The government must guarantee New Zealanders that Chinese engineers working on KiwiRail’s locomotives are at least receiving the minimum wage says Rail and Maritime Transport Union spokesperson Todd Valster.
“Last year the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment launched an investigation into allegations that Chinese workers at the Hutt Railway Workshops were being paid as little as $3 an hour”.
“Yet the investigation hit a dead end. It has been revealed that the company undertaking warranty work on KiwiRail’s new locomotives – China CNR Corporation – refused to surrender its wage records to New Zealand authorities” says Todd Valster.
“KiwiRail’s Chinese-built locomotives needed warranty work because the manufacturers had used asbestos in the engine rooms and cabs”.
“This situation would not have happened if KiwiRail commissioned locally assembled locomotives. Building and assembling locomotives could have happened at KiwiRail’s Hutt Workshops” says Todd Valster.
“Outsourcing must stop. Will the CEO of KiwiRail and the Minister of Transport outsource their jobs next or buy asbestos riddled cars” asks Todd Valster.
“The Chinese engineers are doing warranty work, but that should not mean KiwiRail can avoid its responsibility to ensure compliance with New Zealand wage standards. It is a repeat of the foreign fishing vessels and the exploitation of migrant workers.
All companies and all employees working in New Zealand must be covered under New Zealand’s labour laws. The RMTU is calling for a new investigation with greater powers” says Todd Valster.
“Was this the nastiest X Factor judge response ever?”
Yeah. It probably was.
When X-Factor judge Natalia Kills, backed up by her hubby Willy Moon, harshly criticised the contestant Joe Irvine a few weeks back, social media exploded with criticism and the evening news in Aotearoa was dominated by Natalia’s actions. Many accused Natalia of engaging in bullying behaviour, and by all accounts those accusations where correct. I cringed as I watched this judge’s tirade against Joe, as an artist and writer it was painful to watch another creative being destroyed in public because I know just how devastating those attacks can be. Even Simon Cowell recently responded to Natalia Kills’ public attack by calling her “mad” and “hateful” and saying he did not think anyone had gone that far on a reality talent show before. Y’all know it is bad when, even Simon Cowell, the original “Mr. Nasty” thinks what Natalie said was pushing it.
Many people, including our own blogger Martyn Bradbury and many on my Facebook feed have rightfully pointed out that there are far worse things to get upset about than some pompous pop stars bullying and humiliating someone on national television and, of course they are right. At least in the grand scheme of things: the 280,000 kids living in desperate poverty in Aotearoa, the fact we are sending troops to war (again!!!), the brutal attacks on workers rights and the devastating effects of climate change. I’ve written about all of these things, marched against them, protested and spoken out against these injustices and human rights violations, but I also know what it feels like to be bullied and humiliated – both privately and publicly. To have my writing and art ripped apart for no other reason than some shit person decided I was fair game, and it was my turn to be their punching bag. It sucks. A lot!
If you have never been bullied badly, maybe what happened on X-Factor is no big deal to you? Maybe witnessing the artists Natalia Kills and Willy Moon, who have since been sacked by Mediaworks and have returned to L.A, abuse their position of power as judges on X-Factor by verbally assaulting a contestant in a tirade of meanness and accusations of copying Moon’s style (because, apparently wearing a suit with slicked back hair is super original), didn’t affect you. However, if you have been bullied you know how it can make you feel worthless and like giving up – it can take away your hope. If bullying becomes bad enough it can even take away your will to live.
Whether you think what happened on X-Factor was worthy of the relentless air time it got or not, what is important to note is, Natalia and Willy’s actions speak to a wider culture of bullying in this country. Some of the backlash in response to their actions on social media is evidence of this wider culture. While some used social media to hold these two pop stars who behaved so poorly accountable, it was also used widely with glee by people to ‘take them [Willy and Natalia] down’ reportedCatalogue Magazine. Some people even told Natalia to “go kill herself.” Using abusive (cyber) bullying tactics to counter bullying behaviour is a bit of oxymoron – and it is abuse. After all hurt people hurt people, and meeting Natalia’s bullying words with more bullying simply perpetuates the cycle.
So for anyone who thinks what these two did was blown out of proportion, I have to disagree. And this is why:
Every day a large minority of young people and kids are going to school hoping to god they make it through the day without being verbally assaulted, kicked, punched and alienated by their own peers. My nephew has a stutter, he is 6 years old and he gets teased by one boy at his school who cruelly mimics his stutter in-front of other kids. The acclaimed spoken word poet and anti-bullying activist Shane Koyczan cites in his book, ‘To This Day’ which is based on his poem of the same name, that “85 percent of bullying happens while other kids are watching.” Last year a group of girls followed my nephew around and engaged in similar bullying tactics. My nephew who takes after me in that he never shuts up, now tries hard to avoid speaking. Bullying can devastate self-confidence.
Many in Aotearoa are yet to wake up to, or care about, the desperate poverty hundreds of thousands are living in, but so often we ignore bullying just as we ignore poverty, just as we ignore the effects of climate change. Whether we turn a blind-eye to bullying in the work-place or the school ground or wherever, bullies often get away with it because we let them. Because we are scared if we step up and step in, they might turn their venom on to us. Koyczan in his book also points out that “bullying will usually stop within 10 seconds if someone steps in to help the victim.”
For some reason thousands in Aotearoa stood up to bullying a few weeks ago, utilising social media to express their outrage. Maybe this public display of intolerance to bullying (those who used bullying tactics to express their disgust not included) helped to give some kid who is being relentlessly picked on at school a little bit of hope? School zones are battle zones for some kids I think if you told any child, my nephew included, who is surviving bullying that “it is no big deal and there are bigger issues to worry about such as poverty”, they might tell you it really, really is a big deal to them. They might even tell you they don’t want to live in this world anymore. Heartbreaking.
Laurie Penny wrote last year for the Guardian “there has been a chilling surge in suicide attempts among [young] people with their entire lives still to live, many of them linked to bullying.” Shane Koyczan, the spoken word poet I mentioned before spent most of his childhood being bullied, suffering relentless put-downs and name calling and physical violence by his peers, which ultimately drove him to contemplate suicide. His anti-bullying poem, ‘To This Day’ speaks to the profound and detrimental long lasting damage bullying has on the individual. He wrote:
we weren’t the only kids who grew up this way
to this day
kids are still being called names
the classics were
hey stupid
hey spaz
seems like each school has an arsenal of names
getting updated every year
and if a kid breaks in a school
and no one around chooses to hear
do they make a sound?
are they just the background noise
of a soundtrack stuck on repeat
when people say things like
kids can be cruel?//
‘Kids can be cruel’, is often said in an attempt to brush off bullying as if it is a childhood rite of passage, as if it is something we should expect and acccept. Yeah, ‘Kids can be cruel’ but so often nothing is done about the cruelty being committed and because of this, this cruelty often creeps insidiously into adulthood as the X Factor case has evidenced. Cruelty often goes unchecked, therefore being sanctioned by default.
Most commonly bullying that impacts adults happens in the workplace. Bill Bradford, a Lawyer who works for First Union recently reported “There’s actually an epidemic of workplace bullying in this country.” From the school ground to the work place bullying is a massive social problem in this country. A 2012 study by the Work Research Institute at AUT University found almost one in five New Zealanders had experienced workplace bullying. In the school playground Koyczan suggests “1 in 7 kids has either been the victim of bullying or a bully.”
Statistically, bullying gets worse with age.
Just recently protesters picketed Pak’N’Save Rotorua in response to workers speaking out about a climate of intimation. Bill Bradford reported “More than 70 staff had recently joined the union and when a list of members was sent to management ahead of a meeting under the Employment Relations Act, the owner and his management team responded with a campaign of bullying and intimidation.”
So often when kids are the targets of bullies we tell them to “stand up to the bully” (which is a terrifying request if you think about it) and we tell adults who are being bullied to “grow a rhino skin” or use some clinched positive affirmation like “chin up”, these are all a thinly veiled form of victim blaming no matter how well meaning and unaware the gesture might be. We are simply minimising for our own comfort. Thus, telling people who speak out about being bullied that there are bigger problems in the world like poverty (because other people have it so much worse), amounts to minimising langauge.
Telling someone who is surviving abuse – and bullying is a form of abuse and violence – to, “toughen up” or to “harden up” isn’t helpful. The person who is surviving bullying should not have to change their behaviour or reactions to bullying, it is the person engaging in bullying behaviour who needs to be constructively challenged and told to change their behaviour. They are the ones who need to be told to be “more compassionate”, so often our society has it terribly backwards in response to bullying.
Whether it is politicians, such as National’s Paula Bennett, bullying their own citizens who are living in poverty through welfare cuts and poverty shaming rhetoric, managers belittling their staff members and intimidating them, kids in our school grounds surviving relentless torment by their own peers, or two pop stars ganging up and verbally abusing a contestant on some talent show, ultimately all of these types of behaviour (regardless of the context) are designed to humiliate and dehumanise. It all matters. We should give a shit about bullying, and put our collective energy into eliminating it everywhere it exists, from the playground to the workplace, to parliament.
KiwiRail is failing to fulfil its environmental obligations says Rail and Maritime Transport Union General Secretary Wayne Butson.
“KiwiRail is considering replacement options for its electric fleet operating on the Hamilton to Palmerston North line. Yet one of the options under consideration is replacing electric locomotives with diesel locomotives”.
“KiwiRail is considering an option which will take the company and the country backwards” says Wayne Butson.
“Mighty River Power is planning to convert 70 percent of its fleet to electric or hybrid vehicles. This is a positive move for the country, the company and its workers. Meanwhile KiwiRail is considering converting its electric fleet to a fossil fuel fleet”.
“There need to be clear sustainability guidelines for public companies. The sole consideration should never be profit. KiwiRail owes it to the country and its workers to rule out diesel locomotives over electric locomotives” says Wayne Butson.
I’m at a Café in Howick, Auckland where the Barista just lost it, he smashed glasses on the ground, threw the part that filters the coffee grounds on the floor and stormed out. I chased after this guy and asked him if he was O.K? He said,
“Nah, I am sick of being paid nothing to be a coffee making machine.” And then he walked off.
You know what is not cool? Employers who make heaps of money off the blood, sweat and tears of their employees while paying them poverty wages and treating them as expendable. I am starting to wonder how owners who treat staff so poorly sleep at night. I have watched the owner of the same café, which also has a bar attached to it, swoon around his establishment while his bartender works her ass off on a Friday evening, not only making drinks for, mostly, baby boomers in boat shoes and salmon coloured polo-shirts (I’m serious, not even making that up for comedic effect) but also doing bar back, clearing the floor and restocking by herself. All because, as this bartender pointed out to me, the owner refuses to hire an extra bartender/glassy for busy periods so he can save a buck. The owner only pays this bartender just over 16 bucks an hour she told me, to literally do two peoples’ jobs.
