Why are employers arrogant enough to advertise that they pay below the minimum wage?

Yesterday, I decided I wanted to find some seasonal work picking fruit so I can make some casual cash while I am traveling Aotearoa on a road-trip. I’d heard that a lot of workers who take on seasonal fruit picking jobs get treated horribly and I don’t doubt it. I’ve had friends who undertook this type of work describe it as “slave labour”. But I thought to myself, “what is a month of being paid the minimum wage and picking fruit because I’m sure I can hack it, for the extra cash?” And I really need the cash at the moment. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

I decided to look on New Zealand’s BackPacker job board which is geared towards people wanting short term work and who, like me, are road tripping around Aotearoa. I checked out some ads for housekeeping and cleaning as well as fruit picking. One of the very first ads I looked at very blatantly stated that as employers they pay below the minimum wage, of $16.50 an hour. What the actual fuck:

I’ll level with you, I have worked low waged jobs most of my life as such I am not really surprised by the ads I read which publicly advertised breaking employment standards. Employers have offered me less than the minimum wage and I took it, because I was desperate and I needed the cash. Regardless of my own lived experience and hard won knowledge, it still annoyed me because it was so brazen and so arrogant.

Here is another ad I found which is looking for a farm hand and offering just $500 a week, and the worker is expected to work a seven day roster, with 6am starts each morning. Not only does this breach minimum wage standards but would be a clear cut case of exploitation. Plenty of employers coerce workers into taking jobs which pay less than the minimum wage but most of them are smart enough to do it behind closed doors:

link to ad

The job above would likely be cash-in-hand meaning, the worker’ is forced to become part of the insidious ‘Black Economy’. Which leaves them in a vulnerable position because they are coerced into committing tax fraud. And for the record offering below the minimum doesn’t just breach minimum employment standards, it also amounts to wage theft. Yes: stealing. Yet these employers, Farmers, whatever they wanna call themselves, seem to be getting away with daylight robbery. 

Anyway I decided I’d had enough of these types of ads being unchecked by the site they run on. And, frankly, I am sick and tired of employers getting away with this shit, with zero accountability or consequences. I updated my FB with a simple and direct call to action:

The tactic I used to hold this employer to a form of accountability wasn’t my own. First Union used similar tactics a few years ago when they were pushing for ‘fair pay for fair work’ at individually owned Pak’N’Save supermarkets. Union reps and people on the picket-lines outside the supermarkets (including me) handed out flyers stating the owner of said supermarket was treating their staff poorly. The flyers asked people to text the owner demanding better pay for their workers. This means people can feel like they are pushing back and engaging in activism but they don’t have to risk job loss or harsh consequences. Every small action against injustice, counts.

As per my Facebook post people texted the owner of the employer in question and pointed out it was illegal to pay below the minimum wage. She responded to most of us stating versions of, “my mother was sick and I was overseas and I didn’t know the minimum wage had gone up.”

Bullshit.

The governmental wage increase goes up annually at exactly the same time: April the 1st. She must have known? And I am sure the dozens of other employers advertising for workers but paying under the minimum wage on that BackPacking boards knew as well. Look, let’s say in some far off distant alternate universe I give these employers the benefit of the doubt. Maybe as business owners they truly didn’t know the basics of employment law or that the minimum wage goes up every year at the same time.  This still begs the goddamn question of:

WHY DIDN’T THEY  KNOW THE BASICS OF EMPLOYMENT LAW???!!!! THEY OWN A BUSINESS!! OMFGGGGGG!!!

Our media was abuzz with whinging employers who were pleading “poverty” over the hike of $00.75 cents. Cry me a river. It isn’t even that much more than the usual hike by our past right wing National government who pushed it up between $0.30 or $0.50. My point is that the media was teeming wth articles about the $00.75 cents increase when it was first announced.  As such I find it hard to believe some employers somehow didn’t know about it.

Clear and blatant breaches of employment law on this site didn’t stop at minimum wage standards being breached. There was job ad after job ad for “work for accommodation and food”, which is pretty dodgy:

link to ad

New Zealand has a strong wwoofing volunteer community and I understand travelers may want to learn organic farming or permaculture on a lifestyle block because the trade of learning skills, fresh kai, and a warm bed for unpaid work seems like a fair deal. But perhaps our wwoofing culture has lead to the normalisation of “food and accommodation” in exchange for unpaid work? Here is one such ad, for organic farming:

link to ad

The job ad which asks for unpaid workers to help milk a thousand cows sounds like a massive and exhausting undertaking. And the ad also says “approx 4 hours work” each day, so there would be no saying how much you might end up working day to day. In what world does this even sound like a fair deal? Actually, I wouldn’t know what a fair deal looks like on a farm so I asked a Farmer who I will call Dairy Man*. He also happens to milk 1000 cows give or take. I asked him how many hours he works on average, he responded:

“The cows are milked twice a day through a 50-bail rotary shed for 10 months of the year. There are 6 full-time staff plus a calf rearer during calving & a student over summer.”

He told me his workers undertake around four hours of work a day. But during “calving” which takes place from August through to September, he told me his workers easily do between “11-12 hours a day”. I asked if trading work on a farm for “accomodation and food” was a fair deal? It was a “no” from him:

“No, it’s not a fair trade. All my staff are paid decent salaries and have accommodation provided on farm at 3/4 market rate.

My lowest paid staff members are on about $20/hour.”

Clearly, some farmers including lifestyle farmers, are taking the utter piss? And are far more about operating on a modern day form of feudalism than giving their “volunteers” an enriching and positive learning experience.

I am going to break this down for you in employment law speak: It’s likely these employers offering “accommodation and food” (and there were tonnes of them) in place of real wages are gonna be in breach of New Zealand’s Zero Hours Act. This act was brought in around two years ago in April. A lot of governmental changes to employer law happen in April and employers should know this! How do they NOT know this???

This Employment Standards Act was a hard won piece of legislation and came about thanks to the hard mahi of Fast Food Workers and Unite Union, battling against contracts called Zero Hours. These types of contract invoke unfair penalties against workers and cause crippling economic uncertainty. The Act was part of a package which aimed to prevent and push back against unfair work practices. If your “volunteers” are working consistent but varying hours that extend past the agreed hours of work, you could be in breach of this Act. Especially if your “volunteers” are working unpaid for an extended amount of weeks and months with no real set start and finish times or agreed hours, or even payment. Giving them some kai and a couch in exchange for such hard labor isn’t fair. 

It would seem our agricultural industry is the the Wild West of workers’ rights when it comes to employment relations. Anything goes. If your business practices depend on unpaid labour and breaking the law then maybe ya’ just shouldn’t be in business.

Here is a run down of the Act, in case any workers/volunteers want to empower themselves and any employers want be less of a cunt… opps, sorry I meant exploitative:

ZERO HOURS ACT’ RUN DOWN: CLICK HERE

I’ve got to ask: are the employers who are offering below the minimum wage or asking for “volunteer labor” on the BackPacker board, just really ignorant about employment law, as at least one of them is claiming? Or does their brazen and arrogant flouting of employment law have much more to do with the fact that there is almost no oversight (in these industries) by the MBIE (Ministry for Business and Innovation). In Auckland, this Ministry Department only has 11 worker labour inspectors to cover every business in one of our major cities. Couple this with the reality that over the last 30-odd years, consecutive governments have dismantled unions’ bargaining power, making it harder, and harder, for them to function/operate and access sites/workplaces. As such workers have become disempowered and unfairly disadvantaged, and wages have (by design) stagnated for our lowest earning workers.  

