More on organising and protests

On the night of the 14th of February I dreamt of a small anti-war march it was fractured and disorganised, with only about 100 people there.

On February 15th I walked down to the starting point of the anti-war march I had helped organise. On every corner I saw people I didn't recognise going to the march, they were carrying banners, and children. When I got to the park we were supposed to start in it was over-flowing. We'd expected 500 people, and 5,000 turned up.

As an activist you work in the dark, you spend so much time working on issues that you care passionately about, but you seem to be a very small minority. Then occasionally you're not in the minority anymore, you're overwhelmed by the number of people who support you. Those are the moments that make this worth doing.

We organised another, just as big march, then, just after the war started, we organised another - and no-one came. That happens, the huge support you were shocked by disappears as the media melts away. I don't think this happens because people stop caring, but because that hope that they can make a difference is taken away.

I've thought a lot about that time, and I think what we should have done differently, is spent more time on getting people involved over a longer period, and less on the urgent, urgent, now, now, now.

I thought I'd learned that lesson. But then this year, a similar thing happened, a small group of women gave out leaflets, and it became clear that many, many, many, many, people were angry about the cop rape verdict. However, it never became anything more. I assume those wells of anger, and the experience that it was based on, is still there. But the opportunity to tap them has been lost. If we'd been organising against cop-rape this time last year, then we would have been able to do so much more.

I wouldn't take any of it back, I'd still organise that march, even though it was a disastorous mess, and I think what happened after the cop rape verdict was incredibly important. I think what I've learned is that you can't predict these groundswells, so you have to be prepared to do the ground organising so that when the support materialises it doesn't vanish away just as quickly.

Review: The Break Up

My friend Besty and I were possibly the only people to refer to The Break Up as the new Peyton Reed movie. Ever since we watched Bring It On in a mostly empty cinema in the middle of the day, we have been big fans (don't ask about the opening cheer unless you really want to know).

The great thing about Peyton Reed is that his movies have quite a mainstream sensibility, but with a different (and most importantly feminist) content. Betsy and I cracked up listening to his DVD commentary on Bring it On when he talked about the movie's punk rock sensibility (punk cheerleaders!), but we knew what he meant. The ads made The Break Up look like an extended episode of friends (boys are like this, and girls are like this - isn't that hilarious), but (and I should have had faith in Peyton Reed) instead it looked at the reality behind some of those ideas, and what they mean for the people involved.

It's weird that we finally got around to watching the break-up tonight, just after I'd written about housework. Because the Break-up is a movie about the dishes. Brooke (Jennifer Aniston) and Gary (Vince Vaughn) have been together for two years and they're holding a dinner party. When Brooke gets home from work she tidies up the whole place, does all the cooking (for the meal she's shopped and planned for), sets the table, and so on. When Gary gets home he turns on the TV and watches the game, despite the fact that she's still cooking dinner, and he's not changed. Then after the dinner party he sits down and plays Playstation, and when she asks him to help her do the dishes he talks about how he needs to unwind (this is the fight where they break up).

More than anything else I found the movie terribly, terribly sad. Right throughout the movie Brooke, keeps trying to get him back, she's doing more, and working harder in the hope that'll make him notice the work she already does (which appears to be about 90% of the work in the relationship). There's a scene near the end where she lists all the things she does for him, and doesn't ask him to reciprocate, doesn't ask for equality, just asks that he recognise what she's doing.* When he finally began to understand what was upsetting her so much, it was too late, she felt entirely used up, and couldn't keep trying any more.

It all felt so familiar. They're not even particularly my issues, but I've listened, and I've given advice, and in the end there's nothing I can do.

There were other bits I really like; the female relationships were very real and reminded me of the limits of solidarity without analysis. It was obvious, throughout the movie, that other women backed up Brooke because she was a woman. But the advice they gave was all slightly ridiculous and useless, and showed that her friends were also mired in this pit where it was impossible to relate to men on anything approaching equal footing, so all they could offer Brooke were suggestions on how to get around.

What I really do wonder is how much of this was intentional. I'm fairly certain that Peyton Reed brought out the feminist aspects of the movie on purpose. But on the DVD commentary Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston were implying that they thought this was a movie about two equally flawed people. I imagine if you're used to being blind to power dynamics it might look like two equally flawed people. But there was a power imbalance in that relationship, whether it was intended by the creators or not.

It passes the Mo Movie Measure - but in quite a neat way - it's only after that she's decided that she has no more energy to give him that she is shown speaking to another woman about anything but Gary.

As a movie it definately worked for me, anything that felt that real definately would. There were also some absolutely hilarious moments (and some others that didn't really work for me, but I don't find Vince Vaughn particularly funny). I really do recomend you watch it, I'd like to know what other people thought.

* I imagine that it'd actually be impossible to recognise that you were in a relationship where the other person was doing the vast majority of the work. It's much easier to be blind, than to realise that you're a parasite (or to do your share).