How mean spirited do you have to be, to work your staff this hard and give them so little thanks in return? How divorced from reality and humanity do you have to be to then expect your workers (and employers who operate in such callous and unaware ways, always expect you to lick their asses. I know, I have worked hospo for nine years now) to be grateful for their measly pay check? Get fucked. You get what you pay for. The sad thing is, that barista who justifiably lost it today because he had clearly just had enough, will likely receive a warning or get fired for his outburst. When it SHOULD be the other way around.
What is the point in serving fairtrade coffee, as this café/bar in Howick does, and promoting other tokenistic gestures such as serving free range eggs and chicken, if you can’t even treat your own staff, fairly? I guess, serving fairtrade coffee in affluent areas gets customers in but paying a fair wage and treating your staff with a bit of dignity doesn’t seem to make much economic sense to so many employers that cater to the mostly rich and well-off, Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen.
Workers rights all over Aotearoa and globally are being relentlessly attacked and undermined. Furthermore, it is not only hospitality workers who are enduring poor treatment and work place injustice. Just recently the massive fast fashion giant Cotton On, become the first company (that actually got publicly caught out) in Aotearoa to attempt to use National’s callous ‘Tea Break’ bill against their distribution workers, “which takes away the legal right to a tea break and weakens collective bargaining,” as the NZ Herald reported last year. On March the 21 Cotton On, made the embarrassing mistake of posting about ‘Human Rights Day’ on their Facebook Page (the post has since been deleted):
That awkward moment when a company that outsources the production of their merchandise to Bangladesh because as Daisy Gardener, Oxfam‘s labour rights advocacy co-ordinator points out, “They are seeking the absolute lowest price from supplier factories and they’ll find that in Bangladesh,” and who attempted to seriously undermine their workers’ rights in Aotearoa, wishes their Facebook followers ‘Happy Human Rights Day.’ The social media backlash was swift with a many people commenting on the hypocrisy of the Facebook post:
Cotton On, due to social media pressure, and pressure from FIRST Union and their own employees, backed down from taking away their distribution staff’s Tea-breaks, and improvements have been made to wages. However, as Redline reported, the damage has already been done. Just like hospitality businesses that push fairtrade coffee while treating staff poorly (I once worked at a Café in Melbourne that paid me less than the Australian hospitality minimum wage while promoting ‘suspend fairtrade coffees’ so homeless people or low wage earners could enjoy a free coffee. Seriously. WTF?), Cotton On paints themselves as some human rights crusading company – without irony – while at the same time proposing an attack on their own workers’ rights. Not only this, but since March the 6 the ‘Cotton On Foundation’ which seems to suffer from a serious case of ‘white saviour industrial complex, has been promoting their ‘Necklaces That Sprinkle Happiness Along The Way’ campaign. If you purchase one of these necklaces of “joy” and “hope” 100% of the proceeds go to “their friends in southern Uganda” as their website states.
So while Cotton On benefit from slave labour in sweat shops in Bangladesh which have notoriously sub-human and sometimes deadly work conditions, which have been extensively documented and reported on, they are promoting their human rights efforts in Southern Uganda? What one hand gives, the other takes away.
Maybe Cotton On should spread a little “happiness” on their own employees by, oh I don’t know, treating them as actual human beings rather than as a resource to be exploited? Just an idea.
It would seem independently owned businesses such as the Café I spoke about at the start of this blog as well as massive global companies like Cotton On are pretty good at distracting (smoke and mirrors) from their own workers’ rights violations by trotting out some human rights mission or pedalling fairtrade, free range produce. Then there are the business owners who don’t even try to mask their blatant disregard for workers’ rights violations, they are seemingly proud of them. ‘Cos LOL worker’s rights.
Rayner Bonnington* owns the Henderson Pak’N’Save and pays the lowest of all the unionised Pak’n’Saves in Auckland. As FIRST Union points out “Even the minimum wage has increased by 50 cents an hour this year but Rayner has offered his workers a measly 32 cents an hour pay rise.” While Rayner makes millions annually, he pays his workers a pathetic wage that does not cover the basic necessities of life; a liveable wage in Aotearoa is $19.25 an hour. Trying to pay the bills, buy food and pay the rent or mortgage is unmanageable on minimum wage, I know as I have rarely ever earnt anything above this. At 29, typing that was truly fucking depressing.
What all of this comes down to is, greed. Companies can, and will (as the café in Howick, the treatment of workers by owners of independent Pak’n’Save’s and Cotton On are all evidence of) treat their workers as expendable and ultimately worthless. After all, workers are a resource to be exploited and replaced by someone else when they make a fuss or do not work hard enough for their pittance. It is a harsh and cruel reality in a flooded job market that finding other people willing to put up with horrible work conditions and shit pay isn’t exactly difficult. People are desperate for work.
Capitalism creates so many casualties.
So, dear companies and independent business owners who champion human rights and fairtrade coffee and organic produce and free range eggs like you actually give a damn, while at the same time exploiting your workers and extracting everything you can from them for your own profit and benefit, stop with the hypocrisy. Start actually treating the staff you currently have, not as a resource to be used up and spat out but as actual human beings with dreams to achieve and bills to pay. Because as the ongoing pickets outside of Pak’n’Save, the social media backlash against Cotton On and the three letters I have written to tell the owner of said café in Howick what a terrible human being I think he is, it is pretty clear the general public are unwilling to except such work place injustices.
*”Please help these workers by contacting Rayner Bonnington and send him a message that his workers who are making him rich deserve a reasoble wage. Mobile: 021 820 593″
Andrew Little’s lightly veiled messages to Labour voters to send a clear message to the government in last weekend’s by-election was the long anticipated entry of the Party into understanding the MMP environment. Prior to the last election there were all sorts of swirling possibilities of how people could be encouraged to vote in Auckland Central, Ohariu, Te Tai Tokerau and Epsom, all in the name of sending the government a clear message. The Epsom example was with regard to the by-election and getting Labour and Green voters to vote Goldsmith to keep ACT out. The message wasn’t picked up by the Left, many of who just couldn’t bring themselves to voting National.
But last weekend, NZ First romped home and the Key government got the message – that the people of the north weren’t going to be taken for granted and left out of important decisions any longer. Whilst I wished it was a more left-leaning candidate that took the seat, understanding the bigger picture means that I can breathe a tiny bit easier with National’s humiliating loss. In fact, I believe that there have been more announcements for the Northland electorate in the past month than there has been in a number of decades. Having no sitting MP seemed to do them quite a bit of good!
For me though, the best result for the Left was seeing the Labour Party accept and embrace that we needed to vote strategically. The mainstream media and ‘stuck’ political commentators continue to frame the discussion in FPP terms and both neglect and scare the electorate into thinking that it’s one party or another. This was definitely National’s strategy when their messaging changed from a big spend-up in the North, to fear that Winston wouldn’t support them on RMA reform. The beauty of MMP is that it allows a number of views and persuasions to be represented when votes are cast. Scaremongering people into believing that Labour and the Greens can’t come up with decent financial policy is the way you push the electorate into the old FPP thinking. So whilst I would have preferred the protest vote to have gone to Labour’s Willow-Jean Prime, I accept that for this time, the strategy had to be weakening the government.
So I formally welcome Labour and its strategists to the realm of positive, strategic thinking in the modern MMP era. I know it’s a tough transition to make, but the signals I picked up from the by-election were promising. Congratulations Little and Haworth for doing what’s needed to happen for almost two decades – getting our thinking and actions in line with the current electoral system. The Pacific community and young people have all worked it out and I’m excited by the prospects this now poses for the Party that I believe best represents my people. The challenge now, is to maintain this level of resolve.
New Zealanders will not get a say on the government’s decision to ratify an international agreement which removes the right to protect local jobs, says Rail and Maritime Transport Union General Secretary Wayne Butson.
“The government is preparing to assent to the Government Procurement Agreement, a World Trade Organisation Treaty which opens up New Zealand Government contracts to foreign companies and closes the door on local businesses and their workers. However the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Select Committee is refusing to take public submissions on the decision” says Mr Butson.
“The government knows New Zealanders are opposed to international treaties which remove our right to protect local jobs. That is why the select committee is refusing to take public submissions”.
“Steven Joyce and Tim Groser are claiming the agreement is a win for exporters because overseas governments cannot favour their local companies over New Zealand companies. But the catch is that our government cannot favour local companies for its contracts” says Mr Butson.
“The real winners are overseas companies like Serco who will continue to muscle their way into more New Zealand government contracts. The losers are local businesses who supply government companies like KiwiRail. If our government favours local companies and local workers then overseas companies can take action in the World Trade Organisation”.
“The chances of resurrecting Hillside Engineering in Dunedin are minimal. The chances of other local engineering companies getting a look in for future government contracts are just as grim. Multinationals and major conglomerates will be rubbing their hands together knowing the government will soon remove its own right to protect local jobs” says Mr Butson.
Just prior to going on holiday last year I was fascinated by the Heralds weak attempt to try and set the civic Auckland agenda with a silly poll on possible contenders for the Auckland mayoralty. It showed Len Brown as marginally ahead of Phil Goff and mentioned the likes of John Banks making a return, Michael Barnett and Penny Hulse. Of interest to me is the way this so-called political reporting, coupled with their biased polls suggests that Brown’s days are numbered and its time for yet another white male to lead the city with the exception of Penny Hulse.
The Herald is obviously out of touch with the community, but does a great job at feeding the unintelligent stereotypes that pervade popular, mainstream discourse. Underpinning the ideas of these kinds of stories is the notion that Auckland needs a male from a particular background to offer the leadership and direction that the city needs. And whilst a palagi male may well be the best person for the job at present, the issue for me is the way in which news agencies persist with this idea, making little attempt to be self critical, thus deconstructing their own ideas and ultimately, their own privilege.
Auckland is a diverse city with people of multiple ethnicities, leanings and traditions. Decisions for the city are best made by diverse views and backgrounds at the table because they make provision for different experiences and expectations. It’s for the basic good of an evolving city to have people of different backgrounds contributing to the future and direction of the city. I’m still pleasantly amused by the people in this city who think that more roads, single occupant cars and quarter acre properties is the way of the future. But perhaps such thinking remains the terrain of those holding fast to a city that was monocultural and now, historic.
Nurturing new leadership and talent takes compassion, hard work, time and humility. It forces us as a society to reflect on a sense of entitlement that really only exists in our imaginations. Encouraging those from backgrounds other than our own to participate in our society and have a sense of voice is a really challenging activity (for some). I look forward to the day our great city will be led by an indigenous Maori, a woman, an Asian, Pasifika… anyone who’s committed to making this city an even fairer, inclusive and greater place to live, work, study and play in. Because unless we seek wider participation and inclusion, we neglect the very soul of a developing city – diversity.
