Trade unionists arrested after peaceful occupation of bank...
Police attacked an anti-war march in Auckland today, arresting four peaceful protesters and injuring several more. The march had been jointly organised by Workers Against the War of Terror and Global Peace and Justice Auckland, and was part of a global day of action against the occupation of Iraq.
Earlier, three hundred protesters had gathered outside the United States consulate, where they burnt the Stars and Stripes and heard news of the anti-war strike being held by dockworkers in San Francisco.
After heading up Queen Street the marchers launched a peaceful occupation of the offices of the ANZ bank. A sound system was brought into the bank, and protesters and ANZ staff heard speeches which described the bank's role in the carve-up of the Iraqi economy by multinational companies based in the West, a plunder which has brought economic chaos and 70% unemployment to Iraq. A message of solidarity from the Federation of Workers' Councils and Unemployed of Iraq was read, and an Iranian woman spoke about her opposition to US threats against her country.
After leaving the ANZ, the protesters were regrouping in Queen St when a man drove his ute into their ranks at some speed, knocking several people out of the way before being stopped. The police used this incident as an excuse to launch an attack upon protesters. Without warning, marchers were set upon, and pushed and shoved onto the footpath. When a leader of the protest used the sound system to assert his right to march on the street police arrested him, prompting anger from his comrades and a series of scuffles that lasted half an hour.
The confrontation spilled onto Victoria St West, as the police tried to arrest more marchers. The crowd chanted 'Police brutality!' and 'Go home copper' as the police threw wild punches and tried to arrest random protesters and even passers by. A number of protesters were freed from police clutches by their comrades, but four ended up in the cells at Auckland Central station, where they were charged with obstruction and assault.
Refusing to disperse, protesters headed back down to the US Consulate, where a series of speakers used an open microphone to denounce the actions of the police. Dave Brown, a spokesman for Workers Against the War of Terror, pointed out the connection between the ANZ occupation and the police attack, noting that 'As soon as we violate the sanctity of capitalist property in any way, the cops act'.
Speakers from Australia and Scotland recalled similar police actions against anti-war demonstrations in their own countries, and emphasised that the anti-war movement was also a movement in defence of democratic liberties threatened by 'anti-terrorist' legislation and the equation of left-wing protest with terrorism.
Another marcher pointed out that at least two of the arrested demonstrators were trade union activists. It is no accident that the trade unions of Iraq are the target of US repression, and that the dockworkers of San Francisco
Everyone disgusted by today's attack on peaceful protesters should attend the next meeting of Workers Against the War of Terror, which will be held at 2pm, on the second of April, at Grey Lynn Community Centre, 510 Richmond Road. (For more details e mail davebrownz (at) yahoo.com)
Role of Police Violence
Police violence used against those protesting the war in Iraq in Auckland on March 19 was deliberate. It was the response to the success of the protest in entering the ANZ and exposing the truth that this bank profits from the blood shed in two years of imperialist war and occupation of Iraq. As the truth about the link between profits and imperialist war becomes known, we can expect the system to resort to increasing violence.
The actions of the police in Auckland on March 19 cannot be explained by protestors being on the street or footpath, or for that matter standing in the intersection. Many protests in the past have done much more than this and passed without serious incident.
We should see the police actions as deliberate rather than the knee jerk response of some over-excited cops relieved not to be handing out tickets to motorists.
They had half and hour to plan their response to what was the really serious threat to the bosses' profit system, the fact that the protestors took over the ground floor of the bank where the full facts of the ANZ rotten profiteering in Iraq was exposed, to the workers the public and the media, and yet left when asked by the police without any arrests.
The decision by the police to respond aggressively from that point on was because they had been found wanting, and had not been able to protect the sacrosanct private property rights of the ANZ, one of the four Aussie banks that run NZ's finance system and profit to the extent of billions a year paying less than 10% tax.
