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Mike Walker and Paul Hopkinson
The Workers Party’s ongoing solidarity campaign with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is a concrete campaign through which progressive New Zealanders can support the people of Palestine and participate in the struggle against imperialism. Imperialist countries continue to seek to dominate resources in the developing world, extracting super profits at the expense of people. Continue reading “PFLP campaign update”
Come along to this seminar presented by the Workers Party on three outstanding revolutionary figures: Che Guevara, one of the central leaders of the Cuban revolution, who also later fought in the Congo and Bolivia; George Habash, one of the founders of radical trade unions in the Arab world and the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Seamus Costello, a legendary leader of the struggle for Irish national liberation, from his teens in the 1950s until his murder in 1977.
2-6 PM, Saturday the 10th
WEA, 59 Gloucester St (map)
There will be plenty of time for discussion after each presentation; we’ll wrap up with a meal and movie at 5pm.
Continue reading “Christchurch Event: Revolutionary Leaders”
Victoria University management has repeatedly refused to answer the various charges laid against it by Workers Party activists Heleyni Pratley and Joel Cosgrove in response to the management imposing a two-year trespass order on them.
“This draconian trespass order was imposed on us for the crime of participating in a protest against substantial fee rises,” say Pratley, a former student exec member, and Cosgrove, last year’s student president.
Two students have also been charged with serious misconduct for participating in the protest, at which a few eggs were thrown at university councillors.
“Protesters annoy Vic; they get in the way of its smooth business operation, that’s why they put any protesters in a box guarded by security guards,” say Pratley and Cosgrove.
“Every year Victoria University receives hundreds of millions of public funds and claims to be the critic and conscience of society as well as the focus of a wider community. Yet when challenged on their behaviour they ban and attempt to silence anyone who disrupts their corporatist agenda. They’ve trespassed us because VUW cannot stand being called to account. Now they’re setting up kangaroo courts to punish the students who participated.
“The university is intentionally refusing to answer any questions about their actions, to silence any discussion, because what they did is indefensible and they know it,” say the pair.
An anti-war protest crashed Associate Minister of Defence Heather Roy’s consultation meeting over the new defence policy in Upper Hutt yesterday. Four women, two of them Workers Party members, interrupted Heather Roy’s speech to demand an end to New Zealand’s involvement in Afghanistan.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkccWU2Z5tg]
Due to popular demand the Workers Party will be holding another screening of the documentry ‘Lelia Khaled: Hijacker’ about the “poster girl of Palestinian liberation.”
‘Resistance is ot Terrorism’ T-shirts will available for $30 with all profits being donated to the PFLP.
Time: 7:00pm, Monday the 28th of September
Location: Workers Educational Association (WEA) 59 Gloucester St (map)
Workers Party activists Heleyni Pratley and Joel Cosgrove have been trespassed from Victoria University for two years for participating in a student protest against University fee rises of over 90%.
Joel was involved in the throwing of a solitary egg which did not hit anyone. Heleyni threw nothing and instead stood prominently holding a Workers Party banner calling for `free education from kindergarten to PhD’. They and other activists cleaned up the eggshells before leaving.
Let us be very clear. Joel has been trespassed for throwing an egg which he cleaned up afterwards. Heleyni has been trespassed for nothing other than speaking her mind. She is being publicly attacked by the university for exercising her democratic right to protest and express free speech. She is being punished to make an example to anybody else, student or otherwise, who is considering standing up to university injustice.
There is a clear pattern emerging of the University’s disregard for any pretence of democracy or free speech on campus. Earlier this year Workers Party activist Ian Anderson was expelled for filming an anti-war protest. A number of other Workers Party activists have already been targeted and attacked by the university.
“In this case as in others it is clear that the University is targeting the people it sees as the leading activists organising against their slash and burn agenda,” says Mr. Cosgrove.
“The University is attempting to silence debate by expelling, trespassing and intimidating anyone it disagrees with,” he adds.
Joel was trespassed over the phone by a man named Darryl, who refused to give his last name or any way of verifying his statement.
Earlier that day Heleyni was met at her door by two men, who demanded to know where Joel was. On being asked to leave, they attempted to physically force their way into the property, against her repeated requests for them to leave, causing her to feel so threatened that she felt she had to slam the door shut and lock it to protect herself from the threat of violence. While this was happening they were yelling through the door in an abusive, aggressive manner that as she was Joel’s girlfriend she was also trespassed. Escaping in a friends car she was shadowed for sometime by the two men who followed her in a large, black SUV.