Last week the right-wing in Aotearoa descended into hysteria over Man Booker winning author, Eleanor Catton’s public criticisms of our National government. I hate to break it to so many of our right-wing pundits who know so little about so much, but Catton has been pointing out the failings of our current government for a while now. So why the right is so put-out by her remarks is beyond me. This is what Catton said at the ‘Jaipur Literature Festival in India that got so many on the right red in the face:
“New Zealand, like Australia and Canada, [is dominated by] these neoliberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry politicians who do not care about culture. They care about short-term gains. They would destroy the planet in order to be able to have the life they want. I feel very angry with my government.”
Catton’s words were met with a vicious response with many on the right seeking to silence and isolate her, as shown by right-wing columnist Mathew Hooton who tweeted:
John Key our Prime Minster said he was disappointed with the lack of ‘respect‘ Catton showed for his government (as if she owed his Tory government anything?) and suggested she stop ‘mixing politics with some of the other things that she’s better-known for’. More recently when Key appeared on TVNZ’s Breakfast show he completely dismissed and belittled what Catton had said against his government:
“She has no particular great insights into politics, she is a fictional writer. I have great respect for her as a fictional writer [sic].” Key said.
This is not the first time John Key has dismissed a public intellectual (whose very job is to critique society and challenge those in power) and prize winning writer.
Last year John Key tried to discredit & minimize the words of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who released the Snowden files. When Greenwald spoke out against our government and informed us Key had performed mass surveillance against his citizenry and lied about it. Key, in response called Greenwald “Kim Dotcom’s little henchman” and a “loser” and dismissed his claims.
If you cannot fault the message, attack the messenger.
But it was right-wing Radio host Sean Plunket who caused the most controversy when he called Catton an ‘ungrateful hua’, which sounds a lot like the widely and internationally used slang for whore: ‘huer’. Plunket, after he was done using vicious and sexist name calling to shut-down Catton, declared on national radio she was a ‘traitor’ to Aotearoa – as if calling into account those who hold the power was a crime against crown and country. I have not heard such a hyperbolic and jingoist claim in a long, long time.
What Catton said was not an act of treachery against Aotearoa,
It was an act of truth speaking.
Since National took office in 2008 homelessness has grown across the board and one of the biggest areas of growth is youth homelessness. Paula Bennett’s punitive and brutal welfare reforms targeted youth benefits; when young people who live in unstable and often unsafe homes are denied welfare where the fuck does National think they are going to end up? This act of targeting youth benefits sends a clear message to our struggling and vulnerable youth:
Our government does not care if you starve to death on the streets. But hey, all in the name of saving a buck… even if it is at the expense of our most desperate and vulnerable.
While so many of our politicians are hungry for more money and power, so many people living below and just above the poverty line are hungry for three meals a day and a livable basic wage – you can’t live off minimum wage in this country, any low-paid worker will tell you. I hate to break it to John Key but poverty is not a work of fiction.
With all that extra public money saved thanks to denying or forcing people off benefits and the gutting of our social safety nets, National can afford things like limousines and flag referendums, but apparently there is no money to feed the 280,000 kids living in poverty. Money well spent.
National’s unspoken but not so secret neoliberal capitalist mantra for governance for the last seven years has been: profit before people.
Catton also pointed out during her interview in India that our current government does not care about culture, and she is right.
I did five years of art school at AUT and I was a practicing artist for many years until I moved into political writing a year ago. It is nearly impossible to find any other form of government funding in the arts in Aotearoa if you don’t make the cut for Creative New Zealand. Generally, to even be considered for this funding you need to have an established practice. If you are not lucky enough to get government funding for your craft you are left (unless you parents can support you) working a minimum wage job (if you can even find a job in a global unemployment crisis) to support your vocation – what you love doing.
University of Canterbury senior English lecturer Dr Christina Stachurski agreed with Catton’s comment about the Government’s under-valuing of the arts;
“A recent action speaks for itself. National made a massive injection of funding for science and engineering at the University of Canterbury, and none for arts.”
National may show the value they place on fields such as science through massive cash injections into University science departments, but this does not stop them from denying scientific proof of massive global ecological catastrophes such as Climate Change. When I spoke to Christopher Smith, a Microbiologist who has recently graduated from Auckland University he told me,
“The truth is the science community has no doubt about climate change. We have no doubt this is happening right now. And the consequences of denying this are going to be, and have been, devastating.”
Yet, the National government continue to support and promote dangerously unregulated and unsafe practices such as Fracking to extricate natural resources from the planet. In 2012 US fracking generated 1,060 billion litres of toxic wastewater, much of which was dumped back into American waterways. But John Key insists fracking is safe, despite overwhelming evidence that it contributes to climate change and pollutes the planet. As Catton said,
“They care about short-term gains. They would destroy the planet in order to be able to have the life they want. I feel very angry with my government.”
It is John Key and his government who are the real traitors to our country, not Eleanor Catton.
Eleanor is a Hero.
Catton spoke for the silenced majority – that is: the disenfranchised, poor, working poor and those who are marginalized by the dominant culture. This political underclass are the most brutally affected by Nationals’ money hungry attitudes, welfare reforms and neoliberal policies. The backlash against her serves as a strong warning to other people, particularly women, that if you speak out against those who hold the power in a public space you will pay a harsh penalty for your bravery.
“Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example — for courage is as contagious as fear.” Wrote the theorist and dissident Susan Sontag, “But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.”
Catton’s example of principled action will always terrify those who hold the power, namely those who are part of the 1% and the super wealthy who benefit from massive wealth inequality, and self-serving politicians. John Key who is part of the elite 1% and stands to lose too much if cultural values begin to shift in favor of the 99% – in favor of the silenced majority.
Internationally regarded writers and intellectuals such as Catton have a legitimized power to disrupt the mainstream Medias’ narrative that panders to the right-wing and serves corporate interests – and in the process inspire others to do the same. This has sent the right in Aotearoa running scared, and this is why the backlash against her by political pundits and our own PM has been so swift and so vicious.
Science fiction has always offered us a useful way to think through issues, it is testing ground to explore and imagine alternative societies and worlds. In 2002 the neo noir film Minority Report, based on the short story by Philip K. Dick set in Washington in 2052, where “precrime” (crimes yet to be committed) a specialized police department, apprehends alleged criminals based on prophecies provided by three psychics called “precogs”. The preventive government in Minority Report claims these measures are to keep its citizenry safe, and protected. Electronic advances in a future state mean Medias presence is nearly boundless, invading and surveilling every aspect of daily life for the future citizenry of Washington.
Sometimes we do not need to imagine what a world like Minority Report might be like. Even if it is not always immediately legible or visible governments around the world are turning sci-fi dystopias into reality.
Aotearoa’s National party with the backing of Labour rammed through the Terrorist Law recently, 94 votes to 23. The law which gives SIS the power to carry out surveillance without a warrant for 24 hours, aims to tackle home-grown terrorism. John Key’s Government argued the rise of the Islamic State terror group in the Middle East increased the risk of an attack here, referring to ISIS.
“The threats faced by New Zealand have grown and it is important that we have the ability to respond to that,” Key said.
“The Government to protect New Zealanders at home and abroad and this legislation, passed with the support of a range of political parties, will better enable us to do that.”
The fear mongering of Islam by our leader John Key is of course, coded in islamophobia and incites xenophobia by pushing the tired but dangerous 9/11 narrative that Arab’s pose a great threat to our freedom, western democracy and national security. John Key has, predictably used the resent hostage situation in Sydney known as the #SydneySiege as further “proof” that his extreme and draconian Terror Law was justified afterall the Iranian man, Man Haron Monis, responsible for the attack forced the hostages to hold up flags with Arabic writing – clearly, he must be a terrorist? Monis’s lawyer, Manny Conitsis begs to differ saying:
“This is a one-off random individual. It’s not a concerted terrorism event or act. It’s a damaged goods individual who’s done something outrageous.”
But hey, anything and anybody to justify an unjustifiable law… right?
What should worry people about the Terrorist Law in New Zealand is that you don’t even need to commit a crime to have your passport stripped from you for up to four years. In Orwellian fashion our government can now withhold your right to leave New Zealand because they believe you might have been thinking of committing terrorist acts. Meaning, you can now be accused by authorities of a “thought crime” and stripped of your liberty by our Government, acting as some kind of “physic precog” that can predict crimes before they happened also known as “pre-crimes”, to leave your own country.
The only way out of Aotearoa, would be to swim for it.
I went to a meeting for the Human Rights Law commission a few weeks ago and Barrister Grant Willingsworth spoke at the start of the evening he said preventing a person from traveling overseas for 3 or 4 years is a more severe penalty than would be given for many quite serious criminal offences.
“It could perhaps be viewed as a kind of mega home detention.” He said.
Under New Zealand’s 2002 Terrorism Suppression Act, terrorism has a very broad definition. You might be heading to Palestine to join the struggle to oppose Israel’s genocide against a mostly unarmed indigenous people but the democratically elected political party Hamas who governs the Gaza strip, is largely designated as a terrorist organisation by western governments. Hypothetically our New Zealand government which is proudly pro-Israel and has designated the armed wing of Hamas a terrorist organisation, could decide you are guilty of a “thought crime”/”pre-crime” and claim you intended to join Hamas and strip you of your passport.
The Terrorist Law is designed, on purpose, to erode our basic human right to leave New Zealand. It is a law that could be used to stifle dissent and legitimate resistance to oppressive governments and state violence. Cam Walker, a good friend of mine and fourth year Law student at Auckland University sent a submission (those wishing to counter the Bill only had two days to write and submit) countering the Terrorists Fighting Legislation bill before it passed in parliament, he wrote:
“My primary concern with this Bill are the sections allowing the Minister to refuse or cancel passports rely on the wide definition of terrorism provided in s 5 of the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002. This may unduly impact on New Zealanders travelling overseas to fight for a legitimate cause such as national liberation from a colonial occupation or repressive government. The section 5 definition in the Terrorism Suppression Act nets behaviour associated with traditional guerrilla wars, far removed from the grisly atrocities of ISIS.”
Our National Government has been so quick to react with extreme legislation to a perceived threat of terror on the other side of the world, but just scoffed and laughed when they were shown New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions figures by Green leader Russel Norman. Turbo charged extreme weather events and rising sea levels resulting from climate change are a real terror that threatens New Zealanders.
