Zimbabwe: Revolutionary Workers Group statement on Dismissal of Nurses

GOVERNMENT HANDS OFF NURSES! REINSTATE ALL FIRED NURSES NOW! ALL GOVERNMENT WORKERS STRIKE! FORWARD TO A GENERAL STRIKE!

Yesterday, the eve of the independence celebrations, the government through the Vice President and former army general announced the dismissal of all striking nurses. In an opaque statement the government tried to shift the blame to the workers who are justly and legally fighting for their rights. The main reason for the dismissal was that the government view the action as political hence the measures.

The nurses have been on strike for about a week now demanding better working conditions, payment of overdue allowances and a review of their salaries and all legal procedures relating to the strike were followed. The real reason for the dismissal is to instill fear in other civil servants especially teachers who are set to strike when schools open on May. In essence this is the logic of class warfare which must be met with equal force.

The post Mugabe military based coup government is intent on attacking workers to lay the basis for renewed investor confidence and protection of the interests of capitalists. They want to send a clear message that indeed Zimbabwe is open for business and they can guarantee massive profits for their masters. In contrast to the workers and poor masses living from hand to mouth, the bosses and their surrogates are living large and can afford to charter planes for routine medical checkups whilst the masses die due to lack of medicine, proper facilities and money.

The Revolutionary Workers Group of Zimbabwe (RWG-Z) salutes the gallant nurses who are fighting a class war on behalf of other workers in government and generally against austerity and slave conditions. We salute the nurses union for remaining resolute in the face of such attacks and also support the call by the main trade union federation for a general strike. The nurses must be defended. We call on all nurses not to bow down to this intimidation and instead intensify the strike. Workers should support the picket lines to stop scab labour. All government workers must down tools in support of the nurses and send a clear message to the government. A general strike is now a must if the working class is to survive.

We further call for:

• The immediate and unconditional reinstatement of all dismissed nurses!
• An all-out strike and solidarity action to defeat the government!
• Payment of all outstanding allowances and timely payment of allowances!
• The opening of all books of the medical services for public view!
• A living Wage! Workers fight for a living wage and better working conditions through mass action controlled by ordinary workers!
• Against the ever rising prices and inflation we demand a sliding scale of wages!
• Against unemployment and destitution we demand a sliding scale of working hours to provide decent jobs for all through massive public works programs to provide housing, education and medical care for all!
• Organise the unorganised! Form unions of the unemployed as fully affiliated unions!
• Workers take back your unions!
• Militant workers to form class struggle caucuses in the unions to fight for this program!
• The government must stop the attack on the vendors!
• Workers to form strike committees to lead the resistance to the growing attacks on the wages and working conditions of the poor and the livelihood of the majority poor!
• Workers to form workers defence guards for defence against state violence!
• A national strike committee to organise and plan for a general strike!
• For a workers government on the basis of the armed people to implement decisions that benefit the workers and the poor!
• Nationalisation of all companies without indemnification to the big shareholders under workers control!
• Land to be distributed to all poor peasants together with a state bank to provide inputs to all small farmers!
• A workers state that defends workers, peasants and the poor masses against the local and foreign capitalists!
• An African socialist revolution as part of the international revolution that alone can guarantee a better life for all!
• A new WORLD PARTY of socialist revolution based on the TRANSITIONAL PROGRAM of 1938 to lead the revolution to end capitalism and open the road to socialism!

Revolutionary Workers Group of Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe section of the Liaison Committee of Communists)
18 April 2018
Harare

UBI - magical thinking in the age of capitalism

 

As the New Zealand Labour Party ponders the 'Future of Work', the discussion focuses on the Universal Basic Income (UBI) to "guarantee income security and dignity". This is another attempt to rewrite Labour's historic mission to convince workers that it knows best what workers want under capitalism. This is another con. 

Not until bosses give back their profits to the generations of workers they stole them from will any redistribution of income be more than a subsidy to the bosses. Notice how all the discussion around the fashionable UBI is limited to what the bosses can afford to pay. This is magical thinking. No way will capitalist corporations and banks agree to pay for full employment and a living wage let alone a UBI. Both have to be sacrificed in the impending global crash to restore the rate of profit.

This magical thinking has always been the fatal flaw of social democracy – the illusion that there is a peaceful, gradual road to socialism by means of bosses agreeing to 'fair shares' in the distribution of income. To question this assumption is to risk exposing the real truth of capitalism; that all income originates from the labour power of productive workers. 

