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A vision of workers’ freedom

(Workers Party address to Labour Day left of Labour election forum in Wellington)

It’s a nice change to be at a meeting where the right is excluded instead of the left. This year many Wellington election meetings only invited candidates holding parliamentary seats. The New Zealand Council of Trade unions hosted such a meeting. When I complained about being excluded, while National and ACT were given a platform, the CTU organiser emailed back “You’ll have to ask Helen Kelly.” CTU president Helen Kelly didn’t have the courtesy to reply. Instead, the next email in my box was an urgent notice from the CTU organiser, asking me to support a union picket downtown. I wonder if he sent the same appeal to his National and ACT guests.

That small incident is a reminder that political action takes place outside parliament as well as inside. The Workers Party think struggle outside parliament is more important, but we see elections as a chance to fight for our ideas.

OK, I want to tell you what we stand for and how we’re trying to go about it.

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Clark rewrites history to conceal Labour started the Dawn Raids in the ’70s

Workers Party media release

“Remember the National Party initiated dawn raids in the 1970s” Ms Clark told reporters on the election campaign trail in South Auckland on 23 October.

“Either Ms Clark is ignorant of the facts or she is knowingly concealing the truth” says Daphna Whitmore, Workers Party candidate for Manukau East. “Labour was in government from 1972 until 1975, and the dawn raids on Pacific Islanders began in 1974”.

A quick check of the Samoan history section of the Encyclopedia of NZ confirms that indeed Labour began the raids nearly two years before National came to office.

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Health workers on strike

Workers at Counties Manakau District Health Board Sterile Supply Unit are taking strike action from 22 to 24 October 2008. Their collective agreement expired on 1 July 2007, and they are still waiting for a decent offer from the employer. The staff have rejected the Health Board’s offer on the basis of: the term of the agreement, their refusal to pay back pay and the failure to include a fifth week of annual leave.

The workers, who are members of the Northern Amalgamated Workers Union held a high spirited picket outside the DHB’s headquarters on the first day of action. The constant toots of support from South Auckland drivers was near-deafening, so hopefully the bosses over the road have got the message.

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Don Franks’ address to election meeting at St Anne’s Northland-Wilton Anglican Parish 21/10 /08

Good evening and thanks for inviting the Workers Party to speak at this parish.

The parish I originate from myself is St Albans in Eastbourne. That was quite a long time ago and for the last 40 years I’ve been resident and working in Wellington.

Every election we hear some politicians claiming to uphold and defend Christian values.

The party I belong to, the Workers Party, makes no such claim, and we see religion as a private affair. However, as a former Sunday school pupil from St Alban’s parish, I’m sometimes drawn to wonder how the carpenter of Nazareth might have related to Workers Party policies.

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Book review: The Other Hand by Chris Cleave (Sceptre)

“Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl,” opines the protagonist of The Other Hand. The pound coin has many advantages, not least of which is its effortless mobility:

“A girl like me gets stopped at immigration, but a pound can leap the turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men with their uniform caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi. Where to, sir? Western civilisation, my good man, and make it snappy.”

Little Bee is a Nigerian girl fleeing men armed with machetes and men armed with official powers. Sarah is a suburban career woman juggling a young son who refuses to take off his Batman suit with an extramarital affair with a Home Office functionary, Lawrence. Their lives are thrown together in an unlikely way, forcing them to confront themselves and the society they live in.

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Workers should be running the country

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1427625006007341758&hl=en]
Sanitarios Maracay, a Venezuelan factory under workers control, holds an assembly. Topics covered include the previous boss’s acts of sabotage, logistics of workers control, and socialism of the 21st century.