I'll take the risk

I got a text from my friend Josie today: "According to the paper if women do housework there's less chance of breast cancer." So I got hold of the paper and read something like this

Women who keep their homes clean and tidy are less likely to develop breast cancer than those who let the dust and dishes pile up, according to a new report.

Researchers found regular moderate exercise such as housework provides greater protection from the disease than more strenuous but less frequent sporting activity.

Being active in the home cut the likelihood of pre-menopausal women developing breast cancer by 29 per cent compared with being inactive, and reduced the risk for post-menopausal women by 19 per cent.

What I find particularly amusing is that even though the research absolutely didn't touch on whether or not the women's houses were clean (rich women who have cleaners can have very clean houses without spending an hour on housework, whereas mother's of several children could do 17.6 hours a week easy and still live in chaos), the various newspaper reports worked very hard to imply that it was the dust itself that was causing the cancer risk.

I always go into these stories outraged by the sexism, but by the end of the article, I'm often just as outraged by the scientific ignorance. It's as if every health reporter on the planet needs to be locked in a room until they've written "Correlation Does Not Prove Causation" 1,000 times. If you actually want to read the study itself to find out what it does prove (not much), it's available here as a pdf file.

But actually this study discovered something that I do find interesting. This was a survey of 218,169 women in 9 European countries and the average pre-menopausal woman spent 17.6 hours a week on housework.

I believe that the vast amount of unpaid, unvalued reproductive labour that women do, is central to our oppression. The women in that study averaged 10% of their life on housework (which appeared to leave out the actual reproduction). The solutions to the second shift: men taking on their share of unpaid work, and a socialisation of some labour that is currently unpaid, haven't changed, but they don't look any easier to put into place either.

By-Pass

The Wellington inner-city bypass open yesterday. To non-Wellingtonians that won't mean a lot. Those of us who live here it means a bit more than that. I learnt about the by-pass at age 8 when I went to a school outing to see the buildings that were going to be pulled down (it was a hippy school). My main objection has always been on historical grounds, and I'll explore that in a litle more detail in another post, but I just want to talk briefly about the anti-bypass campaign and some of the issues around it.

The by-pass is part of a late 1970s motorway project where state highway 1 was brought into Wellington city (they dug up a cemetary to do it). There was some opposition to this road, and more opposition to the supposed by-pass that was going to be built next.

That road was delayed for thirty years. In this time there was on-going anti-bypass action, but it focused on two avenues - legal challenges and city council elections. Both strategies were ultimately useless.

Every three years we were told to vote for an anti bypass city council, and every three years this failed (the way the city council wards broke down it was always going to be difficult). T

The problem with these strategies is that there was no organising. There was an occasional public meeting and large march in September 2000, but the basic work of getting people who opposed the bypass together to take action, was not being done.

So come the end of 2004 the bypass started to be built and there was very little organised anti-bypass opposition, but quite a lot of anti-bypass feeling. A small group of people got together to try and do a direct action campaign to stop the bypass.

I want to make it clear that I was not someone who was prepared to step-up to oppose the by-pass (I just had a supporting role). So my reaction to those protests are not criticisms of the people involved (who were at least prepared to do work that I wasn't), but just ideas that I have learned from watching this protest movement, and others (I plan to write a similar post on the problems of letting the media do our organising for us, about a couple of protest actions I was part of). I think by late 2004 it was probably too late to do the organising work necessary, and doubt things could have gone much differently at the time most of the anti-bypass protesters I know, got involved.

The strategy the 2004 anti-bypass group took, the strategy that I agree was most likely to succeed was to delay and disrupt the bypass and make it financially untenable for the sub-contractor. Most of the energy was put into people involved taking action, rather than getting new people involved (although there was some good organising going on throughout this time).

But I think it's always problematic to only look about how you can win, without also looking at how you can make yourself stronger in the process. As it happened the group involved weren't big enough to pull this strategy off. Most of the time we're not strong enough to win right away. People who focus on the importance of winning each campaign ((A word I hate when referring to activism, it usually implies that a small group of people have got together in a room and decided how they can win a particular issue. Rather than focusing on organising, and allowing that no matter how smart a small group of people are they can't predict what'll happen when people get organised.)) also appear to be most likely to burn-out, as they don't win, and feel they've got nothing. We must see the fight for a better world as a marathon and not a sprint. Each protest movement must try and make active organised opposition to the society we live in just that little bit stronger.

The protests against the M11 in Britain show that organising against roading can be done, and even though those protests weren't immediately successful they have had an impact on road-building in Britain (I have dial-up so I can't guarantee the quality of this video - but if it's the one I'm thinking of it's well worth watching to see the level organising that is both possible, and necessary to make a difference).

Maia vs WINZ: The Reality

My Planning and Assement Module* appeared to be going well; I really liked the guy who was running our first session he was giving us all this information about entitlements that I didn't expect (non-beneficiary accomodation supplement, recoverable and non-recoverable grants, targetted assistance - he covered it all). I noticed a sign advertising courses WINZ provided that were run by privately owned companies - I made a little note to myself - thinking that I could write a nice little blog post about privatisation through sub-contracting.