The protest movement had effectively targeted and exposed the fundamental immorality of capitalist profit - that John Howard backed George Bush in sending troops to invade Iraq to recolonise the oil wealth of Iraq, killing over 100,000 and still killing every day, to profit from this plunder. Now Howard and his Aussie capitalist backers are shown up in the full glare of the protestors truth, to be getting their payback, their share in the plunder of imperialist war
The cops did what they get paid for. Try to shut down the protestors from exposing the truth that the ANZ is pocketing part of the blood money of the Iraq war. The way to do this most effectively is to provoke the organisers, pick them off as violently as possible so as to make the rest of us angry and disrupt the protest. This was intended to intimidate the protest movement and close down the exposure of the profit system.
They failed to shut us up or to intimidate us. We were not intimidated. Not only did most of the protestors surround the cops in the attempt to prevent the arrests, those who physically tried to.
In the Court actions CWG will also be saying that this is what the police are paid to do when the property of the ruling class, and the link between profits and war, are publicly revealed. The conclusion we draw is that the more we expose the rotten profit warmongering system, the more violent will be the repression.
Therefore, the working class needs to prepare to defend itself, avoid unnecessary confrontations with the cops, and organise workers to strike against all those corporations that are shown to be profiting from war.
From Class Struggle 60 March-April 2005
To mark two years since the US led invasion of Iraq, and the continuing bloody occupation of Iraq, an international day of action on March 19 was called by numerous anti-war groups to demand ‘Troops Out Now!’. In the US the Million Worker March rank and file union activist movement strongly endorsed this call. In solidarity with the MWMM call to get organised labour out on March 19, WAWOT (Workers Against the War of Terror) entered into a united front with GPJA (broad anti-war coalition) to hold a rally at the US Consulate in Auckland and a march to the ANZ Bank in downtown Auckland.
This was the best anti-war march yet. Why? Apart from one spontaneous march of young people who broke away from the main GPJA march on 20 March 2003, and several Muslim organised marches in 2003 and 2004, most rallies in Auckland were aimed at stopping NZ troops going unless sanctioned by the UN (The Labour Party’s position). This time, however, there were two important developments.
First the rally was built by collaboration between GPJA activists who were oriented towards the unions, and by WAWOT which is committed to taking the struggle against imperialist war into the labour movement as the only force capable of defeating imperialism. The overall message of the rally and march was that we cannot rely on any capitalist government to stop war. Rather we have to mobilise the working class to defeat the capitalist class.
Second, the 300 mainly young protestors, after burning the flag outside the US Consulate, went on to occupy the Queen St branch of the ANZ Bank for 30 minutes with a teach-in on the profiteering of the bank in Iraq. While this was partly a propaganda exercise to expose the link between the banks profits and the occupation of Iraq, an important proposal raised at the bank was that the ANZ workers take industrial action to get the owners of the bank to stop profiteering from Iraqi blood money. This was an important step in showing how workers can organise to stop imperialist war.
From Class Struggle 60 March-April 2005
Dear Class Struggle comrades,
I thought I’d bring you up to date with some of the events in my West Auckland local of Unite! Community Union. Unite! was founded as a union for beneficiaries and low-income earners. In recent times Unite! has been controlled by Matt McCarten, and has been divided into two sections, a Community union for beneficiaries and some low-income earners, and a ‘workers’ union for employees as diverse as English language teachers, chefs, and hotel staff.
Our local is opposed to the expansion of Unite! into these new areas, because it has involved poaching members from other unions, a practice which is always counter-productive, and which is giving Unite! a bad reputation in the union movement. We are also concerned at the recent attempts of Unite! organiser and McCarten ally Mike Treen to bring prison guards into the union. We see prison guards as no better than cops, and we don’t think they belong in the workers’ movement.
We are alarmed by the way that unemployed and other beneficiaries are now being marginalised through the whole of Unite! We insist that Unite! was formed in the first place to organise and unite low-paid workers, unemployed workers and beneficiaries – in fact, we would argue that Unite! has no other reason to exist.
Our local is standing candidates in the upcoming Unite! national executive elections - we hope to join with leftists from other parts of the union to highlight the errors of the union leadership and increase the weight of the opposition on the national executive.