I would argue what poses a grave threat to our western democracy and freedom are political leaders who support laws that can strip someone of their right to movement because they might commit a terrorist act and who justify warrantless surveillance on their own citizenry. Glenn Greenwald has argued for a large extent of his journalistic career that governments who justify warrantless surveillance and commit mass surveillance do so to keep the population submissive to government powers. Greenwald wrote in his book ‘No Place to Hide:’
[…] even if one is not personally targeted, a surveillance state that collects it all [electronic information] harms society and political freedom in general. Progress both in the United States and other nations was only ever achieved through the ability to challenge power and orthodoxies and to pioneer new ways of thinking and living. Everyone, even those who do not engage in dissenting advocacy or political activism,
Surveillance cheerleaders such as our leader John Key, who committed mass surveillance against his citizenry and then lied about it, offer up essentially one justification of mass and warrantless surveillance. Greenwald wrote “it is only carried out to stop terrorism and keep people safe.” In America many Democratic senators such as Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have argued, as the New York Times reported last year
“The usefulness of bulk collection has been greatly exaggerated. We have yet to see any proof that provides real, unique value in protecting national security[…] the NSA has not provided evidence of any instance when the agency used this program to review phone records that could not have been obtained using regular court order or emergency authorization.”
The record of mass surveillance preventing terrorist’s plots is pretty fucking poor.
In the words of graffiti artist and activist Bansky “I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take to protect me.”
Post the #SydneySige our MSM in Aotearoa which now acts as a state apparatus for the right wing and National government ran articles with fear mongering titles such as ‘Sydney Siege: “similar people monitored here” – PM’ and ‘Sydney Siege attack could happen here: PM’ our MSM such as Yahoo News and Stuff asked if a “terrorist attack” like the one in Sydney could happen here? Our Prime Minister stated we could be targeted by a Lone wolf “terrorist” similar to the one in Sydney. As previously said the #SydneySiege is now conveniently being used to justify the Terror Law.
None of our MSM pointed out you have more chance of drowning in your fucking bathtub than being killed or injured in a terrorist attack.
Unlike in the film Minority Report what mass surveillance apparatuses allow governments to gather in 2014 is a “Majority Report”. A massive drag net is used to collect citizen’s metadata – wading through millions of peoples data generated while using technology to find terrorists is almost impossible.
The purpose of the state and establishment has never really been to keep us safe from terrorism. The purpose is to keep us, their citizenry complaint and quiet – and fearful.
So, I have done it – that is what you are meant to say when you finally land a job that is meaningful, has a living wage and where you feel like you are valued and treated with dignity, right? In my new job I get to use all those degrees I earnt (and landed me with crippling student debt) and I got to tell WINZ to go fuck themselves. Anyone who has had to live off social welfare will tell you how good that feels. And yeah, I am not going to lie: getting sick leave and other benefits feels pretty good. I’d always wondered what it might be like to legitimately call in sick to work and not desperately worry about how I was gonna pay rent the following week because I was down a hundred bucks. I’ve never had sick pay. It is a whole new world.
Benefits, like holiday pay, are pretty cool right? You don’t need to work yourself to the bone all year round and you can have a few weeks off each year just to kick-back. Why do ‘they’ even call “holiday pay” a benefit? Isn’t it a human right to be able to take rest and not have to worry about how we are going pay rent or, I don’t know, eat?
I used to hate people (just a little bit) who got paid holidays. Maybe hate is too strong a word? I guess “bitter resentment” more adequately sums up how I feel about those lucky people who get holiday pay. I have never ever had a paid holiday unless you count all those times I had to go on WINZ because I got fired from whatever shit job I was working at the time for whatever reason management came up with. I once got fired because I reported an older Pākehā male manager for bullying his staff; myself included. Suddenly my work was not good enough. I got fired the day after Christmas.
I know rich people often think being on welfare in Aotearoa is like some kind of luxurious holiday where you sit around all day eating chips, cake and drinking RTDs, but yeah, nah. Between desperately trying to find work in a global job crisis and trying to stretch that 200 bucks WINZ kindly gives you to pay for food, rent and bills, living a life of luxury does not really come into it. People on welfare aren’t flying off to Hawaii despite what rich people think. I promise.
I work in an open plan office now which is cool because I always have someone smart and interesting to discuss ideas and politics with. The thing is I keep asking for permission to pee or at least announcing I have to go the toilet because clearly my new workmates need to know about my bodily functions. I know this might seem like a really bizarre thing to tell you but bear with me. I have worked hospitality and a range of other low-paid service work for over a decade now. In these jobs you have to ask for permission to do anything: go for a smoko, sit down for five minutes, inform a rude customer their behavior is not ok (usually you are told to suck it up because the customer is always right) and yes, to relieve yourself.
You can’t just pee when you need to.
I have self-autonomy in my new job, and it feels fucken weird. I can go for a walk if I get stuck on an idea in my writing without asking (I know, I get paid to write now – what is this life?). I can go and grab a coffee without asking for permission. And yes I can go to the bathroom without checking with someone if it is a good time to do so.
The thing is that bars (primarily I have worked hospo to make cash) get really busy sometimes. You can’t always pee when you want to. I suffer from UTI (urinary tract infections) it is an ongoing problem that I can’t help unless I stop having sex and I’m not keen to give that up obviously. Or I just need to make sure I drink lots of water and go to the bathroom often. In my hospo working life I’ve often been denied the privilege of bathroom breaks by managers and owners. Usually they don’t care if you tell them that you get UTIs and if I hold on to long I will wake up in agony tomorrow morning and need to see a doctor I can’t actually afford on the shitty poverty wages they are paying me. Very rarely has any manager or owner cared when I have told them this. They want the work done and they want it done now.
I have often imaged what it might be like to work in a job where you didn’t need to ask to relieve yourself or take a break. I am not even joking. I’d wanted to pen something about this for a while now but thought it was not really worth writing about. Plus having zero self-autonomy in low-paid work is something you just except as inevitable. So you just shut up and get on with it and don’t really think about; it is easier that way because otherwise you just depress yourself.
What changed my mind on the worth of writing about this subject was Linda Tirado’s new book Hand to Mouth: the truth about being poor in a wealthy world. Tirado in 2013 answered, on a blog she frequented, a question someone had asked: Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive? Her response to this question cut to the bone of the realities of being poor and being a low-wage worker, and it went viral and lead to her writing the afore-mentioned book. Tirado wrote in her book:
“Some people have the luxury of asking themselves whether a job fulfils their career hopes and ambitions. I’ve got my own metric to gauge the fabulosity of a job. Does the job require me to keep my boss informed of the inner workings of my gastrointestinal system, or am I allowed to go to the bathroom at will? It’s physically uncomfortable to hold it forever, and it sucks to stand by for the okay like a dog waiting for someone to open the door. But for me, the indignity of the whole thing is less about potential bladder infection. It’s more about the tone of the place. In my experience, the jobs where the boss regulates your urinary tract also tend to demand a bunch of other degrading shit.”
Nearly every low-paid service job I have worked has demanded I keep to a strict compliance of telling owners and managers what I am doing down to toilet breaks; it’s like they don’t trust you to function as a thinking human being capable of making decisions yourself. I got fired once from a bar job because I forgot to tell a manager I was going to the bathroom. I got told I put the business in jeopardy because I missed service on a table in my absence.
In this capitalist system is it always profit before people.
Your bosses don’t notice or care if you work like a dog for them but they sure as hell notice when you don’t scrub a table clean or smile big enough for some pretentious, entitled customer.
When you work crappy jobs you have no rights or at least owners and employees actively deny you your rights. You can be fired at any time without warning; at least this is how it goes down in Hospitality. Maybe you looked at a customer wrongly? Fuck, who knows. I’ve been fired for turning up two minutes late just once. I have been fired because a manager was a sexist arsehole and I called him up on it. I have been fired because in all honestly I hate working in hospitality and it shows. Between customers who treat you like a trained monkey and are rude to you more than they are polite and employers who refuse to give you consistent hours or pay you a livable wage, it can be hard to feel any sense of pride for the job you are working or any sense of hope for the better.
I’ve suffered from depression and anxiety (it gets pretty stressful not knowing if you have a job next week or not and it’s not like you can save for a rainy day on minimum wage) which I am pretty sure was situational; it is crushing working so hard for such little money in a job with no hope of moving up.
Caring about some shit job and smiling on cue for customers becomes difficult when getting out of bed is a minor miracle. Mental health days are a luxury of the rich.
The sexual harassment you experience as a female bartender doesn’t help anxiety levels either. I once had a customer tell me there was something wrong with the toilet. So I went up with him to fix it, he pushed me into the cubical, locked the door and shoved his tongue down my throat. The most a manager has ever done when I reported shit like this was to get the bouncer to kick them out. I’ve honestly lost count of how many times I have had my arse and breasts grabbed by customers; yes, sometimes by male managers. It is easier to laugh it off than say anything and risk your shifts being cut.
I’ve been told by people (usually they found jobs, with security and benefits, straight out of University and can not imagine how you did not either) more times than I can count “you should just be grateful/happy you even have a job.”
I can not begin to tell you how fucking sick I am of hearing this.
Grateful for what? For being treated like I am worthless and expendable by employers? Grateful for zero job security? The only job security I have ever had was when I worked two bar jobs; if I lost one job I had another to fall back on. Grateful that I can work up to three bar jobs and not even crack five hundred bucks a week in one of this world’s most expensive cities? Minimum wage in this country is $14.25 it is estmated you need $18.40 to survive in Aotearoa. Grateful for ‘casual contracts’ which mean the employer has the right to cut my hours at a moment’s notice, while expecting me to be on-call just in case they need me?
“I resent the fuck out of it every time my schedule’s been cut and then I’ve been called in for tons of extra hours, as though my time wasn’t worth anything,” wrote Tirado “just so that my boss can be sure not to pay me for a minute that I am not absolutely necessary.”
In Aotearoa the use of ‘Zero Hour’ contracts is growing. These contracts mean the employers, namely giant profit driven companies such as Burger King and Starbucks, don’t guarantee any hours of work and employees have to be ready to come in when they’re called. One week you might have forty hours the next none – as you can imagine budgeting becomes impossible. These contracts are mainly being offered to women (this includes overwhelmingly women of colour; so often when we say “women” we think only of white women), young people and those over the age of 65 who are the most easily exploitable and therefore most likely to be desperate enough to sign these types of contracts. These contracts aren’t really being offered to Pākehā men. “These contracts are despicable and cruel, and designed to put workers at the beck and call of their employer,” Mike Treen from Unite Union said.
Stop telling low-paid service workers to be grateful for what they have; it is patronising, defeating and reeks of the arrogance and ignorance on the part of those who say it.
I wrote most of this blog on Christmas Eve. It is the first time I am not working some fifteen hour shift serving irrationally irate customers who want to buy little Sally some shit, made-in-China toy she does not need (possibly made by a child even younger than she) or serving Joe Dickhead a beer he also probably does not need. Employers/owners operating in the service industry rarely pay you extra or give you a bonus at Christmas time even though you work three times as hard and the company most likely made record profits during the Christmas shopping period. Other than time and a half or quarter (depending on how stingy the employer is) on Boxing Day and during the ‘jolly season’ in my ten years working the service industry I at least never got paid extra . They might give you a bottle of wine with a bow on it – if you are lucky.