Thanks to all this Hot Neoliberal Mess, workers often have little representation from Unions or consecutive Governments.  Thus what has resulted is that most of the power within the workplace (and that includes farms) has been transferred from workers and now sits with employers who rarely face any consequences for breaking the law. So they continue to break it with impunity, because they can. Because no one has stopped them.

UPDATE: I spoke to Radio New Zealand about employers advertising that they are paying below the minimum:

wage: https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2018645092/nz-backpacker-job-board-like-the-wild-west

***

Kia ora all! I am freelancing which means I have no secure income so, I rely on donations from the wider public to keep economically afloat. If you liked what I have to say and want to support me, you can make a direct contribution via my bank account:

Name: MISS C A KING

Bank Details: 12-3040-0580277-01

Or you can support me via my Patreon, check it out…

‘In Greed We Trust’: how the Trusts’ in West Auckland are exploiting their workers and breaking the law

You’d hope that if a “charitable” Trusts’ motto is “Giving back and investing into the community”, that they’d start by treating their own workers with respect and dignity, right? Unfortunately, this isn’t the case when it comes to The Portage and Waitakere Licensing Trusts, (hereafter the Trusts) out in West Auckland, New Zealand.

If you aren’t familiar with who or what the Trusts are, between them they have an exclusive license to operate twenty-five retail stores.  These include liquor stores, eleven hospitality venues, and one hotel, in a geographical area covering nearly the whole of West Auckland. In other words, they hold a geographic monopoly when it comes to selling piss, pedalling pokies, and dishing up food and coffee. And they are big on letting everyone know about just how charitable they are, and how much they love their community out West.

Regarding all their blowhard ‘care for the community’-type self-promotion, I can tell you as someone who has worked in one of their restaurants, this ‘care’ and fostering a community approach does not extend to their own workers.

From personal experience, and speaking with dozens of Trusts’ employees, there are many examples of unsafe work environments at their venues. Complaints include sexual harassment, an openly anti-union stance, employees being denied basic employment rights such as breaks, and wage theft. Additionally, the majority of their service workers earn poverty-rate wages while the Trusts’ president earns a six figure salary.  

Up until this point, not much has been said publicly about how this charitable organisation treats their workers, but they have certainly been under the media spotlight for the last few weeks, and NONE of the attention is flattering. The Spinoff recently exposed a number of concerns, such as conflicts of interest among the Trust’s board members, that this “community” organisation promotes problem gambling at their venues, and a lack of transparency in regards to how they spend their money.  Increasingly, it has come to the public’s attention that this community organisation may not be as “charitable” as they profess to be.

From early January 2018 until March 2018, I was employed at Bricklane, a restaurant situated in New Lynn, owned and operated by the Trusts.  Even by hospitality standards, the Trusts have an incredibly low staff retention rate of around 13%. You might ask why they struggle so badly to hold on to staff. Here is your answer:

The Trusts pay the minimum wage, or slightly above it, to the vast majority of their service workers.  When I had my job interview with Scott Kennedy (hospitality manager) he told me that Brick Lane was a “cash cow” and made “loads” of money. Yet very little of this profit is ending up in the pockets of their workers. At least one kitchen hand told me he was on the minimum wage. I spoke to another worker who was employed in one of their retail stores, she stated she was only offered ten cents above minimum wage when she began working for them.

When I was hired I negotiated a starting rate of $17 an hour, but when I was handed my contract I was told I would be paid the baffling amount of exactly $16.88. Another employee I spoke with told me they were also on a seemingly random wage of $16.08 an hour. One has to wonder how on Earth the Trusts calculates the wages they pay their staff.

If you treat your workers as nothing more than units-of-production to turn over a profit for some corporate arm headed by a six-figure-salary-plus-five-figure-bonus “earner”, they tend to quit.

In April 2018, the government increased minimum wage to $16.50. Some employees at Bricklane have told me they were given a measly pay rise – bumped up to just $17 an hour. Across all of their venues, the Trusts’ pay the vast majority of their staff far below the living wage rate, which will rise to $20.55 an hour this year. I guess their sense of “generosity” doesn’t extend to their retail and hospitality workers.

The Spinoff reported that Labour city councillor Ross Clow, also president of the Portage Licensing Trust, is earning an eye watering salary of $127,487 plus bonuses.  And National councillor Linda Cooper, who is the president of the Waitākere Licensing Trust, is earning a salary of more than $100,000. So while people such as Cooper and Clow are on six figure salaries, the vast majority of The Trusts’ workers are earning poverty wages. Does this sound fair to you? Personally, I think it sounds like bullshit.

***

One of the Trusts’ key values, is: “Respect! Do what you say you’re going to, with care for each other.” This sentiment is hardly reflected in the sub-human wages they pay their workers, a wage that does not match inflation, the CPI (consumer price index) or Auckland’s  spiralling living costs. Just because you say something doesn’t make it true, no matter how many times you repeat it.

As far as I am concerned, there is a special place reserved in hell for employers who profit off the blood, sweat, and tears of their own workers.   Paying them so poorly, they can barely survive the rising tide of inequality and wrought, in part, by wage suppression, not failing to mention employers who exploit their staff with no remorse. Employees from West Auckland and ALL other employees from all over Aotearoa deserve to be paid a living wage.  The Trusts’ should lead by actual example, not merely empty rhetoric.

If the discrepancy between Clow and Cooper’s six figure salaries and the pittance paid the Trusts’ hospitality and retail workers does not make your blood boil, perhaps this will: The Spinoff reported that before 2016, the Trusts had sold a whopping NZ$100 million worth of alcohol in the last decade. But as the report continues, “up until recently the Trusts’ financial contribution to local community could be measured in the tens-of-thousands.” More recently, they have invested $1,000,000 dollars per annum back into the community, while spending $200,000 on advertising costs alone!

They are a vastly profitable conglomerate, yet very little of those profits are ending up in the bank accounts and hands of their lowest paid workers, or even the community they are beholden to.

I think it should be noted that the large majority of trustees at the Trusts are actively in favour of paying their own workers poverty wages. Just for some background:

The Trusts’ is made up of three different boards: the Portage Trust Board (ten members), the Waitakere Trust Board (seven members), and lastly the West Auckland Independent Board (WAI) (five members) for a total of 22 Trustees.

A few years ago, the Trusts (like other wider organisations associated with the council and community) put paying all their employees a living wage to a vote. I am told that only around two trustees, voted in favour. Yep, you read that right: Only around two trustees thought their workers deserved to be paid enough to afford the basics of life.

I reached out to Clow for comment over email and I asked for his stance on the living wage; he responded writing,

“I want to categorically state that I am a strong supporter of the Living Wage campaign, and the goal of delivering all a decent income.”

But the question has to be asked: if he is the president of the Portage Licensing Trusts, and he also chairs the Auckland Council Advisory Group on the Living Wage, then why is it that the Trusts’ workers have remained on such low pay packets? The devil is in the detail: Clow goes on to contradict himself in the same email.  He states that hospitality has low profit margins and “it is vital we remain competitive against our close competitors”. In other words the buck, and Clow’s, commitment to the living wage stops at the Trusts’ doorstep. Perhaps Clow’s position as chair on the Advisory Group on the Living Wage needs to be reviewed?

