Report by Matt Jones, reprinted from Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement (AWSM).

Fightback Wellington branch will hold a public forum on fighting zero-hour contracts and poverty wages on Sunday the 29th of March.

Over 50 people attended a public meeting held in Christchurch/Otautahi on the 2nd March to hear from workers and union organisers about the brutal reality of zero hour contracts. Chaired by Jared Phillips of the Dairy Workers Union and introduced by Ben Peterson Organiser of Unite Union we were treated to the stories of Unite Union member Rose Williams from the Wendy’s Restaurant chain and long standing Maritime Union delegate Mike Will.

Ben told us that in 2014 Unite Union asked their members what their life in the workplace was like. Over one thousand responded and the results surprised many. They discovered that the average hours worked was 25 hours at the minimum wage and more than half of the respondents needed 35 hours or more to meet their living costs. Those that were getting more than 40 hours per week were forced to drop their overtime allowance. Overtime allowances kick in when someone works more than 40 hours per week, they should receive their hourly rate plus a further half for every additional hour they work. In reality they are by being told to sign a waiver, or at times by not giving their consent at all, to allow the company to pay them at their ordinary rate. Unite had spent the previous two years fighting for a living wage, forcing the issue onto the front pages, what the survey results were telling the union was that without hours to work, the rate of pay arguably became a secondary issue.

The hours are not scarce in the industries Unite represent. Fast food, retail, hotels, cinema’s and security all suffer from incredibly high turnover rates. Fast food for example churns through 70 to 80% of its workforce on an annual basis alone. Why do the bosses continue to hire if their existing workforce are clambering for more hours? Power, that’s the only possible conclusion – hiring new workers requires advertising, interviews, inductions, training, administration and supplying clothing and equipment, in short it’s not a cheap process. Keeping your work force desperate and fearing to cause a stir by requesting a day off, taking sick days, demanding your holiday entitlement or saying no when you’re called to work with less than thirty minutes notice is exactly how these multi national corporates and franchise operators are running their businesses.

Rose Williams addressed the crowd telling her story of the recent strike held at her store. Wendy’s are in negotiations with Unite Union who took the company by surprise when their only South Island store took to the streets. She described how she was originally taken on as a full time worker, working more than fifty hours a week sixteen months ago. She is now down to 26 and only gets five days a week by working both Saturday and Sunday while having with no consecutive days off. When she works public holidays there is no day in lieu. There is no standard shift and as a result workplace bullying is rife, managers are literally using the rosters as disciplinary tools, baiting workers with the very means of survival.

Mike Will told us of his experiences with the local activist community during the past few years. He spent day and night at the Christchurch Occupy site in Hagley Park and witnessed the possibility of community organizing and direct democracy. He thanked the individual anarchists that were at the heart of the local chapter of Occupy and acknowledged the hard efforts that many from our scene put in during the emergency period of the Canterbury earthquakes. Many ears picked up at his mention of the short lived Otautahi Solidarity Network that was inspired by the Seattle Solidarity Network.

Mike’s words inspired figures from the union movement including Dave Bristow of First Union to stand up and hint heavily that there were early talks of a new way of organising within their union – something the writer of this article will be following up discussions in the near future.

The reality is the businesses that profit from zero hour contracts and paying minimum wage are taking the piss out of their workforce on several levels. Workplace bullying, insecurity and fear is topped off by a gut wrenching weekly phone call to the IRD to declare the inconsistent hours and irregular earnings worked in order to make ends meet. The multinationals make a killing by paying poverty wages and the taxpayer tops up the shortfall. TV3’s Campbell Live made the connection between zero hour contracts and kids turning up to schools without breakfast, lunch or basics such as footwear on the same night as the public meeting.

The floor was opened for people to ask questions and speak their mind. Networking and sharing resources was the theme of the night and the momentum will continue to build. The forum also discussed the idea of establishing a progressive network and regular meeting to discuss local progressive ideas and campaigns. The first Monday of every month at the WEA, 7pm will be the place to hear of the day’s issues and be inspired that you’re not alone when thinking it’s all on its head and the world’s gone mad – the question is, what are we gonna do about it?!