Then my casemanager came in. It was the guy who had run the previous seminar. The only consolation I had was that he was as worried about seeing me as I was at seeing him. As we walked over he told me that I wasn't to interupt him to talk about the inaccuracies of his hypotheticals.**

So we went and sat down, it seemed relatively easy, until we got to the job-seeker part of the deal.

I think it is time for a little diversion. Once upon a time a man named Peter McCardle was working as a work-broker (or possible at Social Welfare it doesn't really matter), he would see people looking for work (or possibly applying for the benefit) and think 'why can't there be a one stop shop where people can apply for the benefit and look for work'. Now this story wouldn't matter that much if he didn't end up on the NZ First Party List at the 1996 election, when the New Zealand public, showing a well-placed cynicism in all politicians (with unfortunate results), gave NZ First the balance of power. So National, who at this stage were prepared to raise the minimum wage to keep in power - they certainly weren't going to object to some restructuring of the public service, announced that Soical Welfare was going to merge with the employment office, just like Peter McCardle wanted.

I swear that one of the pieces of paper had "Thank you for choosing WINZ for part of your work search" - obviously a new use of the term 'choice' previously only used by anti-abortion nut-jobs.

From my experience there are three really important reasons why having WINZ also offer employment services is a bad idea. One is straight incompetence, the case-managers are badly trained, and there's extremely high turnover. The benefit side of WINZ is largely mechanical, job-matching less so - so job-matching looses out. My case-manager didn't know what to do when 'union organiser' wasn't in any of the databases. He couldn't load that in either as the jobs I was looking for, or (more disturbingly) the last job I had. We spent a good ten minutes trying to find any job in there that in anyway matched 'union organiser' (Him: "What about HR Manager" Me: "Not so much").

The other problem is that it makes it easier for social welfare to use the job-search as part of the ways it sanctions beneficiaries. Most people would argue that this was the point of loading WINZ up with employment in the first place (and that's entirely possible), and I wouldn't disagree, but I suspect it's counter-productive.

One of the most ridiculous activities was looking at a list of fifteen skills and number my top ten. Several of them I had no idea what they meant (and I picked reading comprehension as one of my skills). "Co-ordination Adjusting actions in relation to other's actions" - whether or not I'm good at that really does depend on the actions that are being talked about. Based on the ten I chose I had to be put into a talent pool (their words). The talent pools were a standard array of low-wage jobs. Many of the talent pools such as caregiver, retail and customer service are casualised industries that have little chance of delivering anyone full-time hours (which is supposed to be the goal of all this).

I want to make it really clear that I'm not arguing that caregiving, customer service, and retail are beneath me because I'm a middle-class white girl with an MA, and a professional job. That work is not beneath me, or anyone else - but the conditions that those jobs are done in, the part time casualised nature of the industries, with your hours of work at the whime of the employer - those conditions are bad for the vast majority of workers. It's also not a solution to unemployment, because people cycle in and out, one week they earn enough the next they don't. Taking the attitude that an on-call job (where you don't actually get called) is better than nothing, does not keep people off the unemployment benefit, long term. What does (apart from changing the monetary policy so that workers' lives aren't used to fight inflation) is making sure people are in jobs that will give them a livelihood. For most people pushing them into insecure employment makes secure employment further away, not closer.

The third reason why social welfare and employment should be two seperate areas was made clear to me during my session. My case manager wanted me to go on a course. Since my only goal of the entire session was 'no WINZ courses', I put up a strong case why that would be a bad idea.** When he agreed not to send me on the course he said "I was just testing you, I wanted to see what you would say, I can see that your confident, and you know what to do so you don't have to go."

Now I've no idea if he really was, or whether he was trying to save face. But what he said was true, confidence is hugely important when you're looking for jobs. It's a completely confidence destroying business putting yourself out there for rejection. The more confidence you have in yourself, the more likely you are to be able to keep on going, the less likely you are to be depressed by the job hunt and unemployment.

WINZ does not give people confidence, because case-managers tend to treat every person who come through their doors as if they've done something wrong.**** This destroys people's confidence and makes them feel like shit (not to mention the power WINZ has over people's livihood). I think fighting this attitude towards beneficiaries is a very important project, but it's a long term project. If Social Welfare and Employment had never merged, then the work search could be happening in . I think that'd be much more likely to get people into jobs with secure hours that match their skills and experience (putting people in other sorts of jobs as a stop-gap measure makes unemployment levels look good, but if anythign it adds to government costs as people are less likely to stay in their jobs, and getting people on the benefit is a long process).

*That's WINZ speak for applying for a benefit, it as euphamistically named as you might expect, there was little assessment and less planning.

** I've realised since that he probably felt that I had shown him up at the previous seminar (I'd pointed out inaccuracies and argued, and other people had joined in). He appeared to be quite new and struggle a bit with the software and the forms. I'm worried that this is going to end badly. I suspect the combination of not knowing what to do, and not wanting to lose face is why he sent me home before the interview was finished.