Sub-human wages are not the only problem. In the two and a half months that I worked for this company, I was routinely denied my basic break entitlements which, just for the record,  is a breach of employment law. I continuously complained to my duty managers, asking for my break entitlements and eventually I began to get them, although only sporadically. I believe the Trusts purposely under-staff their venues as a way to save on wages. But what then occurs is that during high volume periods and weekends, breaks are overlooked for the sake of “customer service” and an extra corporate buck. Not to mention when you under-staff a hospitality business, it means your workers have to work twice as hard while still earning piss all per hour. Does this sound like an ethical business practice to you?

I spoke with Nick* who worked as a Duty Manager for one of the Trusts’ venues from 2013 to 2016. He told me he started on $15 an hour (in 2013 the minimum wage was $13.75). During this time he recalls that he never received a pay-rise until the yearly governmental increase and then he’d be bumped him up about 50 cents. He went on to say that he often worked as sole charge during the day and rarely, if ever, received his basic break entitlements during these periods. The longest he worked on one shift without a break because of “understaffing” was 12 hours straight.

Nick also tells me he believes wage theft was happening while he was working for the Trusts:

“I remember for a time, there was a period where we were getting unpaid breaks – as in, the venue managers would deduct the amount of time for breaks from the wages of that day.”

In other words, he believes that breaks he never took were being deducted from his pay! This doesn’t just breach employment law: it’s outright illegal.  This type of wage theft is common in the hospitality sector, but you’d hope an employer pitching themselves as a community organisation, would be better than this.

When I asked Nick if he thought the Trusts’ cared for the welfare of its lowest paid workers, he responded without pause, saying, “Hell no”. He then elaborated:

“Any organisation that could be accurately described as a ‘trust representative’ is far too removed from the actual working conditions of their lowest paid workers to be able to care about them.”

I don’t know how Nick stuck out nearly three years working for the Trusts, because after only two and a half months of working for Bricklane, I had had enough. I made a formal complaint to my Union (E tū), which I have actively followed up a number of times. This was soon after I had a meltdown at work because I was so sick of how I was being treated. My mental health had began to suffer, I had started to drink heavily to cope, and frankly, I had had enough of their bullshit. I refused to go back because I felt my workplace was unsafe.  I terminated my employment with Bricklane, and was paid out for my final two weeks.

The reason why I called my workplace “unsafe” was because of the high levels of harassment I personally witnessed and endured at Bricklane. From regulars who go in for hugs without asking permission – my body is not your entitlement – and whose hands then sometimes crept down and on to my ass, to outright inappropriate comments from others: a customer once said to me, loudly, “You have great fucking tits.” Clearly the culture at these venues needs to change.

I expressed my concerns over the phone to Scott Kennedy (Hospitality Manager) in regards to lack of safe working conditions and basic break entitlements.  He told me he was horrified and would “investigate”. I recently followed up with an email and asked him if any form of an investigation was underway. I received no response.

The reality is that the socially corrosive pattern of hospitality businesses getting away with the most appalling behaviour in regards to how they treat their workers is commonplace in New Zealand. My industry is unregulated and its workplaces often dangerously unsafe. Breaches of employment law are common. It is a sector in which workers are routinely disempowered and exploited because of criminally low wages, poor Union representation, and nearly no oversight by the MBI (Ministry of Business and Innovation) or consecutive governments, and including those with Labour in charge. After all, Clow, is a Labour Party councilor who happily takes a six figure salary while his own workers are paid poverty wages.  

The Trusts’ 37 venues have a multi-employer collective agreement (MECA) with E tū Union, and as such, working conditions should be more bearable. The fact that they are not might have a lot to do with the anti-union sentiment I observed at Bricklane. The Duty Manager actually encouraged me not to sign the MECA Agreement as I was signing my employment contract.

While working at Bricklane and in speaking with dozens of Trusts’ workers this week, I’ve learned hardly any of the workers knew anything about the MECA or E tū.  I only knew about the benefits of signing this agreement because I come from a Union background (thanks, Mum) and I know how to read my contracts properly.

To be clear, each worker is offered two contracts they can sign when they first become employed by the Trusts’. The first is an individual agreement which leaves workers with little to no legal protections if things start going ‘wrong’ at work. The second is a MECA (Mixed Member Employment Collective Agreement) which gives workers greater protections as they are protected by their Union. But the Trusts’ ony inform workers of the MECA briefly over email and in a short letter attachment. No one, from Scott Kennedy to E tū representatives, explains the benefits of signing such an agreement over the individual contract, for example, signing the MECA exempts you from the controversial 90 Day Work Trial.

E tū need to step up their involvement with the Trusts as there have only been a handful of site visits by representatives in the last 12 months. E tū justified the lack of site visits in an email to me saying there was “no uptake” in regards to joining their union out West. This claim sits in stark contradiction to the workers I spoke with who had no idea they even had a Union. Multiple E tū representatives whom I spoke with told me they are in “living wage negotiations” with the Trusts. But they have been in these “negotiations” for years and nothing has changed. No workers at the Trusts’, I spoke with had any idea about these negotiations. If a tree falls in the woods…

It seems, in regards to protecting the rights of the workers at the Trusts, there is a lot less  E tū (stand strong/stand up) and far more e noho (sitting down)*.

In the before-mentioned email Clow sent to me, he stated, “Management also confirmed that the relationship with E tū continues to be a good working relationship.” Perhaps it is time E tū got out of bed with men like Clow and the Trusts’ upper-management and instead, started talking directly with the Trusts’ lowest paid workers. Clearly, their voices are not being heard.

If what I have told you isn’t bad enough, it gets worse.

I spoke with another worker named Paul* who has worked for one of the Trusts’ many liquor stores for four and a half years. He pointed out that he and his co-workers are all expected to undertake ongoing online training, outside of work. On the surface it may sound like this company is putting effort into upskilling their staff, but  the reality is, workers aren’t paid for any of the time put into the courses. He explained to me:

“In recent years they have also manipulated staff into doing many, many hours of online training in their own time* (which legally they are required to pay you for), saying things like:

‘if you can’t put a couple of hours of your own time into learning for the business, then we as a business don’t want you’…”

Another person who used to work in one of their retail stores contacted me over Messenger, she told me she also had to undertake online training and was told “it’s [our] problem to do it outside of work.” Both she and her co-workers attempted to argue against doing training unpaid and on their own time. But they were all threatened with disciplinary action by the store manager if they continued to speak out. This workplace bullying isn’t exactly conducive to a fair and safe working environment.

Throughout our conversation, Paul, much like Nick, made it clear he did not think the Trusts, cared for their staff and described their business practices as “sickening”.

E tū’s collective agreement and its benefits, should be thoroughly explained to all new workers and clearly this is not happening. And they should be encouraged to sign it, not discouraged, as I was. But there is a reason why anti-union sentiment flows through their veins and venues: it means they can continue to pay their workers peanuts while treating them like dirt, with no consequences.  

Well, I am here to say: I am your consequence. I am the Trust’s worst goddamn fucking nightmare. I am a low-waged precarious worker with nothing left to lose and everything left to gain.