Three women coined the Black Lives Matter slogan.

Fightback is a socialist-feminist organisation.

Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist and writer based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories. She has been involved in community-based grassroots migrant justice, feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous solidarity, anti-capitalist, Palestinian liberation, and anti-imperialist movements for over a decade. This piece on International Women’s Day is reprinted from her column, “Exception to the Rule,” on rabble.ca

Every morning I read my one-year-old daughter a fabulous children’s alphabet book. When we get to the letter F, it goes “F is for Feminist, Fairness in our Pay.” Of course a children’s book is limited in its ability to express nuanced layers of analysis, but I often wonder about how relevant this articulation of a particular version of feminism will be for her.

Dominant liberal feminism has typically sought equal and fair rights for women. Even subsequent waves that brought greater representation of diverse women and trans people within these same frameworks of feminism have rarely altered the premise of “equality” as the primary organizing force of feminism, thus leaving the relationship of heteropatriarchy to other social, economic and political structures of power largely unquestioned. Patriarchy is not secondary to capitalism and imperialism; the very foundations of capitalism, colonialism and state violence are structured in conjunctionwith and through patriarchy. Marginalized women, therefore, not only endure gendered violence at higher rates, we also experience it qualitatively differently.

Feminism: Friend or foe of the state?

The past decade has seen a surge of debate on feminist anti-violence strategies that rely on the state. Anti-violence strategies, such as tougher sentencing laws and increased policing, have been criticized for emboldening criminalization that already disproportionately targets communities of colour, poor communities, and trans folks.

It is clear that the state is not interested in protecting women who defend themselves against heteropatriarchal and transphobic violence, as evidenced most recently in the cases of Marissa Alexander and CeCe McDonald, both Black women who were incarcerated for defending themselves against partner violence and transphobic violence, respectively. A fact sheet on battered women in U.S. prisons details that as many as 90 per cent of the women in jail today for killing men were battered by those men.

Battered women in prison are part of a broader trend of incarcerating Indigenous and Black women, women who are street-involved, sex workers, trans women, and migrant women. The incarceration of Black women in the U.S increased by 828 per cent over five years. In Canada, the representation of Indigenous women in prison has increased by nearly 90 per cent over the past decade. For migrant and non-status women, reporting sexual abuse often leads to deportation, and Canada has recently introduced a policy of conditional permanent residency that further entrenches the vulnerability of migrant women. This criminalization, incarceration and deportation of women and trans people is gender violence perpetrated by the state.

Feminism: A challenge to or in the service of imperialism?

At the global level, Western feminism has been complicit in racialized empire. Despite the fact that military occupations wreak havoc in the lives of women and children and the documentation of rape as a primary tool of war, many feminist organizations support imperialist interventions. From earlier “yellow peril” myths that warned of migrant Asian men ensnaring white women with opium to the more contemporary justifications of the occupation of Afghanistan as a mission to liberate Muslim women, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak portrays the cheerleading of civilizing crusades masked as feminist solidarity as “white men saving brown women from brown men.”

Liberal feminism is a handmaiden to cultural imperialism, essentializing communities of colour as innately barbaric. Women and queers are supposedly devoid of any agency — forced to veil, subjected to honour killings, coerced into arranged marriages. In the post-9/11 context, cultural imperialism is evident in debates about gender and Islam that force a singular feminism — secular, sexually expressive, and liberal autonomist — on women and queers of colour. Laws banning the niqab, for example, target Muslim women for public scrutiny, hate crimes, and state surveillance. Writing about the architecture of feminisms in the service of imperialism, Leila Ahmed charges, “Whether in the hands of patriarchal men or feminists, the ideas of western feminism essentially functioned to morally justify the attack on native societies and to support the notion of the comprehensive superiority of Europe.”

Colonial gendered violence: Land is Life

Given that Indigenous women suffer the highest rates of sexual violence, combatting gender violence requires a commitment to dismantling settler-colonialism. Nearly 1,200 Indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing in Canada over the past 30 years. As renowned Indigenous feminist Lee Maracle writes, “It is not simply about ‘ending violence,’ the violation is the colonial order.”