Employers expect you to smile at rude customers and to not complain; just be happy you have employment no matter how underpaid or unfulfilling. But service workers around the world have had enough.
I was working on this blog when I heard that workers at the fast food restaurant Wendy’s, on Dominion Road in Auckland, had walked out on a strike. Joe Carolan of Unite Union messaged me saying those who walked out on the job are tired of zero hour contracts, bullying in the work place and irregular ten minute tea-breaks.
It was not only fast food workers that were tired of getting a raw deal. Nadia Filistin, an anti-poverty activist, updated her Facebook near midday saying:
“There is an ANZ strike today- Christmas Eve. Members are striking over the banks refusal to pass on record profits to the workers who made them happen in the form of a decent pay increase. Never mind that their boss, CEO David Hisco, highest paid CEO in the country earns over 2k an hour and gave himself a 14% pay increase this year.”
3News reported it was an 11% pay rise but in all honestly I think I would trust the words of a grassroots activist, who is committed to the struggle such as Nadia, over the MSM who often report disinformation to create static and minimise people power and protest.
The United States of America has, let’s face it, really run with this whole capitalist thing. Thousands of Walmart workers have been protesting and striking for over a year now. They are demanding better work conditions, more stable hours and a livable wage of fifteen dollars an hour. The six heirs to the Walmart fortune have more wealth than the poorest 30 percent of Americans. “They can’t even form a football team,” wrote Russell Brand in his book Revolution “how are they going to stop a revolution when we act on the unfairness of that statistic? The heirs to the Walmart fortune, whose dad was “good at supermarkets” do not support paying Walmart workers anything above poverty wages.
Recently hundreds of Walmart workers marched on million dollar mansion of Alice Walton, who is one of the heirs to the Walmart fortune, to deliver a petition demanding Walmart start paying their employers $15 dollars an hour. Walton called the police and 26 of the protesters were arrested.
People deserve to be treated with dignity (not having to ask to go to the bathroom might be a good start), respect and compassion by their employers and paid a fair and liveable wage.
After all, you get what you pay for. If you pay people sub-liveable wages they owe you, as their employer, NOTHING.
I went to WINZ last week to claim my transition to work grant because I’d finally found a job. I didn’t get the grant in the end even though it is, or should I say, was my entitlement but this is beside the point. When a security guard buzzed me into the WINZ office, (after the shooting of two WINZ case workers down in Ashburton they have tightened their security) I walked up to the counter where a young Pākehā guy who I will call Paul*, was in front of me pleading for an appointment.
“I have not eaten in two days, I’m so starving. I need a food grant” Paul told the receptionist as he took scraps of paper from his pocket that turned out to be his bank statements revealing a zero balance and a maxed-out credit card.
The receptionist responded:
“I’m sorry you should have made an appointment or budgeted better.”
Despite the receptionist’s callous, and in my opinion brutal, response Paul kept pleading over and over again until finally the security guard asked him to take a seat.
I said to the receptionist “You just blatantly lied to that you guy. There are always emergency appointments for desperate situations. Was he not desperate enough for you?” She ignored me and asked for my name.
I sat down one seat in front of Paul who had just been turned away from WINZ and told him about the emergency appointments that, seeing as it was midday, should still be available. He thanked me and again went up to the receptionist, repeated what I had told him, and got an appointment that he would most likely wait several hours for.
My heart went out to this guy. I have been in his situation before, begging for a food grant at WINZ. It can be a humiliating and frustrating experience.
Paul came back to his seat behind me and I heard him make a phone call. When someone picked up he said “I think I have got a food grant we will eat food tonight, at least.”
Fuck.
I felt my eyes well up.
I turned to this guy and asked as politely as I could, “Do you mind me asking, how’d you get so broke, babe? No judgement – I hate the WINZ system. I write for a political blog I’d like to hear your story.”
“It was either food or power. This month we choose power because of the penalties you have to pay if you miss payment.” Paul said.
I just want to repeat the part where Paul said “this month.” Clearly this was not the first time he has had to make the decision to go without either food or power.
“You try living off 250 bucks a week and tell me how to fucking budget?” Paul said to me.
If anyone out there can tell me how people are meant to live off so little in one of the world’s most expensive cities without forgoing basic necessities like food, I am all ears. As Nadia Abu-Shanab, who at the time was working for Action Against Poverty said in May of this year,
“We work with people every day who have been squeezed to the limit by a punitive approach to beneficiaries and the unemployed. We have seen incomes drop significantly in parts of Auckland. This winter, an untold number will face freezing homes and empty stomachs.”
Nadia makes clear what we already know: Paul’s situation is not unique in Aotearoa. There are thousands struggling to survive in a city where rents and food prices have soared. Wages have not increased to match these rising living costs. Despite this, our government persists in telling us we just need to work harder – as if hard work was a magic trick for fixing a broken system.
WINZ only gives you “just enough to survive on” as my first case manager said to me four years ago, after graduating university. Paul and Nadia’s words should be a reality check: welfare is not enough to live on for the majority of unemployed people dealing with the massive global job crisis.
Our benefit system’s ethos of “unemployed people only deserve just enough to survive on” is in itself problematic. Regardless of your situation, if you need help from the state because you lost your job, can no longer work due to disability, injury, or mental health issue or for whatever reason – don’t you deserve to do more than just survive?
When you are vulnerable and down, you have the right to be treated with dignity, respect, compassion, and kindness by whatever government is in power. Don’t you deserve to know you are loved and valued no matter how much profit you are or are not turning over?
Instead of compassion from our government, they are leaving our most vulnerable behind as blogger and advocate for Action Against Poverty Katie Dickie-Davis wrote recently for The Daily Blog:
“Last week people queued at the doors of the Auckland City Mission. They are people that are living without enough income to afford the basics let alone the extras we as a society have come to expect at Christmas. Extras like presents for the children and a feed on Christmas Day.”
Aotearoa has never been so unequal. The OCED recently released a landmark report showing that economies the world over are “being hamstrung by growing inequality – New Zealand was the worst effected,” as the Guardian reported.
John Key has dismissed the report. As Dickie-Davis went on to say
“Key has quite a history of denying inequality. Following his election win he did however state he wanted to reduce child poverty. Hmm. Colour me fucking puzzled? Denying inequality, dismissing the findings of report after report and yet admitting there might be some child poverty. Obviously someone is wrong.”
Just over a week ago I was walking late at night to a friend’s apartment at the bottom of Queen Street, when a group of young teenagers crossed my path. They were homeless. I ended up talking to a sixteen-year old girl who had been on the streets since she was fourteen. Her parents do not want anything to do with her she told me, and now she is pregnant and has no idea what she is going to do. This young girl told me John Key does not give a fuck about her and while laughing and throwing her head back she acclaimed “let’s put bombs in the beehive”.
We are one of the few developed countries in the world that has no national strategy to combat homelessness. Youth homelessness has grown since 2008 and Paula Bennett’s punitive welfare reforms targeted youth benefits.
The National government is sending a clear message to young people who are homeless and others struggling to stay above the poverty line: we don’t care if you fucking starve to death.
Post Script:
I wrote at the start of this blog that I have finally found a job! Not some crap low paid job either. For the first time I am being paid a liveable wage and I am using all those degrees I earnt. I have been hired as the Editor of Debate magazine at AUT. I feel incredibly humbled to be working at AUT in a position which will allow me to connect daily with students and hear their voices. I am at the very start of a rebrand and relaunch of the magazine, much of my time will be dedicated to seeing this through. I will no longer be blogging for The Daily Blog as frequently as I have done in the past. I hope to contribute to the Daily when I can.
Thank you to all the people who believed in me, gave me praise and yes, criticisms. Your support and robust debate has been invaluable. There are no words I can use to express my thanks to Martyn who spent at least 6 months urging me to write for him. Thank God I finally got over my lack of self-belief and committed to writing for The Daily Blog just under a year ago. It has been an affirming and incredible experience for me, writing soothes the soul.
This year was the first time I ever voted and in all honestly I feel a bit ripped off. I knew the left would lose badly to the right, so it was not this which left me feeling short changed. It was the left’s behaviour after the fact.
Watching Labour cannibalise itself and witnessing some of David Cunliffe’s own MPs throw him under the post-election bus left me feeling pretty disillusioned.
So much for solidarity in tough times.
Megaupload tycoon Kim Dotcom bankrolled the Internet Party then stood on stage on election night crying and apologising for poisoning the Internet/Mana brand and declaring it his fault that Hone, Mana Party leader, lost his seat in parliament (self-awareness always comes too late). Dotcom’s ego eclipsed so many of the incredible policies the Internet Party had to offer. Greens co-leader Russel Norman had a public hissy fit on Waatea News and accussed Internet/Mana’s of stealing Green votes. As the saying goes “the right seeks converts and the left seeks traitors.”
We lost the election for many reasons – it’s not just down to National’s dirty politics and right wing attack dog and political blogger Whale Oil. Many of our own left wing politicians have behaved dismally. The endless infighting within our left wing movements and Labours refusal to work in solidarity with other left wing parties played an epic part in our downfall. Journalist and activist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recently wrote this in relation to the powerful uprisings in Ferguson against class warfare, police brutality, and racial profiling which offers a model for civil resistance:
“Rather than uniting to face the real foe—do-nothing politicians, legislators, and others in power—we fall into the trap of turning against each other, expending our energy battling our allies instead of our enemies.”
I had never voted until this year, as previously mentioned. Not because I am an apathetic millennial – as the stereotype goes, I just never really saw the point in voting.
I have been an activist since I was 19 and since I can remember I have cared deeply for other people and their welfare. But like so many young people I have felt completely alienated by the political process and establishment. I worked out early that most politicians do not give a fuck about my generation. Even the ones that do have no idea how to connect in meaningful ways with global youth.
It is so easy to forget where you come from as John Key so succinctly proves. This is how we’ve ended up with token gestures like ‘The Young Nats’ and ‘Young Labour’ whose members are millennials but they often fail to connect with a disenfranchised and angry youth.
It is hard to care about politics when you are struggling to find your first job thanks to a massive global job crisis. Youth unemployment in Britain sits at an all-time high of 21 percent and youths account for more than one-third of total unemployment in New Zealand. Around 40 percent of youths in employment are underemployed.
Governments all over the world took stifling austerity measures after the financial crash that adversely effected the young, vulnerable, middle class, and poor leaving the super wealthy untouched and unaccountable. Anti-capitalist activist Naomi Klein wrote
“The only kind of contraction our current system can manage is a brutal crash in which our most vulnerable will suffer the most.”
