwhile, this unhinged right wing Government plunder and destroy the incremental steps Labour did manage.
The vast majority of ‘workers’ are unaffected by this because they’re not in a union.
Outside of the state run organizations and a handful of reasonable sized private companies, NZ is a company of small or micro businesses, which won’t ever unionize for the simple reason that most of the employees own the business or are relatives of the owner.
The other consequence of this employment profile is that the vast majority of union members are middle class state employees. Over 50% are teachers and most of them are women.
Were you home schooled Andrew?
It shows.
Right on the button gordan, National have a track record for kicking the working class in the guts and propping up the rich. They pump money into private schools and run down our public ones. The wealthy moan we pay taxes but it’s there choice to send their kids to a private school. They use to get a tax rebate for the school fees not sure if they still do. The CoC are destroying the social fabric of our country and the eight percent and 6percent parties are going to destroy our environments and more transfer of wealth.
Ms van Velden is of the Pinochet/Reagan/Thatcher/Chicago Boys school of Labour relations–a vicious, smug, union buster to put it accurately. The 70s and 80s neo libs are obviously long gone–but their politics, political economy and international capital control live on. Brooke will not give interviews or talk with workers organisations and representatives–a gutless ruling class rep.
This Minister has proposed the most significant attacks on the NZ working class since the 1991 Employment Contracts Act and Lord Jackson and Sirkey’s “Hobbit Law”. Unite, Etū and Maritime unions are doing their bit, time for PSA to step up and drop the bogus political neutrality position in favour of direct industrial action.
More bullshit bob the unions are weak because of the ruling parties and too much neo lib policies and too many people like you only care about themselves.
exactly – they took one leg out from the tripartite and gave the employers a big slab of wood to keep the stool upright (and to bash workers with). weak government puppets cajoled by capitalist masters. Conservatives are the weakest because, like muppets with someones hand up their arse, they aspire to regaining the status of being real people. (and it gives them comfort, when we all know they’re just frightened little shadows playing at conservativism)
WHAT to say, Jim knox, Muldoon, rule, walking doon manner st, waving a huge t, bone steak, want one of these, join the Union.
Anything workers get today would not have been achieved without unions, fact.
Only an idiot would argue against that.
Workers like anyone else can take risks and earn money outside employment. Easy.
Yep under National it’s called burglary