Latest articles

  • Why have women left the Occupy movement?

    Byron Clark, Coordinating editor of The Spark The Occupy movement began as a movement championing the “99%” united against the 1% of the world’s population that control a disproportionate amount the worlds wealth. A possible flaw in this is that oppression is not as simple as a 99:1 ratio and exists within the working class

    Read more

  • Green Left Weekly: Wharfies beat lockout

    This article by Workers Party member Joel Cosgrove originally appeared in Green Left Weekly. In what has been described as New Zealand’s most high-profile and bitter industrial dispute since the early 1990s, waterside workers went back to work, after a four-week strike. Auckland’s port company agreed to end its lockout of 235 workers on March

    Read more

  • Meat industry dispute reveals need to re-organise entire working class on militant basis

    By writers for The Spark The livelihoods of thousands of working class people in New Zealand are being attacked by Talleys Group Ltd, a New Zealand-based private company which owns AFFCO meat-processing plants and has locked out freezing workers throughout the North Island. Background As one of the largest meat operations in New Zealand, Talleys

    Read more

  • Green Left Weekly: New Zealand workers fight casualisation

    This article, by Workers Party member Joel Cosgrove, originally appeared in Green Left Weekly. A number of high-profile industrial struggles are unfolding in New Zealand. About 1500 aged care workers, members of the Service and Food Workers Union, are taking part in rolling strikes against a 1% pay rise offer. About 750 meat workers have

    Read more

  • Green Left Weekly: Atrocity in Afghanistan fuels opposition to occupation

    This article, by Tony Iltis, originally appeared on Green Left Weekly and will be republished in the April Spark. For the US military and the pro-war Western corporate media, the March 11 slaughter of 16 civilians, nine of them children, as they slept in their homes in the villages of Alkozai and Najeeban in Panjwai

    Read more

  • Zizek: What to make of the political Elvis (Wellington event)

    “[Zizek uses] a dizzying array of wildly entertaining and often quite maddening rhetorical strategies are deployed in order to beguile, browbeat, dumbfound, dazzle, confuse, mislead, overwhelm, and generally subdue the reader into acceptance.” Edward R. O’Neill Slavoj Zizek is one of the worlds most well-known and controversial philosophers. As a Marxist theoretical thinker, he refuses

    Read more

  • “Illegal” solidarity action necessary to challenge employer offensive

    Ian Anderson “Blacking,” or black-listing of cargo, has a long and proud history among wharfies. In 1998 during the Australian Patricks dispute, when the Australian government in concert with private contractors launched an offensive to casualise Australian ports, wharfies in Auckland black-listed a ship loaded by scab labour. This international solidarity was a key factor

    Read more

  • Solidarity around the country

    Kelly Pope Support for the striking Ports of Auckland workers has been evident in Christchurch and across the country this last month. On the 7th of March port workers in Lyttelton refused to unload the ship the Lisa Schulte which had been worked on by non-union workers in Auckland, following similar action by Wellington and

    Read more

  • Spark Discussion Group: a space for radical ideas

    5pm, Mondays SU219 Student Union Building Victoria University of Wellington

    Read more

  • Report from the picket line

    Mike Kay Morale on the picket line remained strong on 20 March, despite the wet and wild weather. “We work out in this weather 24/7, so it’s no problem for us,” explained one wharfie. Another striker described how important the public support has been for them: “We had runners doing Round the Bays come past

    Read more