When the Occupy Wall Street movement exploded all over the world it was mostly young people leading the movement protesting austerity measures and the staggering divide between the super-rich and remaining 99 percent. I sat in Auckland’s Occupy camp three years ago talking to homeless kids as young as 14, who spoke of having no future and no hope. They were painfully aware of how little their government cared for their welfare or their futures. When I spoke on the phone to Corie Haddock Candidate for Labour and who is the co-chair of ‘The New Zealand Collation to End Homelessness’ he told me:
“We are one of the few developed countries in the world that does not have a national strategy to respond to homelessness. Homelessness has grown across the board since 2008. One of the specific areas of growth of homelessness is young people.”
Jan Logie, Green MP, visited Youthline a few days ago and created a Facebook update in relation to her experience there. She wrote,
“I was disturbed […] to hear about how big the youth homelessness problem is and how some of the very worrying issues I’ve seen around alternative education seem to have got worse.”
There are without a doubt some incredible MPs and political party candidates working hard in parliament for social change and who are listening to the voices of young people. But they are so often are minority, not the majority.
So why would young people, especially those living in poverty who have been pushed to the margins of society in New Zealand, put faith and trust in a government and political process that does not include them and has left them out in the cold? Why do so many people patronisingly tell the youth of today to “get out and vote?” Why should they? Can you even tell me why I should vote without using the words “civic duty”? As Danny Dorling wrote last year for The New Statesman,
“The prospects for young people have never seemed so bleak. No wonder they feel society is rigged against them and are so reluctant to vote.”
Left and right wing governments all over the world from Canada to England are hiking tertiary fees and making it harder and harder for people to access higher education. Unless you come from wealth and your parents can support you through under- and post graduate study you are likely to be lumped with massive, crippling student loan. The reality that 1 in 5 Māori live in poverty as compared to 1 in 10 Pākehā, means the increasing tertiary fees will acutely affect New Zealand’s indigenous youth and ethnic minorities.
Our higher educational systems are already racially and socially divided but with growing tertiary fees, a young person’s potential to attend university will increasingly depend on how much their parents earn, not how hard they work, or how dedicated they are to learning.
Higher education should be a human right.
When students protested against massive educational cuts and the axing of student allowances at postgraduate level in New Zealand three years ago, our right wing leader John Key ignored their demands and flippantly told student protesters to “finish their degrees and go and get a job.” In a job market where in vocational qualifications such as teaching degrees in particular are almost not worth the paper they are printed on, this statement was not only dismissive, it was a lie by omission. As activist and journalist Laurie Penny points out,
“The message being sent to the next generation could be summed up with a second-person pronoun and any given expletive. You don’t vote for us; why should we care what happens to you?”
Representative democracy constantly disappoints.
The ruthless attacks on the poor and unemployed through the National government gutting the welfare state and Paula Bennett’s dangerous welfare reforms send a clear message to thousands of young people who are struggling to find work in a stagnant job market: we don’t give a fuck about you. As John Key gives ever increasing tax breaks to the super wealthy, our social safety nets are being ripped away. As Dorling states,
“When there is a dole, young people do not have to take any work, no matter how bad it is.”
Young people deserve to have job opportunities that are meaningful for them, and that pay them a living wage. Our youth are witnessing the collapse of our economy, the privatisation of their educational systems, the destruction of our social safety nets, and their very futures.
Russell Brand states in his book Revolution,
“I mean, if someone said they had a socio-economic system that creates a hugely wealthy elite at the cost of everyone else but it was ecologically sound, we’d tell them to fuck off.”
Russell Brand, spokesperson for the voiceless rage of a generation, infamously guest edited the New Statesman last year calling his issue ‘Revolution of Consciousness’. In his political essay ‘We no longer have the luxury of tradition’ he told everyone he had never voted and you shouldn’t either – it only encourages them. Brand referring here to politicians and those who benefit from funding their parties.
“I don’t vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance; I know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars (and one World Cup) so that I’d have the right to vote. Well, they were conned. As far as I’m concerned there is nothing to vote for.”
Political pundits and journalists around the world threw their hands up in the air and declared Brand irresponsible for telling people to stop voting. In an interview with veteran journalist Richard Paxman, Brand was told he was in no position to call for a revolution and a radical dismantling of our current failed [capitalist] system if he had never voted.
Paxman told Brand over and over that he needed to vote or else he had no right to complain. Yeah, that old trope. Brand said over and over that he had no interest in participating in a political process that represents and serves so few. As Brand wrote,
“The idea that voting is pointless, democracy a façade, and that no one is representing ordinary people is more resonant than ever…”
Telling people not to vote may have been irresponsible, but what so many pundits and journalists failed to understand about Brand’s polarising political essay was that it was also a battle-cry – one that echoed the voices of many activists and protesters on a global level.
His essay, given his celebrity status, was a sonorous drum that called for people to rise up against disaster capitalism and rampant greed, and demanded revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony. If, however, you find Brand with his proud sexism (because LOL! Sexism is funny when he does it), whizzing around in a Rolls Royce being driven by his chauffeur, while telling rich people they are part of the problem a bit hard to stomach, rest assured that he is not the only one calling for such radical actions.
In an article written by Naomi Klein and published in Brands editorial debut last year at The New Statesman titled ’Science says revolt!’ she brought both the catastrophic consequences of climate change and a complex systems researcher named Brad Werner to our attention. Werner delivered a session titled ‘Is the Earth Fucked?’ at the American Geophysical Union’s autumn meeting where he used an advanced computer model to answer this question. He talked about,
“systems boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex system theory[…]”
wrote Klein. But as she pointed out the bottom line was clear:
[…] global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we fucked” question, Werner put aside the jargon and replied “more or less”.
There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered up hope as Klein powerfully points out:
“Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture.”[…] this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups.”
“Mass uprisings, political protest, sabotage and direct actions along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – “represent the likeliest forms of friction to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control.”
Given the above, stop telling young people to vote. Tell them to fight. Tell them to protest against our ruthless National government that cares for profit not people or the planet.
Tell them to start the riot.
Tell them to be arrested if necessary.
Tell them the truth: they have been sold a fucking lie.
Tell them that getting degrees is unlikely to land skilled, meaningful work that will pay a living wage in our current social and political climate.
Tell them working hard at some low paid job, if they can find work at all, will barely afford them a basic standard of living.
Tell them this world has been stolen from them by corporate greed, by corrupt and lazy politicians who spend more time fighting amongst themselves than solving social problems, and by a failed economic model that works only for the super wealthy and then is sold back to them for more than they could ever afford.
Tell them it is up to us, the silent and silenced majority, to take this world back.
One of my mum’s colleagues recently told her that there is no money in what her daughter was doing; volunteering at a women’s refuge and writing on politics. This guy, dispensing all his pearls of wisdom, told my mother that setting up my own blog with various other writers is not likely to make me any money, either – he knew someone who had done the same and after a year was still wasn’t making any money off advertising. He believes my issue is “I don’t take advice well” and my swearing puts people off. I would have thought my radical intersectional feminist ideas and disdain for the government and establishment would be more offensive to some than the word “fuck” appearing in my blogs, but obviously not.
This guy at my mums’ work with all the unsolicited advice was of course a baby boomer.
A baby boomer or member of the ‘greatest generation’ telling a millennial how to live their life is nothing new, as anyone under the age of 30 can tell you. Last year I was working in some café in Melbourne as a kitchen hand. I had recently been fired from a well-paid bar job the day after Christmas and had to find work, any work, to pay my rent, so I found myself washing dishes and working under a baby boomer head chef who made Robin Thicke and Redfoo look like the patron saints of sexual equality. One day he decided to rant about “my generation” or “those young people”. He told me the economy is so bad because my generation is lazy and we just need to stop complaining and take any job, because “back in his day they took what was given to them and got on with it”.
As I turned to wash the massive pile of dishes I was being paid below the Australian hospitality minimum wage to do, I couldn’t believe he could not see the irony in his words: I have two undergraduate and two postgraduate degrees – but here I was, willing to work a low-paid job to make enough money to pay rent and buy food, at age 28, without complaining. I have spent the last ten years taking any job, no matter how underpaid, no matter how few hours, no matter how depressing, to make enough money to scrape by. You can’t really live off minimum wage. Millions other people on poverty wages around the world, like the striking Walmart workers in America, will tell you the same.
So here is some advice for baby boomers, who feel the need to give unsolicited out of touch and unhelpful advice to young people – like they have a clue:
Don’t tell us we need to work harder, because in your day “you took any job offered and did not complain”. Your wage was far more likely to match your living costs and there was no massive unemployment crisis when you were in your teens and early twenties. Don’t tell us we need to give up on our dreams and just take that McDonald’s job and be happy with our lot because we should be THANKFUL we even have a job. You should care what happens to us. We are your children. “Millions of young people are finding themselves forced to contemplate 50 years of fear, debt and depression” wrote the journalist Laurie Penny. Is that the life you think we deserve?
Don’t tell us we are selfish and narcissistic because we like selfies and Facebook and feel better about ourselves when we buy pretty things we probably do not need and likely cannot afford. “Diagnosing and labelling people [narcissistic] whose struggles are far more environmental or learned than genetic or organic” wrote Dr. Brene Brown “is often far more detrimental to healing and change than it is helpful.”
We need to humanise problems; this is how we can shed some important light on the issues young people face today. We live in a celebrity-soaked culture that tells us being ‘ordinary’ is worse than death. We are raised in a culture that tells us being superficially loved by many is more important than being deeply loved by a few. It should therefore come as no surprise to baby boomers that so many young people are obsessed with taking selfies and promoting themselves on twitter, Instagram and other social platforms.
Stigmatising young people as narcissistic or self-centred is unhelpful; young people are simply reacting to what Brown calls ‘a shame-based fear of being ordinary’. They are reacting to a capitalist system that values the individual over the collective and puts profit before people.
My generation are often acutely aware they are measured by the profit they can turn, not by how much they give back to their communities, or how deeply they care about the problems in this world. This was proved by my mother’s colleague who saw no worth in my writing or volunteer work because, so far, it has made me no money.
Don’t think you baby boomers have ANY idea what it is like to be young in this world, right now.
Most of you don’t.
The majority of you don’t know how it feels to go to university and be saddled with massive debt, because university was free for you. You don’t know how depressing it is to earn those degrees and tick those boxes only to spend most of your twenties desperately looking for any work. And then, when you get a job, it is either underpaid or you are underemployed so sometimes you go without food. Being hungry sucks, but working a dead end job with no hope of moving up sucks even more. The political magazine New Statesman said last year that my generation will be the first generation in a long time to be poorer than their parents.
