The Workplace – FightBack

Recession and Redundancy

October 11, 2009 by Admin

The Spark October 2009
John Edmundson

As the recession has bitten, redundancies have risen and unemployment figures have begun to climb, Labour’s Darien Fenton has had her Private Member’s Bill drawn from the ballot. The Bill would enforce a minimum redundancy payout on all employers, starting at four weeks pay after one year of employment. The Labour Party of course is the party that introduced the Employment Relations Act, which does not even provide a definition of the word redundancy, let alone provide significant protection for workers. New Zealand workers actually have no legal right to redundancy compensation and very few have provision for it in their contracts.

Workers at LWR’s Wairarapa sites who were made redundant earlier this year have been told that they are unlikely to receive any more than seventy percent of their entitlement in redundancy and holiday pay. Approximately eighty percent of staff with written employment agreements (contracts) have no redundancy provisions at all according to a Massey University survey commissioned for the Department of Labour’s Restructuring and Redundancy Public Advisory Group. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Economics, Fighting Redundancies

Telecom workers: We’re right behind you!

September 21, 2009 by Byron

Download this leaflet to distribute at your local picket line

Enough Greedy Tricks

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.

Filed Under: Workers in Struggle Tagged With: telecom

Striking Telecom Line Engineers picket Exchanges in North Shore City

September 8, 2009 by Byron

Filed Under: Workers in Struggle

Unemployed again – A main feature of capitalism

September 3, 2009 by Admin

Jared Phillips

As a result of the recession, the National-led government has been made to face rising unemployment. Its response has been to attempt to offset unemployment with redundancy initiatives and job creation initiatives. The job creation initiatives are partly corporate welfare (if not corporate welfare, then company welfare) and partly based on the provision of freely trained skilled or semi-skilled labour to firms.

Investment into the different initiatives varies. However, the proportions of all such initiatives can only remain completely at odds with rising joblessness.

From a working class perspective, the response to unemployment must be made as a response against the capitalist system. This means recognising that unemployment is an inherent and increasingly (in the long-term) problematic aspect of capitalism. It also means recognising that during an economic downturn the demands and actions needed to significantly alleviate the rate of unemployment and the conditions of the unemployed must take an anti-capitalist form.

A sharp rise in unemployment

In August, Statistics New Zealand reported that there had been a 38.5 percent increase in joblessness between June 2008 and June 2009, and that the number of jobless people had increased in that period to 236,100.

It is commonly acknowledged that in order to produce a more favourable spin, parties in government emphasise the `Unemployed’ statistics from the Household Labour Force Survey, which are significantly lower than `Jobless’ figures from the same survey. A survey participant may be deemed to be ‘not seeking work’ through failure to check job advertisements. So the Jobless category is more relevant in understanding the extent of unemployment. Within the Jobless category is the unemployed category which had increased by 48,000 to a total of 138,000 in the year to June 2009. Also comprising the Jobless category are those defined as being without jobs because they are seeking work but are not currently available, and those who are `discouraged’ (generally this means long-term unemployed). In June these categories amounted to 98,100 of the jobless. The number of ‘discouraged workers’ had more than doubled on the previous year.

The category of work that declined most dramatically was women’s full-time employment, meaning women’s employment was effected disproportionately. While the report showed a general decline in full-time employment, it also showed an increase in the part-time employment category which was up by 7,000 positions in the June 2009 quarter.

The government’s initiatives

Bourgeois democratic governments, whilst functioning fundamentally as institutions of service to the ruling class, also seek to maintain social peace. With this comes the requirement to try and ensure that people have work.

The government’s concrete response to the rise in unemployment has consisted of initiatives – very public relations driven initiatives -for managing both job losses and redeployment throughout the economic downturn. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Fighting Redundancies

Union day of protest

August 24, 2009 by Admin

Over 100 workers rallied in Auckland at 7.30am to protest Telecom’s plans to force workers to become dependent contractors.

Representatives from several other unions, including Unite, the Amalgamated Workers Union, the NDU and Service and Food Workers Union joined the picket line.