Just because the rest of the hospitality industry treats their workers as disposable trash, does not mean the Trusts’ have to follow suit.  Afterall, they are – on paper – a charitable organisation which profess to invest back into their surrounding communities. Their workers mostly live out West and are part of that community. As such, they should pay every last one of their workers, at the very least, a living wage, and on top of this pay their workers to do online training.

What’s more, this community organisation is also making staggering profits off pokie machines, as The Spinoff reported. By proxy, they are profiting off community poverty and misery which is so often wrought by addiction issues, but as yet have not specifically invested any money back into addiction services. This would be a simple, logical, and ethical move to mitigate some of the destruction they so routinely enable in people’s lives. Those who are bearing the heavy weight of addiction in West Auckland should not be stigmatised and shamed but, instead, corporations who profit off addiction should be publicly shamed and stigmatised.

Between the sale of booze, and their ever-growing property and assets portfolio (estimated at $70 million) and the $14 million sitting in their bank account, I am sure they could find a few bob – or a few million – to pay their workers a decent wage, and then at least partially fund addiction services out West, which are woefully underfunded, with the area even lacking addiction peer support workers. I have already written elsewhere about the importance of peer support workers in addiction and recovery;  they are effectively the backbone of other addiction services in Auckland.

It would seem the Trusts are far more interested in brand building than community building.  I would laugh at their hypocrisy, but in all honesty I am deeply disturbed by their predatory business practices.

I believe they need to start moving towards a more sustainable, cooperative, and democratic way of operating. This is not much to ask, is it? It is just asking for workplace fairness and basic human decency.

Building on my own personal experiences, and after talking with dozens of other Trusts workers, it is clear they are far more about benefiting from the brutalities of late neoliberal-capitalism than investing back into their community.  It is time this changed, not next year, and not in a few months’ time, but today. Right now.

 

*Some names have been changed

Postscript:

Kia ora all! I am freelancing which means I have no secure income so, I rely on donations from the wider public to keep myself economically afloat. If you like what I have to say and want to support me, you can make a direct contribution via my bank account:

Name: MISS C A KING

Bank Details: 12-3040-0580277-01

Thanks very much for your aroha and time.

 

 

WINZ: where hope and dignity go to die

I’ve just come from a WINZ (Work and Income New Zealand) office out in East Auckland, I often go as an advocate for people on welfare. I do this because I know going it alone, mostly, means you will be denied entitlements, often leave empty handed and likely, humiliated. The person who I supported today, I will call Emma (most people on welfare would rather stay anonymous when I ask if I can write about them). Emma, had had her benefit sanctioned because she was unable to attend a few scheduled appointments with her WINZ caseworker. We discovered later that an IRD (Inland Revenue) error was at the centre of this ordeal.

Over the last year Emma, has undergone two major surgeries: one on her neck, another on her elbow, leaving her in constant pain and on heavy pain meds. On top of this, a few years ago she was diagnosed with early onset arthritis in addition to injuries to her nerves and spine. Her ongoing health issues make working incredibly hard because she can’t predict when she will have good days and when she will be stuck at home in chronic pain. She still can’t lift anything heavier than a milk jug, can’t sit in a fixed position for any period of time, and suffers from insomnia that will often keep her awake for 40 hours or more. That’s when the seizures start. Her health issues impact and compound her mental health which just adds to her brain fog.  Depression, the physical pain and the concoction of pills Emma is on to control her physical pain, make it hard to think clearly and just remember day-to-day things – like those all important WINZ appointments.

Between all the physical and emotional hurdles which Emma faces every-single-day of her life, she missed six scheduled appointments at WINZ. She was operating under the information she’d previously been given; that she needed to submit a medical certificate every three months and have a yearly review. Emma didn’t realise she wasn’t in compliance and as such, her benefit was sanctioned and cut to the bone. Resulting in her missing rent, having no money for food, and barely managing to get by. Because what better way to kick someone in the guts who is already struggling, than to to cut them off economically?

I want to say right now, right here: I feel welfare sanctions are a cruel form of (economic) punishment which are punitively administered for the smallest slights of ‘bad behaviour’. Which include (but are not limited to): forgetting or being unable to make a scheduled appointment, failing a drug test (seriously, don’t tell me *you* as a fully employed person, has never ever smoked a bit of dope, dropped a pill in the weekend, or downed a wine or three every other night), and refusing to take a job that may or may not be suitable for you.

If you want to get a welfare sanction lifted you are required to go and plead your case, to whatever caseworker has been assigned to you at the next available appointment. Either that or risk missing even more rent payments and then in turn, risk joining the 40,000 people in Aotearoa, who are homeless and living on the streets.  

The WINZ appointment we had wasn’t exactly the worst I have attended. I’ve had caseworkers out right lie to me, make up WINZ policy, and actively yell in my face for calling them out on their bullshit and lies. It is always luck of the draw when it comes to WINZ: will the caseworker have empathy or will sociopathy be their preferred state of being? Who knows? But luckily this particular caseworker operated from a place of semi-empathy and reinstated her benefit with back-pay. When I asked for a food grant for Emma, the casework granted it without forcing us to jump through moral hoops. Being poor is now an individual and moral issue; not a structural or state issue.

I am just going to put-it out there and get all radical: No one in this damn country should be forced to beg for food. However, every single  day those on welfare are forced to do just that; beg for their most basic entitlements.  Only a few weeks ago RadioNZ reported that over 200 million worth of WINZ entitlements had been denied to tens-of-thousands of beneficiaries, 

“The figures were in a report obtained by Newsub’s The Nation under the Official Information Act.

It showed 150,000 beneficiaries and low income families were not getting payments totalling $200m a year that they were entitled to.”

More often than not when I ask for a food grant the caseworker will demand the person in need of food justify why they deserve it and ask what happened to any extra dole money they had. Oh, I don’t know? Lack of dole cash might have something to do with the cold, hard, and shitty fact that WINZ payments are so low it barely pays rent let alone guarantees the basics like: food.

I talked to a sole mum on WINZ a few months ago who had recently discovered dumpster diving. She was so excited about it all because as she told me “I now have food security. I know I can find food no matter what. My family will not go hungry.” Ya’ fucking know our country is fucked when a sole mum is finding hope at the bottom of a trash can. And food security means going through bins at the backs of gourmet supermarkets like Farro to avoid going hungry.

In the end we got a food grant, we re-instated Emma’s welfare payments and got back-pay. We still have to go and print out some IRD material to get everything fixed up, which it seems WINZ can’t manage in an office full of printers. I am hoping tonight she has a tiny bit of economic breathing space. But what worries me the most is the despair and the sheer terror so many people I support at WINZ are feeling, this includes Emma. She bluntly summarised to me, her experiences with WINZ:

“Constant, exhausting terror, dulling your cognitive abilities because you’re in perpetual fight/flight mode.”

On the way home from WINZ, Emma told me she had come up with a ‘Plan B’ if she couldn’t sort out the WINZ sanctions. This plan was simple in execution: she was going to take her own life. She told me she didn’t want to “come across as dramatic” but she couldn’t see any other way out of it.