Stop telling us not to imagine better and stop telling us to “just work harder”; the only thing that makes this world a bearable place is those people who dare to imagine a world that is better. “The most important battles are fought on the territory of political imagination” wrote Laurie Penny. I know so many of you lost hope after the Seventies. I would have too under the same circumstances. The government just did not listen to you. Seeing as you know what being ignored feels like, maybe you should start listening to us? We are starry-eyed and full of impossible dreams – just like you were – and have naive ideas about taking back the power from the corrupt governments and greedy politicians and corporations who sit safely behind their platinum titles.
Yes, we want it all. That does not make us selfish. Please stop telling us that. It actually makes us fearless.
We – the consumerist, selfie-taking brats – have started some of the most powerful social movements this century has witnessed; from the Arab Spring protests that toppled dictators, to the youth-led Occupy Movement that forced massive income inequality onto the public agenda, to the protesters in Greece who graffitied the words “fuck heroes, fight now” and braved tear gas and violence and sometimes death so their government would hear their voices rising up against suffocating austerity measures, to the young democracy protesters who started the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong: we know how to stand up.
Courage is contagious.
We are not waiting for a Che Guevara or Martin Luther King to lead the charge. Our movements are often leaderless because we want to lead together – this is democracy in action. My generation knows you can kill a revolutionary but you cannot kill a revolution. We learnt that from you, baby boomers. We value intergenerational wisdom and knowledge despite what so many of you think.
Our movements are about the collective, not the individual. This is in radical opposition to a capitalist system that cares only for the rich, detests the poor, and has failed so many of us. Leadership in the most recent movements has come from the bottom of the pyramid not the top.
We are still learning. We have made mistakes and will continue to do so. We understand that failure is part of the process of achieving colossal, long-lasting change. We are prepared to keep getting back up over and over again.
Perhaps those of us who have taken up arms and joined the struggle for change will eventually become jaded and frustrated with incremental change and give up, like so many of you did. Fighting when so few hear you is tiring. Some of us will go and get those corporate jobs we mocked and buy shiny cars and big homes we cannot afford and forget our dreams. And then it will be our children’s turn to dream of the impossible and try to change the world. And thank God so many of them will.
A world without dreamers, change-makers, social dissidents, and the optimistically naive would be a dystopia. Where there is hope, there is life.
We live in exceptional times. Our world is dying. We have polluted it so badly with carbon and gas emissions that our climate has been irreversibly effected. Sea levels are rising and more climate change-effected natural catastrophes are eminent. Whole islands of mostly indigenous peoples will drown and be washed away. The Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea and the Taro Islanders of the Solomon Islands have become climate change refuges and have already paid the price for our ruthless greed and callousness. Naomi Klein said in her book ‘This Changes Everything’:
“In our wealthier nations, we will protect our major cities with costly seawalls and storm barriers while leaving vast areas of coastline that are inhabited by poor and Indigenous people to the ravages of storms and rising seas.”
Our politicians have declared wars in our name with neither, our support or our permission. Obama’s video game technology of killing through drone warfare is being used, mostly, to terrorize and kill innocent civilians in distant lands. One of Obama’s first actions when he first took office, was to bomb an African nation. Please tell me again why he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? America has declared a state of permeant everlasting war, western democracy is being consumed by a police state. In New Zealand, Prime Minster John Key would rather pump money into a flag referendum and go to war than feed kids living in poverty a healthy, nourishing lunch.
This is pure insanity.
We know our world is fucked up. We do not have all the answers, but we are searching for them – we are trying.
I think it is worth telling you what my mum, who is also a baby boomer, said in response to some guy at work telling her how her daughter should live her life:
“My daughter is incredibly passionate about what she does. I fully support and encourage her creative endeavours”.
My mother is a solo parent who went to university in her forties. She worked multiple jobs while studying to feed and clothe both my twin sister and I and is now saddled with debt she will likely never repay. My mum works in the public health sector which is nearly always underpaid. Some baby boomers understand what it is like to be young in this world and to struggle, but so many need a reality check.
So, baby boomers. Either join us in our fight to change the world or get out of our fucking way.
How out of touch with reality is Sir Bob Jones? You know, that white dude who invested in privatised SOEs after the selling off of our assets in the eighties and made a ludicrous and disgusting amount of money and is on the Forbes Rich List and now writes for the New Zealand Herald. His last op-ed ‘Living Wage is a Reward Not a Right’ was so hilarious it reads almost like a parody, only it isn’t. According to Jones those left-wingers demanding a living wage are “absurd” – yeah, it is completely insane to demand low-paid employees get a wage that might pull them above the poverty line and put food on their tables without having to forgo another necessity like paying the power bill.
Dear Sir Bob Jones,
It is nice you like to swoon around cafés, asking owners questions like: “I have a million questions. How do you cope with buggers occupying key tables for two hours over a single cup of coffee?” Not exactly journalistic questioning at its best. (How much do they pay you to write this shit?). I have worked hospitality for ten long shitty years and between the million orders you have to fill in a short space of time and the long hours, you are nearly always paid poverty wages to work, as an employee you don’t really care about people who are occupying tables for long periods of time. It is just one less table you have to worry about.
Mostly, when you work hospo, you are just dying for your next cig brake and hoping to god everyone magically just fucks off so you can finally go and take a piss and sit down. Standing for hours and hours on your feet starts to hurt after a while. Getting regular brakes in hospo is a privilege not a [workers] right. I’ve easily worked up to 16 hours without a brake because bars and cafes are nearly always short staffed – your employer saves money but you end working twice as hard.
If you really want to find out the reality of low-paid work, you might want to start by talking to the staff working at these places – not just the owners. Cafés and bars are notorious for treating their staff appallingly in New Zealand. Being paid minimum wage to work long shifts for such little pay and deal with irate and rude customers who often treat you like something they just stepped in and sexually harass you (working in bars often result in drunk customers harassing you) is not exactly self-affirming. In my experience (and I have a decade of it) owners and managers seem to take pleasure in making sure you know that as an employee you are worthless and expendable – and I have worked in over 9 different bars and 3 different cafés and only once I have been paid a fair wage and treated with dignity and respect.
Not to mention you have zero job security and employers often give you as many or as little shifts as they please, regardless of what your contract stipulates. This is made even easier by the recent popularity in zero-hero contracts, something that has been taken up especially within the hospitality industry
Speaking of job security, I thought I would share something with you Bob: the anxiety of having no job security is crippling. I used to work two bar jobs because I was so terrified of losing one, it was not like I had savings; you can’t save on minimum wage. The logic was: if I had two jobs and I got ‘rostered off’ I would at least have another job to fall back on. (In hospo terms, “rostering off” is a common practice where an employee turns up to work and for some explicable reason have no shifts on the roster for the following weeks. Effectively you just got fired, but without the annoying hassle of employers actually going through the process of a legal dismissal.)
Yeah, that is the only kind of job security I have ever had: holding two jobs in case I lost the other.
As Linda Tirado, a young mother who has spoken out about the inequalities and realities of trying to live on minimum wage, wrote:
“We all know that a lot of folks think that poor people are lazy and incompetent. They think we get fired from jobs because we don’t know how to behave, or we’re always late, or we just don’t care. But what rich people don’t realise is how unbelievably easy it is to get fired. And a lot of times what gets you fired is that you’re working more than one job.”
And this brings me to the illusion you seem to be labouring under, Bob, that if you train or study and make some ‘sacrifices’ you will finally win the prize of a ‘liveable wage’. You wrote:
“If you want the $18.50 “living wage” or better, choose employment paying it, rather than complain. That requires initial sacrifice, whether by studying for a professional career or accepting temporary low-paid trade or other specialist training.”
Dude, you should quit property investing and become a comedian because damn, this is hilarious. Getting a degree, especially a vocational degree, no longer guarantees you (did it ever?) a job – let alone a career with remuneration that pays back that staggering student debt you acquired while making those “sacrifices”. I know it did back in your day, Bob, but times, oh, how they have changed. Unlike the students of today you did not start off your career in debt: university was free. Baby boomers always forget to mention this or see it as ‘none issue’ – especially when they are telling us underpaid or unemployed people we just need to work harder and stop complaining.
When students revolted two years ago against John Key’s massive cuts to education he told protesting students to: “stop complaining, finish your degrees and go and get a job”. The only problem is there where so few jobs to “go and get”. The job market is saturated with over-qualified and often desperate graduates. I trained as a teacher and in just two years we lurched from a teacher shortage to a major oversupply. Leaving me and thousands of other graduates out of work.
The disenfranchising of the young is a major worldwide crisis: last year the New Statesman reported that “youth unemployment in Britain is 21 percent (958,000), a near record.” Recently on Russell Brand’s YouTube show The Trews the co-founder of the ‘99% Movement’ Dave Degraw said in relation to Americas unemployment crisis, “we only have full-time jobs for 50% of the working age population and of those jobs half of them pay under 35,000 a year.”
What this means is America’s economy only works for 25% of the population. The Huffington Post reported that more than 2 million graduates in America are unemployed and millions more are under-employed. In New Zealand 40% of our youth are unemployed or under-employed, and in 2012 the highest percentage of people graduated from universities in New Zealand only to find that their diplomas and degrees often counted for nothing in the job market.
Well educated or not, it is a struggle to find underpaid work let alone meaningful and well-paid work in a stagnant job market, where job creation has stalled. As Degraw said:
“In a technologically advancing society you need fewer and fewer workers so we have to address the issue of providing necessities to everybody[…] I’ve come to realise that we absolutely need a guaranteed income; a guaranteed living income so people can support themselves and buy basic necessities.”
The only reasoning you offer up for your support of the minimum wage is most small businesses cannot afford to pay any more than poverty wages: “What particularly interested me was the salaries for what’s essentially menial work. In most cases they’re on the minimum wage. Any more and they’re [business oweners] out of business.”
As the foundation ‘Closing the Gap’ said in reaction to your belief that small companies simply cannot afford to pay their workers anything above poverty wages,
“It is interesting that those that oppose a living wage always quote the example of “small businesses going broke” or “pay rises equal job losses”. No mention of the large multi-national corporations that export huge profits while expecting the Government to make the difference for their substandard pay. Nor that history shows that “pay rises equal more jobs” as economies thrive.”
The issue is it is not just small businesses refusing to pay a liveable wage so people don’t go hungry and can pay their rent. Massive lucrative companies such a Walmart in America are refusing to pay their workers above minimum wage also. Walmart workers have been protesting and demanding $15 dollars an hour and more stable work hours for over a year now. The six heirs to the Walmart fortune in America have more wealth than 30 percent of the poorest Americans. But these heirs do not support giving their workers 15 dollars an hour – this is not much to ask for really, is it?
The problem is not a lack of education or motivation, it has nothing to do with people on minimum wage needing to work harder to earn the “reward” of a liveable wage – the issue is greed and a (capitalist) system that values profit over people.
