The Occupied Dominion Post - Issue 5, 3 December 2011

Earlier Editions:
The Occupied Dominion Post - Issue 1 Monday 24th October
The Occupied Dominion Post – Issue 2 Saturday 29 October
The Occupied Dominion Post - Issue 3, Wednesday 9 November 2011
The occupied Dominion Post – Issue 4, Friday 18 November 2011

QUOTE:
“The new Government has a job to do. It is in no-one’s interests for it to be diverted by politics.”
Dominion Post Editorial 28/11/2011

On the 15th of October 2011, comrades in around 1500 cities rallied together on a global day of action inspired by Occupy Wall Street, resisting corporate greed. Four days later on the 19th of October, local corporation ANZCO locked out 111 union members at its CMP plant in Marton, demanding that they accept pay cuts of 20-30% before returning to work. The lockout and the occupation have each lasted nearly two months, and bonds of solidarity are forming.

ANZCO embodies the disparity in power and wealth which occupiers seek to redress. The company posts turnover of over $1.3bn. Sir Graeme Harrison, Chairman of the Board, was recently knighted and lives comfortably on Oriental Parade. All of this wealth is produced at plants such as CMP Rangitikei, by the workers currently under threat.

ANZCO is jointly owned by local capitalists and overseas investors. Its tactic of cutting wages to stay competitive is typical of recent trends; real wages in New Zealand have declined 25% over the past 3 decades. Many workers at CMP Rangitikei raise families, and can’t afford to have their wages cut by 30% in a period of rising prices.

However ANZCO is not just attempting to cut costs, they are also attempting to undermine our collective power. Before issuing the lockout notice, the company individually contacted many workers and offered them individual (rather than collective) contracts, in exchange for keeping their jobs. This is an attempt to smash the Meat Workers Union itself. However the dispute plays out, it will send an important signal to organized labour, to protest movements, and to the 1%. We cannot afford to let them take our collective power, to pick us off.

With its un-unionised workforce, ANZCO-CMP Rangitikei runs below capacity. Action on the picket line seeks to disrupt production, to hurt the bottom line.

The Meat Workers Union called for its first national day of action on November the 17th, nearly a month into the lockout, with comrades packing into buses and vans across the country to join the picket line. The Meat Workers’ Union itself mobilized unionists from regions as far flung as Gore, while other organizations sent delegations in solidarity. Occupy Wellington sent around 15 on a midnight bus funded by the Council of Trade Unions, aiming to arrive before the first scab trucks.

Over the day around 200 joined the picket line. Aware of the union’s power in numbers, ANZCO-CMP called off processing. Picketers from around the country celebrated this halt in production with chants of “Who’s Got The Power?” and “Stand Up, Fight Back.” Occupy Wellington and Christchurch passed motions of unreserved support. Soon an Occupy Marton (of one tent, then nine…) was up and running.

However, the company clearly intended to catch up later, when the busloads of comrades departed. Although the Occupy Wellington crew continued to carpool to Marton, delivering supplies of food, coffee and bodies for the picket line – it became necessary to take things a step further.

The next nationwide day of action targets McDonalds, a major customer of ANZCO. Unite Union, which represents fast-food workers, has sent a mass email to its members informing them of this action. The Meat Workers Union is demanding that McDonalds cease buying its paddies from ANZCO, pointing out how consumer action forced them to buy free range eggs. Rallies from Invercargill to Whangarei will demand that consumers boycott McDonalds, and in some cases may shut the stores down. We must show our collective power.

As we develop strategies to challenge ANZCO, to smash the lockout, we must also support the locked out workers directly. Supporters will hold fundraising events for the duration of the lockout. Anyone who wants to make a donation can find account details below. If just one locked out worker decides they can’t survive the picket line, that this pay cut is better than nothing, that’s a loss for the whole 99%.

These Workers and their families need $25,000 a week to get by. Every donation counts! Occupy Wellington is doing what it can to help make a difference, so can you...

Account Name: Disputes Fund
Account Number: 38-9007-0894028-08.

EDITORIAL:

Occupy is on the verge of hitting fifty days of occupation at Civic Square. We have established the Occupation, although to date 140km/hr winds have been much more difficult to deal with than council or the police.

The Occupation has raised a number of points. The reality of the 99%/1% relationship represented in the ANZCO, CMP, Marton meatworkers lockout, covered in this issue as a front page article as well as the Pomare Occupation in Lower Hutt over the demolition of state houses and privatisation of the land they used to rest on. As well as the cornucopia of ideas and perspectives floating about the various Occupations.

The question now is ‘How do we grow?’ It is clear from the thousands of people who have stopped to talk at Civic Square in Wellington and the tens of thousands of people who have read the Occupied Dominion Post or engaged in the various media portals facebook, twitter etc. that this Occupation is a bigger thing than a small grassy corner in central Wellington.

Is Occupation primarily a physical thing or is it primarily a network? This is a point that has come out of the ongoing discussion through the short-history of Occupy Wellington. If the Occupation is a physical thing then it is tied to its physical location. We move from being flexible and proactive to being a fixed and reactive movement.

There is a combined and uneven development within the Occupy Movement worldwide. Combined in the sense that it is a global movement , and uneven in the sense that it is a local movement, with local characteristics and particularities. We have taken a method and practice lifted from the American movement and placed it, effectively unchanged in New Zealand. That was an appropriate step initially, testing the water where it hadn’t been disturbed before and the results have fully justified the decision to occupy. Yet now we need to make this movement a New Zealand movement. A local part of a global movement.

Because the reality is that we don’t have a Federal Reserve to get rid of and although facts and commentary on the situation in Britain and the US is important and interesting, the situation there is different from the situation here. We are focusing on commentary and analysis on the situation and composition of the 99% in New Zealand. Because the world wide crisis that swept the world three years ago has not gone away, toxic debts have been taken over from the private sector by the various states affected by the collapse. In New Zealand though, the crisis has it’s own peculiarities. We have unemployment of 6.6% or 157,000 people1 as opposed to 9% or 13.9 million in the US2. Even those figures need to be treated with some skepticism. Interest.co.nz estimate that $8,652,700,000 is at risk, much of which will be lost to a possible 205,925 investors. The difference between New Zealand and the US in this situation is the clear demarcation of dodgy investments from safe investments. There are a whole bunch of reasons behind this situation going the way it did. In the US, everything sunk because it could not be pulled apart. In New Zealand, there has been what the economist Joseph Schumpeter described as “creative destruction”3 or the wholesale destruction of a huge layer of retirement savings, a huge swath of poor people’s futures. All of which has silently passed by, with the people responsible paying back little and generally getting home detention. If it is raised, shoulders are shrugged and discussion amongst the chattering classes moves on to less uncomfortable discussions.

If this is the best we can expect, a perennial gale of creative destruction, blowing through the lives of billions of people, then we need a global occupation more than ever. Count us in!

NB: Each week we print between 1000-1500 copies of the ODP each week. We’re thankful to Callum at Greencabs for helping us out so far. But we can’t physically print any more copies than our current print run allows. If you are able to help us print more, we’d like your help. Email occupieddompost@gmail.com

The Occupied Dominion Post - Issue 5, 3 December 2011
PDF Download – 791kb

***ENDS***

© Scoop Media