I understand what I just typed is heavy and hard; suicide is always a tough and painful subject. But I think we need a compassionate and public conversation around the very real and deep trauma that our State Social Systems are causing so many people. Like, forcing people to live off so little they are picking food out of a bin to gain food security is not okay. It is not fucking okay that every damn time I go to a WINZ office, caseworkers are actively making up policy. Even the ‘semi-empathetic’ caseworker we got today, still, lied and told Emma it was part of her “WINZ obligation that [she] come for an appointment once a month.” That isn’t true. Tonight, I spoke with an ex WINZ caseworker, who told me,

“What we [WINZ caseworkers] did to beneficiaries was awful… we were encouraged to dehumanise them.”

It is not okay that nearly everyone I have advocated for at WINZ, has broken down in tears during appointments and have often been close to a panic attack. Most people I advocate for at WINZ unanimously tell me it is a humiliating and utterly defeating experience.

Being poor, being unemployed, being on welfare, being down on your luck, or struggling with serious health issues like Emma… doesn’t make you less than; it doesn’t suddenly make you sub-human. The fact I even have to type those words as a reminder that, regardless, of what economic and social position you hold, you are still a human being, makes me incredibly sad.

 

***

Kia ora all! I am freelancing which means I have no secure income so, I rely on donations from the wider public to keep economically afloat. If you liked what I have to say and want to support me, you can make a direct contribution via my bank account:

Name: MISS C A KING

Bank Details: 12-3040-0580277-01

Or you can support me via my Patreon, check it out…

***

If you need help and support for depression and/or here are some services you can contact (or flick me a PM or email me at king.chloe@gmail.com)

 

Lifeline: 0800543354

YouthLine:  09-376 6645

 

 

 

 

Beyond the Election: on solidarity and building communities of compassion

Trigger warning for content which includes sexual assault and suicide

 

New Zealand’s General Election result of 2017 was incredibly close and we actually do not know who has won, just yet. But already my Facebook and Twitter feeds are filled with updates from leftie friends, comrades, and activists declaring “Three more years of poverty, despair and crippling economic insecurity.”

And yeah, I get it; whichever way the ballot box falls, it is hard to grasp why so many people voted again for the National Government which has presided over record levels of homelessness, wealth inequality, and suicide rates. As someone who advocates for those on welfare and for some of our lowest paid workers within the hospitality industry, I see first-hand the impacts of this National government’s values and policies on our poorest citizens. I too, am pretty pissed off that we are quite possibly staring down the barrel of a gun of another three years of a National government.

But … right now, today … this week, I am not feeling defeated or discouraged over this election result, especially given that the last election was a landslide victory to the right. The National party government’s convincing win in 2014 was so complete that at the time it felt utterly crushing for so many of us on the left: “Could be worse”, as they say. It got worse. But now, I am actually – at long last – feeling hopeful again, and I understand that might sound really naive to some of you. But just bear with me and give me a chance to explain why my hope hasn’t been totally annihilated by the 2017 election result, thus far.  

This hope I am holding on to comes from everything I’ve been through and survived in the past year, and as such, how I perceive a win: my definition of a victory, both politically and personally in life, has changed drastically over the last few months. I’ve got this new fire burning in my belly which has been ignited by the many injustices my mates and I have survived over the last year.

Defining a win for this election cycle, for me, is about recognising progress and acknowledging where we were as a country only eight weeks ago. Politically, New Zealand was looking at a failing opposition and a guaranteed National government. Personally, only eight weeks ago, I was in Puna Whakataa, a respite community house for people dealing with addiction. I fully recommend you not attempt to drink wine like it is water, it doesn’t end well.

This was sparked by many events. Some are personal and some political including the following: being fired from a job simply for speaking out about the exploitation of new migrant workers within that workplace (shout-out to the National government for shitting all over workers’ rights including through 90 day trials); being sexually assaulted, which left me reeling and feeling broken; my mum finding out she had cancer; and one of my best friends passing away suddenly. Context matters, and my context is: I’ve already survived so much, and it hasn’t killed me; I am still standing.  

More than anything, it was being sexually assaulted which led me to using alcohol to numb emotions for which I had no coping skills. I tried to get help through the public mental health system but the waitlists were massive, the hoops and different organisations I had to call felt overwhelming, and it just seemed easier to medicate with booze to temporarily anesthetize my pain. National have woefully underfunded services that support those who have been raped or assaulted, and as Radio New Zealand reports, there are month-long delays.

It isn’t just Rape Crisis supporters who are struggling to keep up with the overwhelming numbers of people who need help. All our mental health service funding has been cut to the bone under the National Government. I spoke to a mental health worker who wanted to remain anonymous, who said to me, “We are dangerously underfunded, understaffed, and our working conditions are appalling. Most of us are on burnout and are looking to leave.” Those of us seeking support are often left to find other ways to cope and manage. Given you are 70% more likely to use drugs and alcohol if you have survived sexual assault and/or rape, falling headlong into addiction isn’t exactly inevitable but it is probable at least, for some of us.

It is safe to say I become part of that 70% statistic and attempted to drink myself to death, until, finally, exhausted, I reached out for help, again. I learnt of a peer support focused addiction and recovery service called Mahi Marumaru which is out in South Auckland, near where I live. It took a few months to get a support worker but I hang in there, and eventually I was connected with a peer worker named Jamie, who has been amazing. She suggested I have a break from everything and go into Puna Whakataa, a short-term respite community for addiction recovery, so I could rest and start healing.

There was absolutely no waitlist for this respite (keeping in mind I already had to wait for months to access a peer support worker), likely because Puna is funded by the south Auckland DHB and The Salvation Army, once again a charity doing the work of what the government should be doing. It was, in part, founded by Peer Support workers who come from lived experience with addiction who realise having to wait for a bed can mean the difference between living or dying.

I spent two weeks there, in which I learned a lot about addiction, myself, and how the best models of addiction and recovery are based on aroha and compassion. I had access to 24/7 counseling and support and for the first time in my life I was being taught the tools I needed to cope with all the pain and trauma I was living with. I walked out of Puna feeling stronger, and as if maybe the possibility really does exist that I could get my life back again.

I have not stopped drinking completely, but I am certainly no longer drinking in the mornings, and I am certainly not drinking everyday; for the first time in a long time I have moments of joy where I feel happy, and where all this hurt does not feel so huge and heavy.

Perhaps, for many people, having to go into respite and needing to admit you have a serious problem with alcohol would not be classified as a “win” in life. But for me, it is a win to be able to say: “I am not drinking in the mornings anymore, I have a bit of hope for my future, and I am slowly but surely gaining my life back”. In fact, being able to say this isn’t just a win for me, but also it is life-affirming: not everyone who becomes addicted to a substance makes it out alive.

I know this because while in Puna, a person who was meant to be admitted to a bed did not make it. They passed away from complications with alcohol before they could even walk through the front door. In this context it feels like a monumental victory right now for me to say “I am getting there. I am still here in this world”.  

The knowledge that I can survive so much heartache during a short time has given me a new perspective on my life, and by extension my political awareness, and even how I perceive what a political and social win can, should, and does, look like. It reminds me that whether we have a Labour or National government, it will not change my resolve to fight as long and hard as I can for a gentler and more compassionate country. And by extension communities that are nuanced enough to recognize the impacts of what historical and contemporary racism, sexism, and classism have done to our people.