*** Unfortunately I missed the main argument, which was that he couldn't send me on a course until my benefit started. I'm not entitled till the twelth, and the course he wanted me to go on started on the eighth.

**** I'm going to meet with my case manager in six weeks if I haven't find a job in his words 'to find out what you're doing wrong'. Maybe not finding a job in six weeks over the Christmas break isn't anything that I've done wrong.

Maia vs. WINZ: The Forms

You get a lot of forms after your WR4U seminar, all in a pretty orange folder. In fact that's the reason you go to WRK4U seminars, because they won't give you the form to apply for the unemployment benefit unless you go to a WRK4U seminar. Apparently they are currently on very dodgy legal ground in doing this, but the government is going to change the law to increase WINZ's surveillance of people with the audacity to want government support very soon. I knew I could probably get out of the seminar before I went, but I decided it wasn't worth the effort, plus I wanted to write a blog post about it.*

About half the forms and random bits of paper they give you are about applying for the benefit, the other half are about looking for work.

My favourite form of the whole lot is the self-assessment form. In this form they give you a set of questions and you have to circle 1-5 depending on whether they apply 'Not At All' or 'Always'. Some of the statements are really inane "I am a positive person" is the silliest. Although my personal favourite was: "I know y rights and obligations as an employee" after 4 years of being a union organiser I wanted to make a new category 6 or - 'more than WINZ form-writers'.

You have to be careful with these evaluations though, because if you're not you might come across as the sort of people who needs to go on a WINZ course. WINZ courses are boredom vortexes from which you may never recover, and while Straight2Work - Retail sounds bad, I'm sure it's nothing compared to what they've got from someone who doesn't know that they must circle at least 4 on every question about job interviews and CVs.

The forms about work are funny, and relatively easily ignored (although they expect you to keep a job lead diary of all the job-leads that you've gone after and followed up, isn't surveillance fun). The bigger problem is the application form itself. Here's what you need, besides the form:

Verification of bank account details (easy enough for me, harder for people who don't have a bank account).

Original of birth certificate or passport (I have my birth certificate filed under 'D' for documents in my filing box - people with a bad relationship with their parents might find it harder to get hold of, and it costs time and money to get a replacement - even more so if you were born overseas).

Another form of identification such as driver's licence (which is problematic if you don't have a driver's licence)

A letter from Inland Revenue showing your tax number (I saved one of these under 'T' - otherwise I'd have had to make a special trip down to inland revenue. Not that big a deal for someone with a car and without a child).

Gross income details for the last year (I did this by getting my ex-employer to fill out a form. It was easy enough to do, because we have a really good relationship. But an ex-employer could really screw you over, particularly if they hadn't provided pay-slips. It would also be that much harder if you had two jobs, casual or part-time work).

Verification of accomodation costs (filed under 'F' for flat - and relatively easy for most people although harder if you don't have a tenancy agreement).

Verification of assets (just a trip to the bank away - although the bank will probably charge you).

There's a whole bunch of other things you may have to verify, names changes, evidence of citizenship/residency status, children's birth certificates, . Then if you were silly enough to admit you were in a relationship in the nature of marriage you have to provide all the same information for your partner. For any supplementary allowances there's more documentation; if you want a disability allowance you have to go to the doctor (at your own expense) and provide receipts of everything you've ever bought.

If you know what you need in advance it may not be that hard making sure you have all this stuff when the time comes. But if you don't, then it's a lot of time and expense, when you're probably least able to provide it.

Which comes back to the theme of these posts - it's not the ones who need help least who are kept out by bureaucracy - it's those who need it most.

* I'm 28 the fact that I can treat dealing with WINZ as a strange venture into a foreign land is both weird and a sign of my priviledge.

I don't even have a category

In a lot of those rather annoying end of year round-ups* people have mentioned this as the year that New Zealand politicians finally started taking notice of climate change. I wouldn't disagree, I'm just not convinced it's a good thing for stopping climate change.

I'm the opposite of knowledgeable about the subject. While I find ecosystems and evolution fascinating, I don't have much energy for environmental politics. This is partly because I disagree with the individualist bent of much environmental politics, but it's mostly because I cannot be a political activist if I don't have hope, and when I think of climate change (for example) hope is not the phrase that immediately springs to mind (I make it a general rule not to think about climate change for more than thirty seconds at a time).

But the only solution to climate change in mainstream politics appears to be to turn pollution and the environment into a commodity. The debate becomes how much of a cost is too high to pay for businesses - how low the price can be to get to destroy our world.

I just don't see how it can be a solution. The many things that are produced for profit, whether its food, housing, they don't meet people's needs. Creating things for a profit is what got us into this mess in the first place.

I was talking about it with Dr Frances, a scientist friend who knows much more about these things than I do, and she agreed with my points, but said that it was hard to see what other sort of solution there could be under capitalism.

* It pisses me off how there's always 'best of business' included in these rounds ups, but never 'best for unions', and the politics is always party-political and never politics of resistance. Unfortunately I'm too close to write one myself, but someone else should.

