From The Spark July 2005
Many people recognise that National is no friend of the workers, but should workers and unionists be called on to vote for Labour? They have been in government for the past six years but are workers better off as a result? Check the record:
Union rights
- Labour repealed the Employment Contracts Act, but replaced it with the Employment Relations Act. The new law maintained nearly all the restrictions and penalties for striking that National introduced. And if that wasn’t bad enough, it increased restrictions; now strike notices have to be issued 60 days before action, up from 40 days.
- Under Labour solidarity striking – even by members of the same union – can be punished by fines and or imprisonment.
- Under Labour union membership has not recovered from the decline in the 1990s (around 80 percent of workers are not in unions) and collective employment contracts have actually dropped from 373,100 in 1999 to 329,300 in 2004.
- Labour has set the adult minimum wage at $9.50 an hour – a poverty level income and just 47 percent of the average wage. Labour retain the injustice of lower rates for workers 16 to 18 and provide no minimum wages protection for workers under 16, who can be paid whatever the bosses like.
- Annual leave is still just three weeks a year for most workers, and the promised fourth week is still a long way off as Labour has said it will not bring it in until 2007. Promises in the never-never are offered to workers under Labour.
Rich-poor gap
- The gap between rich and poor has grown. The number of food parcels being distributed has doubled since 1998, while the people on the Rich List have had a 300 percent increase in their wealth. Between 2002 and 2004 the rise in wealth of the super-rich was the greatest since the Rich List started in 1986.
- One in five children live in poverty in New Zealand but child poverty is largely neglected while Labour brags about its budget surpluses.
- Inadequate housing and overcrowding is still rife and contributed to the deadly menigitis epidemic, which then spread to the better off communities. With few new state houses being built the housing problem remains.
Donations from the rich
- Labour is a capitalist party whose members are mostly from the middle class. Its president Mike Williams is a business man, like his predecessors Bob Harvey and millionaire Michael Hirschfeld.
- In 2002 Labour got $1.6 million in donations for it election campaign, more than National. Donations from the rich to speak volumes about what sort of party Labour is.
Attacking beneficiaries
- Labour has maintained National’s benefit cuts of 1991 and continued the policy of attacking beneficiaries. In 2004 it launched “Jobs Jolt” and declared 259 towns no-go areas for the unemployed.
Civil liberties
- Algerian refuge, Ahmed Zaoui, was imprisoned without trial for two years and held in solitary confinement for 10 months under the orders of this government. Other refugees have been locked up for months without charges being laid under Labour’s draconian terror laws.
- Helen Clark sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq and still has SAS forces fighting alongside the US and British soldiers in Afghanistan.
Taxing the poor
- The fourth Labour government introduced GST, a tax on the poor. Not only has Labour kept GST it has increased other indirect taxes on alcohol, tobacco, petrol and drivers’ licence fees.
The evidence shows that Labour and its coalition partners are not “worker friendly”. Like National and the other parliamentary parties they govern on behalf of the elites. We can expect nothing else from capitalist parties. Fundamentally there’s little difference between any of them.
The rights and benefits that do exist have come from workers’ struggles and are concessions forced out of the rulers. For instance, it was in the 1960s and 70s that workers won through strike action the third week’s holiday, paid sick leave, redundancy agreements and holidays paid at average rates of pay.
The Anti-Capitalist Alliance is standing candidates in some seats in the main cities. One of our key messages is that whether National or Labour heads the next government it is only through workers’ own collective struggle that our rights can be defended and extended.