Gendered violence is embedded within settler-colonialism: in racist and heteropatriarchal laws such as the Indian Act, in policies of child apprehension, in the practices of locking up Indigenous women and youth at alarming rates, and in the genocidal attempts to annihilate Indigenous laws through the very bodies of Indigenous women, girls, trans and two-spirit people that embody and enact Indigenous sovereignty. In particular, the systemic ideology that upholds the colonial entitlement to and pillage of Indigenous lands is furthered by the colonial construction of Indigenous women as sexually available. As a Manitoba judge stated during the inquiry into the death of 19-year-old Helen Betty Osborne: “the men who abducted Osborne believed that young aboriginal women were objects with no human value beyond sexual gratification.”

Settler-colonialism is founded on the violences of lack of free, prior and informed consent: the “rape-ability” of Indigenous women’s bodies is intricately connected to the “rape-ability,” theft, and exploitation of Indigenous lands.

Climbing up the ladder on migrant women’s backs

A frequently touted success of the liberal feminist movement has been the entry of women into the paid workforce. However, migrant women performing domestic labour have actually facilitated the entry of these women into the wage economy.

In Canada, the Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP) brings predominately Filipina migrant workers to work as domestic workers for middle-class and rich households. Given their temporary status, they are a vulnerable workforce and constantly subjected to labour and human rights violations including unpaid or excessive work hours, additional job responsibilities, confiscation of travel documents, disrespect of their privacy, and sexual assault. As one migrant domestic worker remarks, “We know that, under the LCP, we are like modern slaves who have to wait for at least two years to get our freedom.” Freedom for some women is, therefore, reliant on the unfree indentured labour of other women.

Reproductive justice and emotional labour: Beyond the wage economy

Women are more likely to be stratified into low-wage work, particularly sectors such as retail, social services, janitorial, food service, clerical work, teaching, child care, domestic work, and nursing. These sectors are undervalued and underpaid precisely because they mirror (and reproduce) the gendered division of labour that typically occurs within the home. As Andrea Smith writes, “Patriarchy is the logic that naturalizes social hierarchy.”

Capitalism not only creates the conditions for wage theft and precarious labour but — through patriarchy as a mutually reinforcing process — it also defines what can even be characterized as labour and ties human worth to wage-labour productivity.

Single mothers become marginalized as “unemployed” and “uncontributing” when they are in fact, as scholar Silvia Frederici observes, reproducing labour power as a key source of capitalist accumulation. Because reproductive labour has been naturalized as women’s unpaid work, it has provided an immense subsidy to capitalism. According to figures by economist Raj Patel inThe Value of Nothing, women’s unpaid work is estimated at $11-$15 trillion, which is more than half the world’s entire economic output!

Reproductive justice movements, therefore, challenge the assumption that the only valuable labour is that which can be commodified and sold on the market. The greatest transformative potentials of feminism lie in the valuing of relational work that sustains our communities and manifests our responsibilities to each other: care work, land stewardship, and emotional labour. By rejecting the dominant model of competition, domination, commodification, and isolation, these forms of labour inherently challenge male, cisgendered, ableist and capitalist supremacy.

Multitude of feminisms

Rather than a feminism that strengthens racism, imperialism, and economic subjugation, feminism is most relevant in its subversion of the state, capital interests, gendered relations, and the policing of gender and sexual binaries. By challenging the ideologies of superiority and uniformity that underlie the dominant liberal framing of feminism, embracing a multitude of feminisms would diversify our understandings of how coercion and oppression is experienced, as well as resisted. It is no coincidence that the Idle No More movement is credited to four women, that three Black women founded the Black Lives Matter project, and that women in Kobane and Chiapas and Palestine and Chhattisgarh are leading those struggles for liberation.

Some days I alter my reading of Avnika’s alphabet book to “F is for Feminists, Freedom Fighters Against All Violence.”

First in a series of monthly left forums organised by Fightback.

Heleyni Pratley (Unite Union organiser) speaks on the international struggle for secure hours and living wages.

2pm, Sunday March 29th
17 Tory St, Wellington
[Facebook event]