If only I could get a job like that

As if to prove my point about the problems at work, the Sunday Star Times has an article about a recent employment case, where stress at work made a woman ill:

When a new manager was employed at the store in 2003, staff relations deteriorated until Williams, on separate occasions, suffered an epileptic seizure and a migraine as a result of stress.

She was then told that she would be sent home if she came to work without make-up on.

I'm glad to say that this ended OK, she resigned from her job, but the court has ordered payments totalling $30,000.

But that won't stop WINZ sending people to Kimberleys work, or putting someone on a 13 week stand-down if they got fired for not wearing make-up.

Year in Review

I've seen a few people do a year in review by posting the first sentance they wrote each month (the most recent was Raising WEG.

This is what I was writing. It's actually a fairly accurate representation, except there's not enough Joss.

I think it's colonialism's fault that I'm grumpy.

The Senate has appointed Alito to the supreme court.

Isn't it a good thing that the state sector unions put so much time and energy into getting labour re-elected promoting the importance of health and education?

I am not hosting any comment that calls Louise Nicholas a liar.

There was a protest march in support of Louise Nicholas today in Auckland.

Now I stayed away from the John Miller's list of top 50 conservative rock songs, because it was too dorky to comment on (plus Amanda did a fine job).

One of the biggest lecture theatres at Victoria University has a sticker up the front it says "Mobilisation May 1: Stop the Tour".

A New Zealand Idol contestant has been kicked off the show for being pregnant.

I went to a Coutdown supermarket on the weekend.

As I said in my last post, I have some experience with alternative primary schooling.

I've become convinced that I will know the last person on the unemployment benefit in Wellington.

This is what she had to say about the Medical Laboratory Workers strike.

Maia vs WINZ Part 1: WRK4U

I'm soon finishing up working at the union, which means I'm going to have to deal with WINZ. I've decided that the best way to deal with this is to re-tell all contact with WINZ as an epic adventure on my blog.

The first step in this story is the WRK4U seminar. As many of my readers probably know before you can apply for a benefit (at least in Wellington) you must go on a Work4U seminar. The main goal of a WRK4U seminar is to kill people with boredom before they get the chance to apply for the dole.

My seminar was very much what you'd expect at a Wellington seminar at this time of year: mostly pakeha, mostly young, mostly men. There were five women, including me, and all the other women were students, as was the only Maori guy there.

The first thing the guy running the seminar asked us was if we had a partner. I was very pleased to see that everyone said no. While I'm not suggesting any specific person was lying (and in case there are any WINZ employees reading this I'm not in a relationship in the nature of marriage) - lying to WINZ about the nature of your relationships is an important rite of passage in this country.

Relationships in the nature of marriage have a funny history. Women on the DPB were one of Muldoon's many targets, and in the late 1970s (the DPB only became a statutory benefit in 1972) there was a real campaign against women on the DPB who knew any men. One cabinet member was explaining what a relationship in the nature of marriage meant, and he said that the woman didn't necessarily have to be having sex with a man for the man to be financially responsible for her, because he knew lots of married people who never had sex. At the time they tried to get a woman to sign an agreement that specified that she wouldn't have dinner with the same man more often than three times a week, or have sex with him more than once a fortnight. Whether their ideas of relationships in the nature of marriage are weird or accurate probably depends on whose marriage they were using as a basis.

The rest of the seminar involved a WINZ employee showing us over-head projector slides and explaining them to us and, as time went by, people arguing with him. The guy asked us who the major employers were in Wellington, of course everyone said the government. He agreed but then said restaurants, and then mentioned McDonalds and KFC by name (which is complete rubbish, I know the person who organises for fast-food outlets in Wellington, and they're not that big in terms of total hours). Just in case we were thinking we should be looking for actual jobs, with fixed hours.

Then he put up a chart showing how much money we'd get on the benfit compared with how much money we'd get in a full-time job. He explained further that if you got into a job the employer would see how well you were doing, and give you a pay rise (I looked sceptical and giggled a bit at this, since this cheery picture doesn't match either my personal, or union experience of employers' attitudes towards pay rises). Then he said that the benefit would stay the same amount forever, and ever and you'd never get any pay increases. When I said "surely the benefit gets inflation adjusted" - he wouldn't even answer my question and say 'yes the benefit is inflation adjusted.'

I think the idea of the seminar was supposed to be that you sit there and listen to the WINZ guy talk. It should come as no surprise to readers (and certainly not to anyone who knows me), that I wasn't very good at that. I can't remember where I started butting in, but I do know that by the time he got to the working for families package entitlements I was explaining it (after that he said he thought I should get a job working for WINZ, which shut me right up).

The really good thing is that once I started, everyone else started putting their two cents in. One of the guys there didn't have the two forms of ID they claimed to need, and another woman said 'it's just another stupid hurdle to try and persuade us not to apply.'

After this we had to go away again, make another call to the 0800 number and set up another time wasting appointment. Apparently you used to make the second appointment at the end of the first appointment, but they don't do that anymore. Presumably because if just 1 in 20 people don't have a phone and find it just too hard to ring the 0800 number, that's many benefits they don't have to pay each year.

