“Blame the System, Not the Victim!” Organizing the Unemployed in New Zealand, 1983–1992

Abstract

The restructuring of capital and the transformation of the workforce in the late twentieth century has produced a newly-shaped working class; one that encompasses those in insecure work and unemployed workers. With this repositioning has come new political organizations of unemployed workers, of which Te Roopu Rawakore o Aotearoa, the national New Zealand organization for unemployed workers, is an example. This organization of unemployed was not only significant for its existence in the face of poverty, status disintegration, and a perceived sense of social worthlessness, but also for the tripartite ideology its members employed. Unemployed workers in New Zealand combined the identity politics of race and gender with a class-based critique of society to demand "the right to work and a living wage for all."

An Overview of New Zealand Career Development Services

“…Despite this obligation, careers for Maori have been characterised by disadvantages and by higher unemployment rates, especially for Maori youth. A number of writers (for example, Korndorffer, 1991;Locke, 2007;Sultana, 1990) have noted the disenfranchisement of Maori in the labour market and in training programs. Government-funded programs-such as the Young Persons Training Programme in the early 1990s-that were intended to tackle youth unemployment, according to these critics, perpetuated Maori entry into unskilled occupations and created the scenario for future patterns of unemployment brought on by the vulnerability of the occupations being entered during economic downturns.…”

Cultural Pragmatics and the Re-Fusing of Collective Memory: A Study of Trade Union and Community and Voluntary Representatives' Collective Memory of Neoliberalisation in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…Over the decade 1974-1984 unemployment rose from 0.2 per cent in 1974, to 1.7 per cent in 1982, and then to 4.9 per cent in June prior to the 1984 General Election (Evans et al, 1996(Evans et al, , p. 1860. James also references government-subsidised work and funding to community and voluntary groups introduced by the Muldoon Government in the creation of temporary jobs, which kept half the unemployed to some extent in work, while obscuring real unemployment figures (Locke, 2007). Following the defeat of Muldoon (Mark, CVR).…”

“…and the National Government in 1984, and with numbers participating in job creation schemes peaking in 1985, such programmes were discontinued, severing an important means of funding for community organisations and advocates for the unemployed(Locke, 2007), and increasing the real number of those out of work.of course the commercialisation, and eventually corporatisation and privatisation of the state sector meant, was that a lot of the jobs-and the ones most relevant to South Auckland was the railway workshop jobs-but also jobs in the post, were absolutely decimated. And that had a massive impact on smaller provincial towns, where the job base was cut to bits.…”