At the very start of this piece of writing, I pointed out we now have one of the highest suicide rates in the OECD. While politicians bicker about what is or isn’t economically possible when it comes to funding crucial health and support services, people are dying. Between June of this year and last, our suicide statistics rose to a staggering 606 people. This number disproportionately affects our Māori and Pasifika people and our young men. When inequality becomes so overwhelming, so huge and so clearly entrenched within our communities, people’s mental health will always deteriorate. The final, irreversible, and desperate consequence of this deterioration is death by suicide.

I would like to add two more people to this statistic of 606 people: during the lead up to the General Election, two of my friends committed suicide. This year has, truly, been appalling and shattering for myself, my friends, and our extended communities. They were both young women in their early twenties, and both had struggled with mental health issues for a long time. One of these young woman had spent a long time battling the punitive and humiliating WINZ (Work and Income New Zealand) state system, and often told me how WINZ contributed to her despair and depression.

Notably, mental health was a leading campaign issue for most major and minor parties, with Labour leader Jacinda Ardern speaking emotionally about her own experiences losing a friend to suicide and has pledged to a target of zero suicides, and has vouched to, if elected, better fund mental health. Perhaps the most powerful act of solidarity for those suffering with mental health issues, however, came from then co-leader of the Green Party, Metiria Turei, who also, importantly and correctly, connected mental health with welfare and poverty.

In July of this year the Green Party launched their welfare policy which would see all benefits rise by 20% and accompanied by a roll back of the economic sanctions many face if not meeting their obligations under WINZ. Metiria spoke at the policy launch where she admitted she had committed welfare fraud in the early ‘90s as a young solo māori mum. She told everyone she did so as an act of survival to supplement her measly DPB (Dependant Parents Benefit) at the time. Metiria said,

“Like most people who receive a benefit, I was so careful about managing my money.

I’d go to the bank every fortnight on dole day. I’d withdraw all my money, in cash, then split it up into small amounts, wrapped up in rubber bands with little notes about what it was for.

I knew exactly how much I had for our bills, our rent, our food. But whatever way I split it, I still didn’t have enough to get by at the end of the week.”

In response to her confession she was subject to a relentless media beat down. Public benefit-bashing became a bloodsport in which spectators jeered at the sidelines and pundits with no lived experience of welfare threw the hardest and heaviest blows. Writer and activist Giovanni Tiso gave perhaps one of the most powerful rebuttals to the tirade of abuse and condemnation that was flung at Metiria and, by extension, anyone who is or has been on welfare:

“Far too often – while rightly worrying about the continued capacity of journalism to serve its democratic functions in spite of the decline of its business model – we forget that the fourth estate is just that: an estate, that is to say a seat of power, and that this power is implicated in everyday forms of social repression and in entrenching the dominant ideology. This is the ideology that reduces welfare recipients to occasional objects of pity, while systematically depriving them of any agency. Hence the outrage at the revelation that a young woman on the DPB – at a time when Māori  unemployment in her age bracket was at near 40 per cent – should dare to be politically active. It is also the ideology that dictates that the lives of beneficiaries must be open to constant surveillance and monitoring, down to the most intimate details of their sexual and affective lives, and including the odious policy of ‘naming the father’.”

To add to what Giovanni so necessarily points out, what was barely noted in our media was that Metiria’s act was one of solidarity after the fact. She had been prompted to speak out about welfare and welfare fraud because she had read a story about a young woman who had taken her life after being accused of welfare fraud. As it turned out the accusation was false, but by the time the truth came out, the realization came too late to save the woman.

Let’s break this all down to its bare bones: Metiria was forced to stand-down because she dared defend the lives of those on welfare and in this case the life of a young woman wrongfully accused of a so called “welfare crime”. A “crime” which she had not even committed and who then, in response, took her own life and became part of our 606 people who have died by suicide, this year.   

People are dying because the so-called State safety net no longer aims to catch those in struggle but instead strangles, criminalises and subjugates them. People are dying because there are not enough beds available fast enough in our mental health and addiction and recovery units and houses. And serious trauma survivors like me seem only able to access wrap around care and help, when we become desperate to the point of struggling through life or death situations. We are living in a country that punishes and seeks to further destroy those who are already in immense pain. You need to ask yourself: Is this the kind of country you want to live in?

I know few people who are not affected by suicide, poverty, or growing inequality, and all of these things affect us both on personal and societal levels. Just as recovering from personal tragedy takes many years, even with help and support, recovering and healing as a nation from all of this deep social pain, loss, and heartache will take rebuilding our communities and connecting on much deeper levels with one another.

We have institutionalised political and social systems founded upon the neoliberal belief that by increasing the pain of those in struggle, we can somehow improve their lives through a dose of “tough love”, an oxymoron if ever there was one. The thinking goes that we can bully and coerce the unemployed into finding jobs no matter how shitty, lowly paid, humiliating, and insecure they may be. We can shame and force those with addictions to pledge to abstinence or face criminalisation and social exclusion. We can demand that those in poverty somehow find individualised ways or strategies to crawl and dig their way out of structural poverty.

These approaches are the antithesis of empathy and aroha, the two things I was meet in spades with, inside Puna Whakataa. I believe these two powerful emotions of aroha and empathy could be a remedy to social harm, if turned into action; let us use the verb form of these words.

I believe aroha and empathy should be at the core of our political and social lives. Perhaps then, all of us who are struggling day-to-day with poverty, addiction, or any other hardship, could begin to etch out a decent economic living and a meaningful life filled with love, laughter, and light, instead of disenfranchisement, disconnection, and despair. Writer and activist Moana Jackson writes for e-tangata,  “Perhaps amid all the current post-mortems about winning and losing the election, it may be timely to re-imagine what is ‘real’ and to reflect on what kind of a different reality might be created.”

Whatever government we are left with, it will take decades of compassionate mahi at a grassroots level to imagine and create counter-communities of connection and absolute solidarity; communities that cannot be fractured. Author and activist Max Harris writes for The Spinoff,  

“But beyond September 23, we cannot let up on putting pressure on politicians to help to create something better. In my view, that “something better” is a politics grounded in care, community, and creativity – a politics underpinned, ultimately, by love. The structures of our politics in their current form don’t accommodate how people are doing politics or want to be done. We need to change that.”

One election, whichever way it may go, does not determine our futures or our lives absolutely. If the last eight weeks have taught me anything, it is that we already have a growing politics of “care, community, and creativity” — we always have, at least at a grassroots level. I experienced this in a community house called Puna Whakataa and our wider addiction and recovery whānau out South. Who treat people like me who have addiction issues as people in need of support and understanding, and not as loser junkies and alcoholics who should be in jail or publicly ridiculed. We all saw this with Metiria Turei speaking out and up for those on welfare and refusing to apologize for committing welfare fraud, in other words refusing to say sorry for just trying to survive and obtain a decent standard of living. It has long been noted: If the law is unjust the law must be broken.

Metiria acted from a place of care and aroha when she so publicly stood with The Welfare Class, and in doing so she ripped wide open the political space for thousands upon thousands of people to tweet, Truth to Power. Under the hashtag #IAmMetiria countless people, in response to her speaking out, told their stories of hardship and cruelty at the hands of WINZ, exposing a failed and brutal system that hurts more than it heals. Metiria also refused to “dob in” any sole mummas who confided in her that they too had committed welfare fraud as an act of survival. Metiria’s refusal to nark on those who trusted her with sensitive information is what I call solidarity.

You can’t break that kind of solidarity. It is absolute.