The whole thing was in essence creating opportunities to shove people down the cracks. What makes me so angry is that it won't be the people who need the benefit least who don't get the benefit under this system, it'll be the people who need it most. I'm fairly certain that I'll get the benefit, and I'm also fairly certain that the woman sitting next to me, who'd been on the student allowance and was wearing a Gucci bracelet, will too. But the guy who'd been on the independent youth benefit and didn't have a passport or a birth certificate, he probably won't.

What bothered me most is how any form of paid work was again and again portrayed as the solution to everyone's problems. There were posters on the wall with photos of happy workers and inane quotes such as "I love my job so I always give 100%."

Even in a half hour seminar (well it was supposed to be half an hour), the guy took the bosses side against the workers on a number of different occasions. He was talking about Targetted Assistance, and used the example of someone who bought a stereo on hire purchase one week, and the employer put him off the next. This implies that bosses can just get rid of people at will.

I'm not saying that having a job can't be good for someone's life, of course it can. But they're not necessarily; employers have a very real power over workers, and particularly in an unorganised workplace, where employees have absolutely no power, that power can make someone's life much worse.

Just this month I've talked to workers who were trying to fight back against really awful sexual and racial harassment, another worker who was made to work so many hours that she fell ill, and someone else who was driven out of her job. A few weeks ago I walked past an accident on the street - someone had been crushed to death at work.

There is more to this life than having our labour exploited.

Crumbs from Rich Men's Tables

I've sat in employment agreement negotiations where it's been a huge victory to get an increase in the statutory minimum bereavement leave of three days when a workers child dies. When it comes to employment you have to fight for every crumb, and it's really easy to underestimate how much of a difference those crumbs can make.

$11.25 an hour, the new minimum wage from 1 April next year, is not a lot of money. But it can buy some more meat, the use of heater, more clothes, or maybe even a trip to the movies every so often. For the minimum wage workers who are working two jobs (or working and studying) maybe the increase will enable them to work a few less hours each week.

That 120,000 workers will get pay increase due to this minimum wage order, shows just how disgusting low New Zealand Emploeyrs pay. Most of those workers will be women, as women's work is the least valued in this society.

Which is the other side to minimum wage increases. Every wage increase creates more minimum wage workers. Cleaning and caregiving are underpaid (women's) industries where many workplaces would be within the new minimum pay-rate. Employers will try and use these minimum wage increases as an opportunity to devalue the skill of (one group of employers has already publicly stated their intention to do so). The only way we can stop this is by organising and bargaining collectively.. The minimum wage order makes this task more urgent, not less.

Won't somebody please think of the children

In my effort to catch up on issues I missed while life was kicking my ass, can I just say I hate the government. From Scoop:

Coca Cola Amatil (NZ) Limited (CCANZ) and Frucor Beverages Group Limited (Frucor), the New Zealand distributor of Pepsi beverages, have signed the world’s first agreement to stop directly selling all full sugar soft drinks and full sugar energy drinks to New Zealand schools.

The voluntary agreement was signed between the beverage industry and government this afternoon.

CCANZ and Frucor have agreed to stop directly selling full sugar carbonated soft drinks and full sugar energy drinks to any schools (primary, intermediate and secondary) in New Zealand. This will take affect progressively from today and will be completed by 2009.

Both companies will provide alternatives, including no or low sugar soft drinks, fruit juices and flavoured waters.

Coca-Cola Amatil (N.Z) Limited Managing Director, George Adams, says the industry was prepared to do its small part in the battle against rising obesity levels in New Zealand.

I'd be happy to see soft-drink companies kicked out of schools entirely. I think the food provided in schools should be put produced for it's taste and nutritional value, not for profit. But I think this change is worse than the status quo. Coke has some nutritional value, as energy is pretty essential to our bodies ongoing well-being. Diet Coke doesn't actually have any food in there, just a message that the person who drinks it should be smaller.

It never stops

I don't want to write about rape right now. I have so many other subjects where I have something to say. I want to write about why national education standards are considerably less benign than they sound, and refute the idea that companies that produce health supplements are run entirely by fluffy bunnies.

But then I read a headline that says 'stranger rape brings 11 year jail sentance' - and the writer of the article thought that the fact that the woman who was raped was a virgin was pertinent information. The messages our criminal justice system send about consent and rape are so appalling that I can't stop writing about it. For example, in this case the judge took into account that the crime was 'premedidated' and deemed that a factor that made the crime worse. If a man doesn't plan to rape a woman, if he thinks she's going to consent, and 'only' rapes her when she doesn't - then that makes it less bad.

That story, that anger, wasn't what drove me to write this post. It was my admiration of another woman. Rape crisis centres in Taranaki have reported that nine women had come to them reporting drug rapes in a four day period.

One of those women wrote an e-mail about her experience and asked that it be passed on:

How do I feel? Everyone keeps asking.

I know that I would like to know what happened and why, I would like to know why he chose me.