If that truth was our starting point the question would be: why does capital have the right to exist and define the terms of debate around how wages are determined when it lives off the expropriation of surplus-value?

In this light it’s easy to see that the UBI is another big con to divert the class struggle away from fighting for control of jobs and a living wage in the workplace and into the dead end of parliament. 

If unions are too weak to win a living wage now they won’t be able to force a living UBI out of the parliamentary talkshop. Parliamentary reforms that benefit workers are concessions won from the bosses only when they fear being over-run by militant labour.

The reason the UBI has been dragged off the top shelf as a ‘reasonable’ demand by academic liberals, social democrats and union bosses is because the bosses are scared a global economic crash will spark rising worker opposition to paying for the bosses crisis and threaten the fragile hold the ruling class has over the ‘dangerous’ class – the international proletariat.

The parties of the ‘center-left’ (Labour, Greens and Mana) are all run by a clique of pro-capitalist bureaucrats whose pay rests on the legal fiction that they represent the interests of the working class. This means that these parties are internally divided between a worker base and the bureaucratic leadership. The internal class divisions widen as such parties are torn between two class programs – to serve the top 10% and their lackeys, or the bottom 90% expected to pay for the crisis with their lives and livelihoods.

A new mass workers party is needed arising out of a split between the working class supporters of these parties and their union affiliates and the rotten labour bureaucracy that act to tie their worker organisations to the bosses state machine. 

Strong fighting, democratic unions that throw out their pro-capitalist leaders are the only way to begin the claw back of the surplus expropriated from workers and build a power base capable of taking on the ruling class and implementing a Transitional Program (TP) that takes workers all the way to socialism.

The TP puts up immediate economic demands that all workers need and are willing and able to fight for such as: Jobs for all! A living wage! Solve unemployment by sharing work hours without loss of pay! These are immediate demands but they are also ‘transitional’ because they cannot be won without workers control of work. 

So rather than waiting passively for a Government cargo cult that will drop a living UBI from the sky even while an economic crash looms and global warming escalates exponentially, fighting democratic unions will defend every job with strikes and occupations against their employers. Because such struggles threaten the bosses’ control of work they will be met with inevitable state repression which will in turn force workers to develop new organisations and tactics to advance the defence of our class.

Inevitably employers backed by the state will try to deny workers defence of economic rights to work and a living wage by using the state forces to close down on freedom of expression, assembly, strike etc. When bosses use the labor laws to call in the cops the workers response is to break the law with occupations defended by picket lines.

Furthermore, strike action to win in any worksite has to be generalised to involve all militant workers in struggle in every sector of the economy. In that way workplace committees, strike committees and workers defence guards, become coordinated locally, nationally and internationally.

Building unity around these demands and the organisations they throw up empowers workers to take another big step and organise a political general strike aimed at defeating the employers and their state machine and imposing workers ownership and control of the means of production. 

Thus the Transitional Program begins with immediate economic and political demands and leads necessarily to workers empowering themselves to the point where they can overthrow of the capitalist state and create a Workers’ Government able to implement a planned socialist economy - where the myth of the capitalist UBI is a dim memory for those whose social equity is based on the principle: 

"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need".

Bankrupt IAM international leadership betrays Boeing Workers

 

In yet another significant major defeat for organized labor, the top leadership of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) in secret negotiations with Boeing, reopened the contract and shoved through a vote of the membership to accept devastating concessions.  Devastating not only for the Boeing workers but for all workers who look to their unions to protect defined pensions and wage packages. The contract was not even set to expire until 2016, and despite the fighting spirit of the membership demonstrated by an initial overwhelming NO vote, the IAM leaders bowed down to Boeing’s blackmail threat to move future production to as yet non-existent, non-union plants, in areas lacking the skilled labor force needed to construct the 777X, This sell-out contract will eliminate the defined pension plan in 2016. Workers will pay large increases in medical premiums and will receive a paltry 1% yearly raise.  Boeing new hires will need 20 years plus employment to reach the maximum pay grade, more than three times what it takes now.  The contract will extend to an indentured servant-like eight years from 2016 to 2024, with workers bound hand and foot to a no strike clause.

 Read more...

