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The tenth issue of Solidarity, free newssheet of the Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement. Download the .pdf above, or click below to read the contents online.

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“Long ago the Spanish used weapons to kill our ancestors and take our wealth. Now they only need to contaminate us and take our wealth from under our noses.”
- Julia Carrasco, farmer, Choropampa

Free film screening
Wednesday July 7th, 7:30pm
Thistle Hall, 293 Cuba Street

On June 2nd, 2000, a truck from South America’s largest gold mine spilled 151 kilograms of liquid mercury, contaminating three villages in Peru’s northern Andean mountains. The mining company admits that over 900 people were poisoned, but villagers say the real number is much higher.

The villagers’ courageous struggle for health care and justice inspired the documentary Choropampa, The Price of Gold.

“Each time I return to Choropampa, people have grown weaker, as though a terrible plague has befallen the village. Many are losing their sight and motor-skills, their hands tremble uncontrollably, they have difficulty walking and some are even paralized. They die of mysterious illnesses, and yet the company and Peruvian government insist the “mercury problem” has been resolved.”
- Stephanie Boyd (co-director/co-producer)

Over the weekend of June 5-6th, the Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement held its 3rd national conference since it was founded in October 2008. Almost all members were able to attend, meaning people from 5 different regions across the country were present, at the fantastic venue of the Wellington People’s Centre.

The weekend was spent reflecting on and discussing our activity over the previous 12 months, making some changes to our core politics (as written in our Aims & Principles) and how we work (detailed in our Constitution) and coming up with plans for the next 12 months, plus some longer term thinking as well.

Reflecting on the past 12 months

We discussed briefly the current state of class-struggle. While we have not come to any conclusions about what is happening in society, we considered that under the current recession, important issues seem to be low pay, overwork, increasing casualisation and unemployment, increasing costs of living, cut backs to community, education and health services, the privatisation of services and infrastructure, and the rise of a surveillance state replete with more prisons and instruments of repression. While there has been some limited resistance, such as how government workers thawed the pay freeze that was placed on them, mostly resistance is still fragmented, small-scale, isolated and at a low-ebb.

Since the 2009 conference, AWSM has grown slightly – from having members in 3 regions, all in the North Island, to having members in 5 places across both islands.

We have been involved in supporting a range of different workplace struggles in various parts of the country, including (but not limited to): Zeal 320 flight attendants, JB Hi-Fi retail workers, Parliamentary cleaners, Ministry of Justice staff and Synovate call centre workers. We have also been involved in struggles for an increase to the minimum wage, for pay equity between men and women and against the proposed pay freeze for public sector workers.

Outside the workplace, we have been involved in fights against cuts to ACC, against the introduction of user-pays charges on residential water in Wellington, against the closure of the 198 Youth Health Centre in Christchurch, and against the introduction of the Search & Surveillance Bill nationally.

In Wellington and Christchurch we have organised (in coordination with Beyond Resistance in Christchurch) public discussion groups and film nights, on a range of topics including current attacks on the working class, mining in national parks, dole autonomy, tactics for workplace struggle, women and work, and more. We have also hosted talks by a member of the Workers Solidarity Movement in Ireland, looking at how the WSM organise and some of their successes and failures over the past 25 years.

We have published 6 issues of our newssheet, Solidarity, and are now on target for publishing it every month, a goal which we previously had not been able to attain. The current distribution is 700 paper copies across 6 different centres, plus electronic distribution worldwide. Some discussion was held at the conference about increasing the number of paper copies we distribute.

In addition to this, we have produced a handful of different leaflets for various events and struggles, which have been distributed across the country. We have started writing news and analysis articles specifically for the website, as well as those we publish in Solidarity, and our members have been involved, on an individual level, in a variety of other things, including one who spent several months engaging in industrial action (including strikes) at their workplace, involvement in the October 15th Solidarity campaign, and more.

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