I’d assume Metiria would rather do jail time then ever break confidence with the women who confided their truths with her. Perhaps, for some, it will be hard to understand this level of loyalty… But, I do. You can’t undo a suicide. You can’t buy back values, principles or morals. Once they are gone. They are gone. After that you have to live with your decisions and choices.

On the back of #IAmMetira, the art and activist movement We Are Beneficiaries, sprang up on Twitter and then on Facebook and eventually even out on the streets. We Are Beneficiaries enlisted the help of artists to draw portraits or images that viscerally reflect the stories and words of those on benefits.

 

This is exactly how communities that cannot be fractured are born: through the sharing of our common stories, and then the citing of these stories as a form of public and political testimony, which gives shape to our daily lives, and the struggle against being forgotten. In the ardent words of journalist Sarah Kendzior,

“When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologies justify punishing the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.”

During turbulent times it pays to remember those of us in the Working, Lower and Welfare Classes take out the majority of our population; we are the majority. We are the 99 percent.  We are the ones we have been waiting for.
Kia ora all! I am freelancing which means I have no secure income so, I rely on donations from the wider public to keep economically afloat. If you liked what I have to say and want to support me, you can make a direct contribution via my bank account:

Name: MISS C A KING

Bank Details: 12-3040-0580277-01

Or you can support me via my Patreon, check it out!

***

If you need help and support for depression and/or here are some services you can contact (or flick me a PM or email me at king.chloe@gmail.com)

Connect (mahi marumaru)

Buzzed, addiction and recovery

HELP: Sexual Abuse Survivors

Lifeline 0800543354

 

 

 

Social Detox: On addiction, recovery and refusing to be compliant

Day One

I am writing this to you from Puna Whakataa, which is a Social Detox unit in Auckland, New Zealand, and what this means is that I have decided my addiction to alcohol has spiralled out of control and it was time to get some help.  Puna Whakataa acts as a respite from your life, your triggers, and your troubles. Going into respite gives you some time out to reflect and get clean and  begin practicing some self-care.

I’ve been told that you have to hit rock bottom before you make the decision to really, do something drastic about your addiction/s like go into Social Detox. But I don’t want to hit rock bottom. I’ve seen what rock bottom looks like for other people and the road back from the bottom seems like a hard and hellish climb. So, here I am writing this to you from Social Detox. I was admitted at 10.30am this morning: It was either this, or continue to fall deeper into the depths of despair and the bottom of a bottle.

I guess, you know that your drinking might have reached dangerous levels when you down two bottles of wine on a 50kg frame on an empty stomach, then wake up choking on your own puke while gasping for air at 2am in the morning. That happened to me about three weeks ago. I’m thankful I didn’t piss myself as well. Small mercies. And of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d woken up in my own vomit with the risk of choking but mostly that type of thing happened when I was younger, not at 31. And, I could use my youth to brush off such dangerous, deadly behaviour. But brushing off the hangovers, blackouts, and bruises from falls from when you are so wasted you can’t stand, is getting harder and harder as I get older.

Apart from the obvious fact that my drinking is harming me physically, it is now, for the first time ever, also harming and hurting my whanau and my partner. They’ve all had to endure me lashing out and getting verbally aggressive when I was wasted and feeling angry at the world. I am all for hurting and harming myself; self-care isn’t my strong suit and I’d consider my heavy drinking a form of self-harm as much as a method to numb. But when I start disappointing and hurting people I love, this is where I draw the line and hope to god I don’t begin to rub it out, and promise myself I’ll do what I can to avoid causing them pain.

They say we hurt those closest to us the most because we believe (or hope) they will never leave us. But I know people with addiction issues who have lost everything: friends, family, their kids, homes… lovers… their lives. My ex recently overdosed on homebake heroin, which is the big final frontier, the fullstop of addiction.

But, even, if you go looking for support it can be hard and challenging to access. Puna Whakataa, is the only facility of its kind for people with addiction issues in the entirety of Auckland. It opened four years ago out of a community effort by consumer workers (peer support workers) Connect, the Salvation Army and the DHB. It’s not exactly like our National government saw a desperate need and then acted.

We urgently need more public addiction and mental health units and community focused houses for respite like, yesterday. And the ones we do have, are dangerously underfunded by our government which results in long waiting lists and understaffing. It took me around two months to access support through Mahi Marama which is a peer support and advocacy counseling service for addiction.  Then a few weeks til I, underwent a CADS (Community Drug Alcohol Service) assessment to determine the best treatment, and then another three weeks until I was admitted to respite at Puna. In all respects this isn’t such a long wait time. I am lucky enough to have a mum who works in the public health system who could guide me to services such as Mahi Marama, which was my first foothold into accessing the care I needed. But I have spoken to other people in restspite who said it took six months plus, to work out how to access services and then finally, be admitted into care if necessary.

Many people don’t even attempt to look for help for drug or alcohol issues; there are concrete social reasons as to why. Ross Bell, Executive director of The NZ Drug Foundation states, “Often people don’t go looking for help or ask for support because of the stigma we create in our society around alcohol or drug dependency.”

I have, in other pieces I penned, touched publicly on my addiction issues and pushed to disrupt the lazy narratives that often surround low waged workers such as myself. But mostly these public admissions were out of absolute anger and a very real sense of desperation that I felt in response to politicians such ex-Prime Minister John Key, and our current Prime Minister Bill English, calling low waged workers like myself “drug addled”, “lazy” and my personal favorite “useless.” Thanks for that one Bill: I didn’t cry myself to sleep over your public bullying and stigmatizing, ‘cos it made me feel like utter shit to be called “useless” by the leader of this country, or anything.

Surely, Bill, as a kid you were taught that name calling those who are in much more vulnerable situations than you makes you a complete asshole. That said the bar is set low when it comes to the bullying behavior of our politicians.  John Key, spent months pulling the ponytail of a young low paid waitress, even, when she —  time and time again  — asked him to stop. The name calling of low waged workers and the objectifying of a young waitress by Key, who ignored her bodily autonomy, says so much about how our political leaders perceive us, as workers in service: as non-people, as other, as undeserving of dignity and kindness. And people wonder why some (not all) of us hit the bottle so damn hard.

Apart from a few public admissions about my drinking, mostly, I’ve hidden the extent of my drinking because I am embarrassed. Because I feel ashamed:

Mostly, I drink alone.

I’ve been a chronic closet drinker for many, many years now. Under my bed, often, resembles a graveyard of empty wine bottles; the labels are the gravestones and the bottles the bodies.

I’ll pour glasses of wine in my room and scull them before my mum gets home or walks in. I’m well versed at nursing drinks to hide the fact that I’m actually half cut. I’ll down a bottle of wine over five hours before my partner arrives home from work, as a way of relaxing into a relationship which I desperately do not want to lose. I’ve turned up to my low waged and shitty jobs drunk and comfortably numb because that seemed easier than facing, stone cold sober, rude customers and a boss who treats me as nothing more than a disposable unit of production and pays me poverty wages to work relentlessly hard.

I’ll carry wine bottles in my bag and find public toilets to scull back as much booze as possible before I need to spew because the liquid hits my stomach too fast and too hard. I’ll buy a bottle of wine at the supermarket but then, I can’t wait until I get home. So, I will find the back of a building, hide behind a dumpster, an alleyway, just fucking anywhere, and choke down wine until I have drowned the emotions I can’t deal with. As the saying goes: “It isn’t what we are drinking. It is how we are drinking.”