The problem is, Sir Bob Jones, you are part of the fucking problem: you are part of the elite 1% that has hoarded most of this world’s capital and helped to create massive wealth inequality. As Russell Brand wrote in his book Revolution, “Oxfam say a bus with eighty-five of the richest people in the world on it would contain more wealth than the collective assets of half the earth’s population – that’s three and a half billion people.”
A liveable wage is not a “reward”, it is a basic human right. People should be able to buy food without foregoing other basic needs like heating in winter or rent. People deserve to live in dignity and have time to spend with their kids and friends, instead of slaving away at some low paid job with little prospect of moving up or ever getting a pay rise.
Maybe what we need is a maximum wage so we can begin to close the gap between the super wealthy like yourself, Bob, and the poor and working poor. This current economic system is unsustainable, and people are rising up all around the world to demand a fairer and more equal world – from the Occupy Movement to the Walmart workers, who are relentless in their protests and demands for fair pay, people are tired of getting a raw deal.
Yesterday, a case manager from WINZ called to tell me that I needed to “imagine what I would do if I did not have welfare”. I replied “Well, I guess if I couldn’t live at home, I would be homeless.” The case manager responded by saying “Now, you see that is a really negative way of seeing it. You would find ways to support yourself.” She went on to tell me I just needed to take a minimum wage job, maybe cleaning or something, and that my expectation of being paid 15 dollars an hour was unrealistic. She informed me that training as a volunteer at Women’s Refuge and writing on politics was not making me any money, so I needed to lower my expectations.
After this case manager’s patronising attempts to get me to “envision life without welfare” I snapped and told her:
You may not be able to agree with me but you know John Key has gutted welfare, which has plunged people further and further into desperate poverty. You know it is nearly impossible to live off minimum wage in Auckland, yet you are telling me to just be happy with a wage that would leave me barely able to afford food. You know Key has slashed funding to education, meaning that the post grad qualification I have in teaching is almost worthless. You know the job market is shit and stagnant, and you know you are hassling over qualified people into unfulfilling and underpaid work and expecting them to thank you. And then you harass and humiliate people who become part of the revolving door at your welfare offices. There is a reason why people go on and off welfare; it is because the [capitalist] system we live in is broken. Not because we are inadequate or lazy. It is depressing working jobs where you are expendable and treated as worthless and paid accordingly.
The case manager then said in a patronising tone that she had just called to confirm an appointment and I was getting upset for no reason, and anyway I just needed to “think more positively about my situation”. This despite the fact that she had at the start of our conversation brought up the fact that I had been on welfare before, and she had pointed out that because I had so many degrees I should have no trouble finding work. The case manager must not have heard me when I had told her:
“Key has slashed funding to education, meaning that post grad qualification I have in teaching is almost worthless.”
Not to mention that preventing violence against women, the sector I desperately want to work in, is under-funded. Anything perceived as ‘women’s work’ always is. Women’s Refuge already relies on 60% of its work force volunteering their time. Without these courageous and dedicated women who work for free, many victims of domestic violence would go unsupported and often have nowhere to go. Without a doubt, lives would be lost without these volunteers.
Under our current National government, as Green MP Jan Logie said at ‘The Women’s Forum’ before the election, “we have seen the erosion of our women’s rights, economic position and pathways out of violence. They have cut the targets for women’s representation, legislated against equal pay, and removed vital protections for victims of sexual and domestic violence.”
It almost feels like a crime to want to work in a job where I might make a difference to my community and country.
Lord knows after my political rant at some random WINZ worker who was not even my personal case manager, my welfare could be cut this week – speaking out is a dangerous game to play. But hey, us benefit bludgers deserve what we get, right? We are just lazy losers and having a benefit cut out of nowhere is the price we pay for sitting on our couches all day playing PlayStation and drinking RTDs. Unemployed people are clearly what is wrong with society – not the super wealthy who horde every last penny creating massive wealth inequality and whose travel habits have a 250 times greater impact on climate change than those living in poverty. We just need to ‘work harder’, be happy with our lot and stop complaining.
Last night I paid a visit to Jill* who used to be an unemployment case manager for WINZ. She predominantly worked with people with disabilities and mental health problems. Jill told me that “every employee at WINZ has to meet a job target. If WINZ employees push people off welfare, they a get bonus and it can be one to two thousand dollars. Keep in mind that WINZ workers are also often low paid workers who have mortgages to pay and families to support.”
When Jill first started working at WINZ she told me that to meet these targets she was supposed to shove (and it was “shove”) her clients into any job. But having worked in the mental health sector previously, Jill was aware that this can set people up to fail and destroy self-confidence. Because of this she found short training schemes that were free and placed people on these educational programs, as she said “to buy her clients time”. She faced enormous pressure “to place people in jobs regardless of their capabilities.” In the end Jill quit after “seriously losing the will to live, sleep and eat” because “working at WINZ was just fucking awful.”
Months after she left, Jill spoke to a case manager still working at the same office and learnt that many of her clients she had managed get into training schemes had found “sustainable work.”
That word “sustainable” has a slippery meaning when uttered by WINZ workers. I have no doubt that Jill, with her moral convictions and refusal to meet her targets at the expense of her clients, managed to get at least some people into work that would be truly sustainable and perhaps meaningful. As Jill told me “I never met one job target the whole entire time I was there.”
But I doubt this can be said for many other WINZ workers as the system they work in demands that they force people into any job no matter how unsuitable or underpaid. When this case manager rang me yesterday she kept telling me I needed to find “sustainable work”. I asked the case manager to define what “sustainable” was supposed to mean in the context of WINZ. She could not tell me. In truth I need not have asked this question. I know, like anyone else who has been on welfare, that it really means: take any job no matter how underpaid or unsuitable and shut up.
Just over a month ago a Russell Tully walked into an Ashburton branch of WINZ, pulled out a gun and shot 3 case managers, killing two of them. Tully had recently been in the paper pleading for help. He had been living in a tent, he was homeless, desperate and mentally very unwell. Nadia Filistin who advocates for beneficiaries said in passionate response the shootings:
The man who murdered Work & Income staff today was homeless, destitute, chronically ill and repeatedly shunned by our politicians and our scarcely remaining “safety net”. Remember that thousands just like him will not murder. They will be quietly loathed, demonised and their collective pain will be depoliticised. Rather, thousands who do not react to the violence and contempt of our Government squeezing and beating people within an inch of their lives with punitive policy, will walk away. Some will commit suicide. Others will die on the streets. Others will carry on crushed by the weight of unjustifiable hardship and social and economic exclusion.
James Baldwin once said: “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”
I am lucky. I was born into privilege: I am a white cis gendered heterosexual woman. I am well educated – I was afforded hardship scholarships and my student loan is small compared to most. I am not homeless. I do not have a mental health diagnosis. I have friends and family that continue to hold me up. There are, without a doubt, many people significantly worse off in Aotearoa than I am.
I am lucky. I am lucky. I am lucky. I will repeat this to myself, every day.
But I think it is worth sharing with you that I have felt seriously suicidal on welfare. I have drunk myself into oblivion and popped sedatives because I felt so hopeless about my situation. I have woken up and wished I had not. I have suffered from eating disorders retriggered when I had no money to buy food on welfare, and sometimes no matter how hard you try to find employment, your best is just not good enough. And that feeling of ‘not being good enough’ is overwhelming.
WINZ compounds these feelings of worthlessness by pushing you into poorly paid, exhausting and often depressing work that in no way reflects your skill set. If you cannot find work you are shamed, harassed and patronised. In the Grey Lynn WINZ branch they will not even let clients use the toilets.
Here’s what is notably not being said to beneficiaries: you are more than your inability to find a job. You deserve to eat food, to have a warm dry roof over your head, to feel loved and to be supported by your government regardless of your economic position. You need to know you are worthy, simply because you were born. “Human beings are worth more than their usefulness to capital” wrote the journalist Laurie Penny. I am so tired of being measured purely by my ability to turn a profit.
*Name has been changed to protect the identity of this person
David Shearer said on TV3’s The Nation this weekend that he appreciated the support Labour’s received from Maori and Pacific communities over the last few elections, but that it was important to again, secure the votes of ordinary white blokes who had deserted Labour, and voted elsewhere. I wonder if he’s talking about the many White blokes that live in his electorate, who decided not to give their Party vote to Labour? If the Labour leadership race is anything to go by, then they must all believe thats the case because all of them are just that… White blokes. To date David Cunliffe, Grant Robertson and Andrew Little have confirmed their desire to sit at the leaders desk. David Parker is expected to announce his intention to stand tomorrow and David Shearer is still sounding out his supporters.
In a recent post, I wrote that the Greens needed to ensure Pasifika representation in their top 15 at the next election to be fair to its broad constituency base. In the same way and in light of being further along the broad church journey, Labour need to exhibit their commitment to both Pasifika voters and its own values of fairness and inclusion, by providing a way for a Pasifika peron in its current caucus to stand for the leadership. I’ve been posting on facebook that my personal preference is for a Mahuta/Sio team to lead the Party, giving a clear message to its very faithful voter support-base, and the NZ public at large, that Labour is in fact the progressive Party it claims to be. Going back just a few elections and the words of former Party President Mike Williams ring true… that the Labour victory of 2005 was courtesy of the south Auckland booths. Its time to reward that loyalty and offer a completely new, fresh, unifying and culturally contemporary group of leaders in Labour.
There seems to be an agreement amongst those currently vying for the leadership that Labour needs to take up more of the middle ground. These White blokes have said that Labour needs to occupy that political space in order to win the votes of their peers, other White blokes. Around the Party I’ve also heard discussions about the socially conservative values of both Pacific communities and working class families. So perhaps there’s some merit to the White blokes appeal and approach that Shearer’s advocating? But Labour must also bring to the fore, a meaningful and culturally appropriate conversation about the role of Pasifika MPs and how they can be encouraged to seek the leadership. Moreover, Labour needs to actively encourage Pasifika MPs to put their names forward for the leadership contest.
I’m fascinated by the ongoing dialogue amongst leadership hopefuls that the Party needs to avoid merely representing lobby groups, feminist interests and the unions. And up until this weekend, Shearer’s been the first to openly admit that we need to win back the middle votes of White blokes. Of further intrigue is that there may be 5 White blokes seeking the leadership of Labour, that could’ve been six had Nash contested. The one thing I admire about Labour’s rules in going thru a Party wide selection for the leader, is that it forces people out of the closet to state their leadership ambitions. But it disturbs me no end, that to date there hasnt been a single Maori or Pasifika MP signal a desire to enter the race. The bottom line is we cant just sit on the sidelines and wait for someone to extend an invitation to us. Its time for Pasifika to stand strong in the mandate of loyal Pasifika votes and put themselves forward for the leadership. Its also high time for the Party to actively encourage that level of participation – because in the end, surely thats what it means to be progressive?