Our branch suffers from chronic poverty, so that even getting members to meetings is difficult. We have no full-timers, our secretary is an honorary secretary only, none of our members has been a union delegate in the past, and until recently we have not been constituted as a local.
We find it difficult to get out propaganda and we have little or no capacity to ‘help’ people who are just going to pay a fee and not be active members – hence we don’t get fees, and we have the bare number needed to form a local. Our five leading members have been relying mainly on a benefit, and one has been ‘Jobs Jolted’ onto an AMES course far below his intellectual capacity and education. Another is a PhD student and thus on a limited income.
We were very pleased, then, when we were recently recognised as a local, and received our first refunds from union headquarters. We now need to elect a treasurer along with a president, vice-president and secretary.
Despite our money woes, we have been very active so far this year. We made a special point of attending this year’s May Day demonstration, because we believe that beneficiaries and low income earners have to be recognised as an important part of the workers’ movement. The weather on May the first was bad, and the official demonstration was called off without authorisation by union officials belonging to the May Day Committee. An alternative march to the nearby US consulate to oppose the war on Iraq was proposed by some of our members and despite the heavy rain part of the rally marched there and listened to speakers from a variety of workers’ organisations.
Several of us participated in the recent Global Peace and Justice Auckland demonstration against the war and the phoney handover of power in Iraq. One of our members spoke to the demonstration, noting that our local arose out of the anti-war movement, and emphasising our solidarity with the unemployed workers of Iraq. Some of our members have attempted to investigate a ‘Work Track’ centre in New Lynn, a major working class area of West Auckland. We are concerned about the way that under the ‘Jobs Jolt’ the organisations running various compulsory courses have the right to ask WINZ to cut the benefits of beneficiaries who break course rules.
After observing work track courses ‘from the inside’ we believe that the providers of the courses must be creaming it off – they provide so little in the way of services, despite the generous contracts WINZ gives them!
We issued a press statement condemning the Budget for doing nothing for beneficiaries. We are being vigilant about the possibility that the special benefit may be cut – at present many of those able to get the special benefit rely on it as a top-up, to get them a socially acceptable standard of living.
Our branch decided to participate as strongly as it could in Unite’s attempt to unionise Burger King – four members of our group attended the initial briefing and five members participated with varying success. We deemed the Burger King drive a useful exercise, and it was very educational to see how the union access clause of the Employment Relations Act operated.
An important event in the life of our group took place on May the 8th, when Warren Duffy represented us at the big anti-racism march called in Christchurch by Asians tired of harrassment and assaults. We raised the $300 for Warren Duffy to represent us at the demonstration, and he was able to repay us by making some personal links with left-wing Unite! members in other parts of the country. A new anti-racism march will take place in Wellington on October the 23rd, in response to the desecration of Jewish graves, immigration laws that humiliate Pacific Islanders, the Maori-bashing encouraged by politicians like Don Brash, and the activities of the neo-nazi National Front.
I am hoping that our local will be able to send members to this march, and that we will not be alone in representing the labour movement.
It is clear that racism is on the rise in Aotearoa because of the gaps in class consciousness created by the defeats of the union movement and atomisation of the working class in the 80s and 90s. The building of a strong union movement is the best long-term antidote to both the National Party and the National Front, but a strong union movement can only be built on an internationalist basis.
Sadly, our union movement is lacking in internationalism. Even some of our best unions cross the line - witness the Service and Food Workers Union's recent press release attacking the importing of foreign workers by an understaffed Sealords factory in Timaru, a press release issued in the same week as an appeal for international solidarity with a sacked union member!
Then we have Maritime Union of New Zealand, which mixes a good position on the war in Iraq with the economic nationalist campaign for cabotage. Don't get me started on the Amalgamated Workers Union, which helps the cops sniff out 'illegal' workers on Auckland's building sites. We can't oppose racism if our movement espouses racist policies. We should be uniting with workers of all races and nations, not with cops and prison screws!
I urge comrades in other unions to send representatives to Wellington on October the 23rd.
Best Wishes,
Unite! rank and filer
From Class Struggle 57 August-September 2004