Class War Volume 1, Number 6, Winter 2013

   Class War V.1 #6 by JohnnBrown

LABOUR VS CAPITAL

Our position of giving critical support for the Labour Party is to vote for it to put it in government to prove to workers that no Labour-led Government however left-wing will be able to legislate to meet the demands and needs of workers. Social Democracy sows illusions in a peaceful, egalitarian, environmentally friendly capitalism. There is no such animal. Capitalism is brutal, barbaric and destructive especially in the epoch of imperialism. Already we see that Cunliffe’s promises of reforms are hedged around with financial constraints imposed not by ‘neo-liberalism’, but by capitalism itself. Will Labour challenge NZs status as an economic semi-colony of the US and China in its position on the TPPA, Oil and Coal and asset sales, GCSB and TICS, SkyCity casino capitalism, and ‘disaster capitalism’ in Christchurch. Will Labour recognise the role that the working class plays in creating the nation’s wealth and stand up and fight for the unions and workers by implementing full employment, a living wage, welfare rights, pensions etc? Right now the Labour Party represents Capital’s profits expropriated from Labour. What is needed is a revolutionary socialist party that will socialise capitalist property under the ownership and control of the working class and create a planned socialist society.

TPPA and the coming US/CHINA war

To implement a sustainable economic policy, NZ would have to regain its economic sovereignty over the ownership and control of its resources. The TPPA is the most dangerous threat to such a national strategy. The TPPA is a tool of recolonisation by US to keep China out of the Pacific. Extending the power of crisis-ridden US imperialism into whole Pacific to recolonise Pacific and to simultaneously block Chinas bid for a regional TPA, and also gain more access to China’s internal market. That’s why it’s the US state taking over every other Pacific state as a means of taking over the Chinese state. It’s a showdown of the two giants of capitalism as the US declines and China rises. .

The US is in decline as its economic power wanes and its dollar ceases to be the only world currency. This is because a currency propped up by oil is being challenged by the Yuan which is based on China’s expanding productive capacity. The US wants to grab onto China to halt its decline. It has done so with one hand – the offshoring of manufacturing to Asia. But to grab with two hands it has to break into China’s economic sovereignty, especially the dominance of its SOEs.

Its strategy is to restrict China’s growth while at the same time sharing in it. By blocking China from the TPPA it puts China at a disadvantage. Yet the US corporations in those states that already have TPAs with China can piggyback into China on equal terms. Both US and Japan are big producers inside China within the free trade zones, but they want to extend into the state sector, especially in privatising the SOEs.

The Labour Party’s position so far is to take credit for the TPPA! It is acting as a US lackey in a US imperialist drive against its No 1 trading partner, China! Its position is that it will not agree to an agreement that is secret. Its position should be that it will reserve the right to unilaterally leave a TPPA that is signed in secret. Otherwise the Labour Party is signing away what is left of NZs national sovereignty and signing up the NZ working class to a war between the US and China in the near future!

Carbon, Assets and Climate Collapse

Oil drilling and coal mining is a litmus test of Labour’s economic and climate change policy. Will it go with the NACT line of the global capitalist economy wherever it pushes profits in NZ, or will it opt for a state-managed sustainable economic growth such as that of the Greens? Labour is torn internally between short-term jobs driven growth and longer-term sustainable growth. It is trying to suppress this conflict in its position on oil drilling by opposing it until it is proven safe. But just as like its position opposing mining on conservation land, this evades the larger issue of climate change. There is no way that burning carbon can protect jobs now let alone in the future. The NACTs rip, shit and bust quarry mentality destroys jobs as well as the environment. On the other hand the Greens reforms don’t have the social support to win. The issue of global warming is now one of human survival where capitalism as a system is destroying our future. Labour needs to rally its working class base to take control of the issue and make stopping climate collapse the heart of its economic development program.

A real Labour Party would recognise that climate collapse is a crisis many times more life threatening than the depression of the 1930s. What it needs is an emergency program to meet this crisis. First and foremost, the ownership and control of energy production should be socialised under workers control with no compensation to the owners of privatised state assets. These assets should then be developed into 100% renewables (hydro, solar, wind, biomass etc). Energy efficiency and conservation should be the criteria for all industrial and agricultural production. State producer boards should plan and regulate the major industries on the basis of sustainability as well as health and safety. Problems with key industries such as a ‘dirty dairying’ would be regulated and state subsidies would become the basis of state shareholdings or cooperatives. The imperative of sustainability would bring a slow socialisation of the economy with the workers and independent producers along with the state sharing in the true costs and benefits of production.