What was it about me that made him think he could drug and rape me? Was it something I did? The lady in the paper said we go out looking sluttish. I was in jeans and a hoody. How sluttish is that?

I would like to know what he looked like, because now I am afraid of everyone; I keep looking at every man and thinking, is that him? I'm afraid to be alone.

I go out of the house and think that everyone knows what happened to me. I see in the paper that they are urging us to come forward to the police. What would I tell them? I can't remember anything. What did he look like? I don't know. Where did he rape you? I don't know. Had you had anything to drink? Yes. Were you drunk? No.

Are the police going to believe me? I don't know.

Does anyone believe me? Am I going mad? I don't know.

How do I feel?

Ashamed, nervous, dirty, angry, confused, and jumpy, but mostly I'm afraid.

For the man that did this, f–- you. Karma will come around and get you. F–- you, you bloody coward. How dare you do this to me, how dare you do this to anyone and all you other rapists, f–- you too.

To any other women out there who have had anything like this happen, find someone to talk to, it is helping me understand a lot. I hope one day I can move on. I know one day I will move on.

More on Buffy and comics

I think my actual point in this post was hidden a little deep, so I thought I'd explain it a bit.

I objected to the image of Buffy in the comic, of course I did. I object to 95% of the images of women that are presented in our society. But I objected, particularly, to that being an image of Buffy, and I don't think I was particularly clear why.

As a medium television is aimed at women, more than men. A television show is trying to sell an audience, not sell itself. In particular it is trying to sell consumers, which means women.

Super-hero comics are only trying to sell themselves, and like beer, they seem to have decided they get the biggest audience by creating (it is clear that most beer advertisers believe that men evaluate their beer buying choices on which beer is the least likely to give them girl germs). The biggest way these comic books create the homosocial world, is by creating their female characters as male fantasies.

My objection to the comic book image of Buffy, isn't that it is any more or less real than the image of Buffy on TV. It's that the shape of her body is created for men. The shape of Buffy on television was created for women - in the most negative way possible. There's no way you'd see women like that on television - television's job is to convice us that it's not OK to have thighs that big.

I don't think it's any worse to create images to make women feel bad, than it is to creates images to fulfill men's fantasies.* But images of women as skinny as Sarah Michelle Gellar, are aimed at me. Images of women who look like they've had several ribs removed, worn a corset, and still managed to develop rock hard abs are not.

I'd rather have a Buffy who was supposed to make me feel bad about myself, than a Buffy who was supposed to be nothing to do with me.

* Is that what they're supposed to do? I don't really know. I find it hard to believe that anyone would find breasts of steel arousing. I suspect the actual role of women drawn like that is much more complicated, some combination of power and helplessness, as well as creating a particular image of what a sexually attractive women looks like.

Call it 'Love' or call it 'Reason'

Recently Foolish Owl posted the lyrics to Love Me I'm a Liberal. It's a great song. If you haven't read the lyrics you should go do that now.

Reading the lyrics to 'Love Me I'm a Liberal' made me sad. There was a time in my life I loved Phil Ochs. When I'm Gone was on the short-list of songs I wanted played at my funeral. I still have his live album and it's wonderful.

But I don't listen to his music any more, not since I read a biography of his life. Phil Ochs was a great lyricist, but he was also violent and abusive.

Like most music genres political folk is male dominated, and there's a lot of sexism in it. When the lock-out ended it took me a while to clean out the sexism of Talking Union Blues so I felt comfortable posting it on my blog. The original third verse of Union Maid, is so offensive that it makes me giggle. That doesn't bother me that much. I either listen to the music in its original form, or (more likely) a recent re-recording that has lyrics I like better. The nice things about folk music is that everyone changes the lyrics up sometimes.

It is regrettable, but understandable, that such sexism was acceptable in political movements in the past. But I can overlook that in a way I can't overlook men like Phil Ochs sang for freedom and abused the women around them.

It's particularly political folk music that I have this reaction to. Other forms of art I'm generally less fussy about. I'm not going to stop loving In My Life, because 50% is a conservative estimate of the number of men in the Beatles who were violent and abusive.

But political folk music, at least the stuff I listen to, is music about liberation. Abusing the power society gives you is fundamental incompatible with anyone's liberation. Just like I wouldn't be interested in a brilliant interpretation of When I'm Gone, from someone who didn't mean it. I lost interest in Phil Och's interpretation of 'When I'm Gone' to the extent that he didn't mean it.

I want to emphasise that my reaction is not one of political purity, but my emotional reaction to the disconnect between the song and what I know of the person who wrote it. I'd be interested in how other people feel.

Actual Women?

As fans of Buffy probably already know, from March next year 'Season 8' will run monthly in comic book form. Joss will write the first four, last four and some in between. I'm excited, really I am, I love Buffy beyond the telling of it.

But I'm just not sure I can be persuaded to love superhero comic books. I enjoyed Fray, it had Joss dialogue and great twists and turns. But the drawings of Fray and her sister depressed me - croptops, tiny wasits, and breasts of steel.