“I didn’t know who they were, or why they were harassing me, I should not be harassed and intimidated for standing up for what I believe in,” says Ms Pratley.
The Workers Party demands the immediate lifting of all trespasses by Victoria University and a full apology to Heleyni Pratley for the distress caused by their utterly inappropriate actions.
Download this leaflet to distribute at your local picket line
The Workers Party salutes the stand that Telecom line engineers have taken in resisting the bosses’ drive to force you into “Dependent Contractor” status. Where this model has been applied in other industries – notably construction – the result has been that pay and conditions have become severely degraded for all workers.
Many of the strikes in this dispute have been “wildcats” – and all the more effective as a result. It tells you something about who the law favours that the redundancy notices the employer issued were perfectly legal, but engineers had to take action in defiance of the law. The vicious spirit of the 1990s Employment Contracts Act lives on, albeit in the slightly watered down version of the Employment Relations Act. Official or unofficial, effective industrial action is what counts, and the majority of public opinion will be on your side if the message gets out that this is a fight for the whole of the working class.
It was the Labour Party that began the job of privatising Telecom in 1987, and it was National that finished it. We then had nine years of Labour-led government which did nothing to bring Telecom back into public ownership. It’s obvious that utilities like Telecom should be under the democratic control of workers and consumers rather than $5 million men like Reynolds. But to win that will mean a major confrontation with the government. With thousands of other workers facing the threat of redundancy, we have plenty of potential allies.
From the start, the strategy of the employer has been to divide and conquer. Bosses had a go at putting immense pressure on engineers on Work Permits to sign up as Dependent Contractors, because their legal status is tied to their job. This brutally illustrates how immigration controls are nothing more than another weapon in the bosses’ arsenal; they won’t hesitate to use the threat of deportation to bully migrant workers. For this reason, the Workers Party supports Open Borders as the way forward to unite the workers of all countries. To the extent that the bosses’ plans have failed, and migrant workers have joined the picket lines, we can’t miss the boost they provide – both in numbers and in decibels!
Workers fighting redundancies overseas have been resorting to more radical tactics. Since the start of the global downturn factory sit-ins have made a comeback. Faced with the prospect of joining the dole queue, workers have occupied Vestas wind turbines on the Isle of Wight, Ford’s Visteon plants in Belfast and London, SsangYong motors in Korea and Waterford Crystal and Thomas Cook in Ireland. Even where such tactics didn’t result in outright victory for the workers, they ended up increasing the number of jobs saved and winning better redundancy packages.
The current struggle with Telecom has the potential to affect every worker in New Zealand. We can’t treat it just like a normal industrial dispute. Line engineers need to start discussing new tactics to escalate the action and turn the tables on the bosses.
What is Marxism?
5:30pm, October 2nd
Crossways, 6 Roxburgh St
Mt Victoria
What would Wellington look like under socialism?
7pm, 22nd October
New Crossways, 6 Roxburgh St
Das Kapital study
Wednesdays 5-7pm
Collins Room
Student Union Building
Victoria University
Mt Victoria
To be delivered on Monday the 7th of September, Meeting Room Two at Victoria University as part of ‘Religion Week’
Welcome to the Workers Party contribution to Victoria religion week!
We’re not starting this meeting off with a prayer, but before you go we will be passing a plate and taking up a collection.
Some of you here today might be hopefully expecting a communist speaker to scornfully dismiss religion in five words as “ the opium of the people” so we can all get away off to the pub nice and early.
I’m not the best person to do that for you. My initial experience of religion was very positive. I was brought up in a comfortable middle class home with a quaint little Anglican church four minutes walk around the corner. When you got there and walked inside, it was a cool dark soothing place, buttressed by reassuringly strong wooden beams. At the end of the building, where your eyes naturally looked up towards, the sun lit up a beautiful red and gold stained glass window behind the altar. The local vicar of my childhood was a dignified Yorkshireman who’d been awarded the Military Cross for some act of valour. He delivered amusing sermons, several of which I still remember. The basic message was very comforting. You worked away all your life and behaved yourself and then, when you finally got very old and tired, you’d be taken up to heaven to be looked after for ever and ever. It seemed like a pretty good deal. So on Sunday we dressed in our best and went to church and thought uplifting thoughts and then came home to have the best meal of the week, a huge satisfying roast dinner. All very peaceful, no one got hurt or killed except the hogget. So you might say, I got dealt about as good a hand as you get in the religious department.
Continue reading “Religion: The Sigh of the Oppressed Creature”