GCSB and TICS

These laws are major challenges to NZ’s economic sovereignty which means increasing dominance by imperialist US and China. Yet Labour has always bought into spying on behalf of its imperialist masters. From the SIS ‘reds under the bed’ on behalf of the UK and US to the GCSB and the ‘war against terror’ justifying the US global rule of terror. State spying serves only the rule of capital. Specifically the great powers use spying to advance their economic and political interests over their rivals. Loewenstein in Guardian updates NSAs latest global spy network of which NZ is a ‘US team player’. So the Labour Party’s demand that NZs spy role be subject to an inquiry does not challenge the assumption that secret state spying is necessary. If a true Labour Party is to represent the interests of Labour against Capital here is what its policy should be.

First, a true Labour Party would challenge the view that the interests of Labour and Capital can be reconciled - crony capitalism is not an aberration but the norm. It would reject an official inquiry and set up an independent workers inquiry into spying. Second, it would abolish all state spying on its citizens, close down its installations, refuse to participate in spy networks with other states, and instead set up a public Tribunal where any accusations of spying could be heard. The decisions of the Inquiry and the Tribunal would be made by delegates elected to represent the views of workers, women, youth, indigenous, social and environmental groups that comprise the broad labour movement.

SkyCity and Casino Capitalism

Symptomatic of how decadent the NZ capitalist class is, is Skycity. The NACTs are so cynical that they will pay out of workers taxes for Skycity to build its ‘entertainment’ precinct in Auckland to fleece tourists and workers all, on the promise of ‘more jobs’. On the basis of this cost-benefit analysis, all the costs fall on the workers and all the benefits go to the parasites.

Yet the Labour Party does not challenge Casino Capitalism at its heart, the global financial capitalist class that parasitically lives off the working class driving down their wages to increase their profits and then cynically exploiting their poverty by encouraging them to gamble. After all this is a metaphor for the way global capitalism in crisis works: stagnation of real growth combined with massive speculative booms parasitic on growth. Labour needs to declare its intention to revoke NACTs corrupt deal with SkyCity and ultimately to revoke its casino licence.

Christchurch re-think?

If Labour is serious about going back to its working class roots then its role in ChCh is a test of that. Labour voted for the sacking of CERA which imposed a rip, shit and bust rebuild similar to the sacking of ECAN to boost the profits of Canterbury dairy farmers. Has Labour had a change of heart? Cunliffe announced Labour’s decision to set up KiwiAssure attached to Kiwibank. Will this meet the need for a state insurer of disasters? Not if KiwiAssure is just another insurance Co like Kiwibank is just another bank. KiwiAssure needs to be a comprehensive no fault insurer of disasters and funded on the model of ACC Otherwise Labour is filling a gap rather than coming to grips with the larger question of the NACTs ‘disaster capitalism’ model in Christchurch. Where is the workers’ alternative based on a return to democracy and a comprehensive plan for the rebuild? Unless Labour steps up with major proposals it will have abdicated any leadership of its historic constituency in Christchurch.

Pensions pensioned off?

ACTs neoliberal pension policy was adopted by Labour just before the 2011 election! The retirement age should come down to 60 not go up to 67.The generational argument is a red herring (making Labour’s red rather fishy) Society is more productive every year, yet the proportion of the increase that goes to labour decreases. The result is that capital creams it while workers are expected to work longer for lower wages and low pension (if they survive). The Labour Party should take a stand on principles not affordability (neo-liberal bullshit about balancing the budget while taxes on capital decrease). Labour produces the wealth. The working lifespan should decrease as productivity rises. Taxes on the rising share of capital should increase. The state can easily fund a living pension for a longer retirement from age 60. The irony is that a Labour Government led by Cunliffe who has spoken of renouncing neo-liberalism, has adopted the ACT policy of increasing the age of retirement so that workers work more productively and longer for a diminishing share of the wealth they produce.

From Welfare to Workfare

The Cunliffe Govt appeals to the memory of the Labour Party of Mickey Savage of the 1930s. That government was under such pressure from unemployed and destitute farmers that it responded with a social security package as a right of citizenship. It recognised that it was the capitalist economy and not an 'underclass' that was to be blamed for unemployment and poverty. The Blairite 4th Labour Government retreated to the neo-liberal view of social security as a personal responsibility that has to be earned. Labour has remained silent on the NACTs slashing of welfare since failing to restore Ruthless Richardson's benefit cuts of 1991, all the way to Paula Bennett's abusive workfare reforms today. While David Shearer was briefly Labour leader he displayed this underclass prejudice with his reference to the 'beneficiary on the roof'. Will a Cunliffe-led Labour Party break with this neo-liberal workfare history?