Joss says the right things:

TVGuide.com: Does she get comic-book superheroine breast implants?

Whedon: She really doesn't. I've been fortunate that I've never worked with a T&A artist. I'm very specific about that.

TVGuide.com: Isn't that the raison d'etre of lots of comics?

Whedon: That's part of why I stopped reading comics for a while. All the people I work with draw actual women.

But this is one of the sample pages from the Buffy comic provided with that very article:


I suppose there are possibly women who have a waist hip ratio of .66 (or whatever that figure has), but Buffy sure wasn't one of them.

It seems a bit stupid to be complaining about the images of women in a comic book based on a TV series where Amber Benson was 'the big one'. But at least with TV you are looking at an acutal women. When a TV actress loses weight she does lose weight all over. Comic book women are fantasies - and they're male fantasies. I don't want to look at images of women created to fulfil the desires of men. The endless images of women with exagerated hour-glass figures make it clear that women readers are peripheral to superhero comics. That the stories are not supposed to be for or about us.

I'm just not sure I could handle Buffy stories that said that to me.

Radical?

I've recently finished reading Barbara Ransby's Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. She's one of the many women (and men) whose stories get ignored in the deradicalisation of the black freedom movement.*

The first I read about Ella Baker years ago, in Mary King's autobiography. But something about the way Mary King described Ella Baker stayed with me, and I've always wanted to know more about her. I think it was the tone of respect - Mary King said that a sign of this respect was that everyone always called her "Miss Ella Baker" (most of those in the black freedom movement came from the south - where the use of honorifics was decidedly political).

I've always wanted to know more about Miss Ella Baker's life, and it was fascinating to read about how she became the person who earned such a huge amount of respect among the students who were fighting so hard for such simple demands. But for me, the most interesting aspect of the book was how much I agree with the way Ella Baker did politics.

Ella Baker was a grass-roots organiser. What made her politics and action radical, as that she centred her politics around ordinary people.

Barbara Ransby demonstrates really directly what this meant. In 1959 black people in Fayette County got together and tried to vote, this was a big problem to a lot of white people in Fayette county. A lot of the people who tried to vote were sharecroppers, and they got evicted from their land for trying to vote - they lost their house and their income. Instead of leaving Fayette County they built a shanty town on land donated by a black landowner. SNCC and Ella Baker both considered this an important battle, and supported, and wrote about the sharecroppers. The NAACP report focused on the well-to-do grocer, the teacher and theminister, who were not able to vote, rather than the vast majority of poor, semi-illiterate sharecroppers.

In 1960 there were many young black students who were the first people in their family to go to college, some of these students took action against the racist world they lived in. These students became SNCC, and many adopted Ella Baker's ideas of leadership. When they went to a town, they were there to organise, to build trust, to build hope, and eventually work their way out of a job. Despite their relatively priviledged position, they didn't assume that those with power within the black community were more important than those without.

Ella Baker had on-going political disagreements with Martin Luther King Jr., because he had a completely different idea of leadership. He believed in a more traditional view of leadership - that it was his job to lead black people somewhere. Barbara Ransby also implies that Ella Baker also just plain didn't like Martin Luther King Jr. This is where I stop just admiring her, and start identifying her. I hate Big Men of the Left (they are usually men - I suspect it's because most people would react really hostilely to women who acted in the same way). I've known a few men who were seen, or saw themselves in that role, and I can't stand them, usually for a reason - but I usually start hating them before I have the reasons. They believe that they know better, and that they are important in and of themselves, rather than for the work they do.

My idea of leadership is much closer to Ella Baker's - although I don't have her skills. Personality and aesthetics are part of that - whenever I've felt I could make a difference to an important decision people were making I've felt the responsibility like a weight and wanted to run away and hide. But it is mostly about my politics - and my vision of the world.

* I've written a little bit more about that here

Helen Clark can just fuck off

This is what she had to say about the Medical Laboratory Workers strike:

Miss Clark said district health boards could not agree to "any demands that are thrown on the table" and there had to be negotiation. It was interesting that one person, Deborah Powell, represented the various groups of health workers who had taken industrial action this year, she told Radio Live yesterday.

"The fact is that the records would show that there's been more willingness to negotiate by other unions in the sector than there is with these ones led by the same person."

At a post-Cabinet press conference later in the day Miss Clark said she was pointing out the obvious, that the strikes were being driven by essentially the same organisation.

Asked if Dr Powell was simply doing her job, she said: "That's for others to judge but these strikes which have been rolling through junior doctors, radiographers, lab workers - are all coming from the same stable."

To suggest that the only reason that health workers are unhappy, the only reason that they're prepared to take collective action, is that they're being controlled by somone, is insulting and ridiculous.

I could give you a whole bunch of reasons to support the Medical Laboratory Workers, but I'm not goign to. That'd play into the idea that every industrial dispute is a form of special pleading. I've had enough of that - I support the strike because workers are fighting for better wages and conditions.

I'm glad to say that the Prime Minister isn't the voice of the people - a Stuff poll had over 50% support for the strike