A true Labour Party would return to the social welfare as a right of Savage’s day and abolish all workfare measures introduced since the 1970s. First, it would implement full employment and job creation by public works. Free health, education and housing would be paid for by a 100% capital gains tax on all property and assets. It would create a UBI based on a living wage and administered by the unions as a right whether one is working or not. Even outright capitalists like Gareth Morgan argue that a living UBI is more profitable for bosses than growing inequality and poverty. These measures would help to recognise the working class as the creators of wealth and shift the blame for NZs economic recolonisation by the US and China off the ‘’underclass’ and back onto the decadent, parasitic and rapacious capitalist class that is destroying Aotearoa.

Revolutionary Labour Party

Is the Labour Party capable of standing up for Labour against Capital? It is the very nature of the party that it has the main contradiction between Capital and Labour running through it. Capital is devoted to exploiting workers for profits, while Labour (not the Party!) is devoted to securing a share of the value it produces as a living wage. But such is the crisis of capitalism today all attempts at reconciling these objectives will fail. Profits must drive down living standards and destroy jobs and lives. Labour to live must challenge Capital’s right to rule by socialising all the essential resources that are necessary for life and for the survival of the species. The Labour Party will split sooner or later into those who defend Capital, and those who are defend Labour.

Aotearoa: Fight the NACT Workfare Attack

http://waitemataunite.blogspot.co.nz/

The NACTs attacks on beneficiaries should not surprise us. Since the onset of the structural crisis of capitalism in the 1970s the bosses have tried to cut back social spending on the social wage but cutting their taxes as a drain on their profits. In the 1980s Labour undermined the welfare system by restructuring the economy and ending compulsory unionism. In the 1990s we had Ruth Richardson's benefit cuts of 1991, Jenny Shipley's workfare attack of 1997/98, which also targeted solo mothers but was driven back by mass outrage. The whole point was to cut taxes on profits behind a smoke screen of blaming beneficiaries for 'bludging' on the state and causing profits to fall.

Then after its 2008 re-election the National led government in its first-term implemented reforms that made life for beneficiaries worse (for example ACC forcing sex abuse victims to forgo paid counselling). 

Bennett Bashes Beneficiaries

"As the recession deepens laid-off workers by the thousand are lining up to claim a right won through bitter struggle in earlier depressions- namely the right to an unemployment benefit. The capitalist overclass and their parliamentary representatives have anticipated this and are desperately seeking ways to divert the rising tide of working class outrage at the ways they are immensely profiting from a crisis of their own creation. Having in opposition wept crocodile tears about the emergence in NZ of an ‘underclass’ they are now in government reverting to their time honoured posture of blaming that ‘underclass’ of beneficiaries for all the social social evils spawned by decadent capitalism as a prelude to attacks on working class entitlements, including citizenship rights such as the client confidentiality of beneficiaries and the democratic right to criticize the government without having one’s privacy violated. In doing so they fully intent on creating an underclass in the sense of a stratum of society denied full citizenship status. The corporate media are complicit in this attack on society’s most vulnerable, and have abetted welfare minister Paula Bennett’s crime by publishing the names of those whose income’s she revealed and enthusiastically participated in the redneck abuse to which this has exposed them.

The strategy of picking on beneficiaries conveniently diverts media attention from parliamentarian’s perks such as travel allowances and subsidised housing. (While speaking of subsidised housing, let’s remember that amongst the supplementary benefits that can swell a beneficiary’s apparent income is the Accommodation Supplement, which is available to employed workers but is nothing but a state subsidy to capitalist landlords.)  However its main thrust is to create division in the working class and cultivate the fascist mentality which they will find so useful to smashing worker’s organisations. Workers, whether still employed or laid-off must not allow their solidarity to be so easily undermined.

The beneficiaries under attack had dared criticise Bennett for scrapping the Training Incentive Allowances which presumably had helped Bennett herself escape from the despised underclass. Other measures the Key government is currently undertaking to make the victims of their crisis pay for it are the cutting of funding for community education and the restriction of access to certain special benefits such as the Independent Youth Benefit. In the latter case young workers are being offered places in the Army’s Limited Service Volunteer Scheme and told that declining could mean the loss of IYB. As Key and Co deepen NZ’s involvement in imperialist war they are capitalising on the propaganda value of Corporal Apiata’s VC and following in Mussolini’s footsteps by ‘firing unemployment out of the barrel of a gun.’ The working class has seen it all before and the world has seen it once too often."

Now Paula Rebstock's razor gang draws on earlier these earlier attempts by Labour and National to attack beneficiaries and demolish the welfare state. The severity of the Rebstock ‘reforms’ testifies to the severity of the global crisis of capitalism rather than some bloody minded policy extremism – though that helps. Capitalism is in a terminal crisis unless it make us pay for its crisis. That's why these workfare policies are the same everywhere and the leading lights of these reforms are people who are neo-conservative intellectuals, politicians or  administrators formerly employed to cut back on social spending in the US and the UK, so there is nothing especially unique about NZ in this regard.

BOSSES CRISIS BEHIND WORKFARE ATTACKS

Today the global capitalist system is facing a major crisis of falling profits. Its banks and big corporations can survive only by a massive redistribution of wealth from workers to bosses principally a drastic shift in the burden of taxation from capital to labour. So the growing wealth gap is not a cause of the crisis but its effect. The reason for this is that the wealth of the 1% is due not to rising profits in industry but to speculative fictional profits and policies that cut corporate taxes and force working class taxpayers to fund the bailouts of banks and countries 'too big to fail'.

But this is not enough for capitalism's survival. To solve their crisis of falling profits the bosses must drive down workers' living standards by smashing those remaining unions that stand in the road of contract labour (wharfies, meatworkers, aged care workers) and by removing welfare rights and forcing beneficiaries into the floating reserve army of unemployed and penalised to compete for jobs and driving down wages. This is the real objective of welfare 'reform' - job creation by increased competition for jobs driving down wages and allowing the bosses to create more low paid poverty level jobs!

BOSSES DIVIDE AND RULE WORKERS

This working class has met its growing impoverishment with growing resistance. From Tahrir to Oakland their anger is on the rise. So to undermine this resistance the bosses try to isolate and target sections of the working class to blame for the crisis. Militant unions have always been targets - in NZ wharfies, seafarers, meatworkers, teachers, etc. So have welfare beneficiaries, in particular, Maori and Pacifica solo mums and state housing tenants who comprise the so-called 'underclass'. Instead of the capitalist system that creates inequality victimises these groups, it is they who are blamed for the ills of capitalism.

By targeting and demonising Maori (as radicals), migrants (as terrorists), youth (as anarchists), women (as biologically dependent) and those labelled mentally ill, the NACTs show that as the crisis gets more severe they impose more and more repressive attacks on us. The logical outcome of this repression is fascism as the demonised target groups are denied basic human rights. The bourgeois fantasy that "works make us free" is the rationale for workfare just as it was the slogan of the Nazis above the gates of the work camps to cover up the repression and elimination of millions.

WE WILL NOT PAY FOR THEIR CRISIS!

The only way to fight back is to unite all these elements of the working class, employed and unemployed including the 'underclass' unionists, students, youth and women, as well as those in the middle class (self-employed, contractors etc) that are also coming under attack, against the capitalist system that exploits and oppresses them. The obvious way to unite workers is in their unions. To win back to the unions the 80% who are not unionised and to unite all members of the working class especially all those who are normally marginalised on the basis of racial minorities, women, lowpaid, casualised or unemployed youth and older people, Lesbian, Gay, Bi- and Trans sexuality, and the current main target of workfare,  beneficiaries especially single mothers.

But as well as mobilising the unions, the rise of the Occupy Movement which includes many workers and middle class who are not unionised, has created a new form of united front in which all those coming under attack can unite as the 99% against the extreme concentration of power and wealth in the 1%. It is time for Occupy and the union rank and file to unite under one program to smash the ruling class and put the 99% in charge.

Smash the NACTs demonisation of the poor! 
For living benefits! 
For 24 hour free childcare! 
Jobs for all on a living wage!
Unite the working class to make the bosses pay for their own crisis.
Build democratic, fighting unions!
Build the occupy movement globally!
#OCCUPYEVERYTHING!

OCCUPY MAYDAY/ OCCUPY WINZ
Waitemata Branch of Unite is organising  Mayday March and occupation of the WINZ office, 450 Queen St.
Assembly Aotea Square May 1st, at 1 pm.