My closest drinking is a flawed coping strategy to numb the bubbling and boiling anxiety that is swelling in my stomach and a way to soothe the shame and rising negative self-talk that is reaching the point of overflow, in my head. And right now it is 8pm and I desperately want a drink. I want to cry. I want a hug. I want to know that I matter and I have the mana to get through all of this. I just want this to stop. I want to leave Social Detox and drink myself into white oblivion. But I also want my life back, as cliched as that sounds. I’ve also, for a while now, had a thought formulating in my head: Perhaps, just maybe, giving a shit about myself and practicing some self-care, and not attempting to drink myself to death (which really amounts to a very slow suicide) might well be a radical act of defiance.

I say this because I am pretty sure our current National government, just like consecutive governments before them, wants people like me either dead, or at least silent and compliant. When I say “people like me,” to be more specific, what I mean, is that I am a lowly wage earner who has been stuck in insecure work since the start of my working life thirteen years ago. I am also part of what WINZ case workers call the “revolving door,” because I keep having to come back and beg for measly hand outs whenever I get fired or I have my shifts cut.

I’m what National politicians and right wing pundits would call a “drain on society.” Especially right now because I am writing this from a publicly funded respite facility for people with addiction issues, and I am here at the tax payer’s expense. I am one of those low waged/unemployed “drug addled” and “useless” workers (- when I can find work -) that Bill English and many other politicians seem to hate so, very, very, much. I truly believe they would rather I was  dead; one less pov draining public coffers; one less ugly mouth for welfare. As activist and academic Sue Bradford, so brilliantly and blatantly states in relation to our mental health system,

“I can see that really nothing has changed, and if anything it may have got worse since the 1990s. I often end up thinking that the system is just relieved when people die, because it’s one less cost to their budget. It’s a brutal system.”

So, I figure getting clean and sober and learning to manage my anxiety and depression, and refusing to remain silent and compliant, is an act of not only self-care, but, yes, an act of defiance. If you have addiction issues (and thus, often, a dual diagnosis of mental health issues) you are worthy of aroha, compassion and care, and regardless of what politicians and wider society has to say. You  have a basic human right to community support that acts as a safe harbour, from your life. You are entitled to wrap-around services which support you into recovery and into a life where you get to thrive, not, just survive. And beginning to believe that, is an act of rebellion against the dominant narratives, and stigma attached to addiction.

 

Postscript:

Kia ora all! I am freelancing which means I have no secure income so, I rely on donations from the wider public to keep myself economically afloat. If you like what I have to say and want to support me, you can make a direct contribution via my bank account:

Name: MISS C A KING

Bank Details: 12-3040-0580277-01

Thanks very much for your aroha and time.

Addicts or not, workers don’t deserve public shaming

I am writing this while half cut. I downed a glass of wine at 10 am because three days ago, I was fired under New Zealand’s Hire and Fire at Will Law. It is a policy bought in by The National government, which promised job creation and more flexibility for workers. But all this law has done is compound the growing issues associated with low-waged and precarious work, and allowed employers to believe they can fire you at will, with barely any reason given.

So, in the face of the dawning reality that I will probably spend my life bouncing from one low-waged and precarious job to the next, numbing myself with alcohol feels like a logical — albeit harmful — response.

***

I wrote that paragraph months ago. I can confirm as someone who likes to pretend I am a part-time alcoholic so I can avoid admitting I have a serious problem (just like Jessica Jones) attempting to drink yourself to death in response to losing your job really doesn’t work. Well, it does not work in the long run, anyway. In the short run, it seems like a fantastic idea to numb the overwhelming sense of shame and humiliation that you feel from being told you are unable to hold down a job.

Compounding my deep sense of shame over my addiction to booze (which is directly related to my inability to find a job that pays more than the minimum wage) is the relentless public shaming of low-waged workers by politicians and employers. Last year our ex-Prime Minister John Key called us “drug addled” and “lazy” in a now infamous and widely criticised Radio New Zealand interview. Our new Prime Minister Bill English recently parroted this stance when he called workers “useless”. As if his first statement wasn’t mean enough, he later expanded on this when talking about young beneficiaries. He stated, “Under workplace safety you can’t have people on your premises under the influence of drugs and a lot of our younger people can’t pass that test.”

Under workplace safety laws, workers shouldn’t be forced to keep working when they’re been seriously injured, either. However while working as a chef I’ve suffered hot oil burns to my arms and had to keep going without medical attention. But Bill English only talks to employers and never to workers so he has no idea of the health hazards and issues we face in our workplaces every day. His statement was entirely anecdotal without a stitch of statistical evidence to back up any of these wild accusations. There have been ongoing public attacks on low-waged workers from employers as well. Most recently, Stuff Media interviewed cafe owner Barbara Olsen-Henderson who agreed with English’s comments. Stuff reports:

“Olsen-Henderson voiced her concerns about the normalisation of drug culture in the country, backing Prime Minister Bill English’s comments about the hospitality industry’s struggle to attract and retain drug-free Kiwis”

As someone who is on the ground talking to hospo workers every day, what I can confirm is that overwhelmingly hospo employers are subjecting their staff to poverty wages and coercing them into signing casual contracts which offer no guarantee of reasonable hours or any hours.  — employers do not even have to offer you one hour’s work under these contracts.

It is common in the low waged industry of hospitality for workers to undertake long hours with barely any time to eat or take rest.  I’ve worked this industry for over a decade and I have gotten UTIs (urinary tract infections) because managers forced me to hold my urine for so long because apparently serving customers matters much more than my health. It is the height of humiliation having a manager or boss deny you a toilet break while you desperately stand there trying not to piss yourself.

So, let me boil this down for you: I’ve got more chance of being forced to piss in a cup for a drug test than to be given adequate bathroom and meal breaks as a hospitality employee. What does that tell you?

Yet the wider public’s focus is always on the useless, lazy and drug-addled behaviour of workers, and rarely on the humiliating, degrading and at times outright exploitative behaviour of employers like Olsen-Henderson.

So let’s talk about addiction and what is notably not being said by employers and politicians alike: addiction is a logical response to unemployment or underemployment and the rising precarity in our stagnated work economy. All of this causes restricted choice for workers and causes us to dive well below the poverty line and poverty is depressing. Both addiction and depression often go together and alcohol, pills, pot, and whatever your poison, all can help negate the side effects of poverty like anxiety and loneliness in the short term. Any relief from these isolating and painful feelings seems better (to me) than soberly coping with the overwhelming sense you do not matter, day-in-and-day-out.

Plus, let’s get real; long-term planning isn’t something many low wage earners do, as short-term thinking feels more manageable. Linda Tirado, anti-poverty activist and author, states in her book Hand to Mouth: Being Poor in a Rich World, “Poor people don’t plan long-term. We’ll only get our hearts broken.” Sooner or later you learn long-term plans only lead to more disappointment and hurt so you stop bothering. It isn’t that I, or any of my other friends stuck in poverty and low-waged work, lack ambition (which involves long-term planning) it’s just that we learned over the years that ambition costs more than we could ever afford.

Cheap wine, or whatever substance I use to take the edge off, makes life, at the time, seem more bearable, even if only for a few hours, until the hangover sets in and the shame spiral begins because I know I shouldn’t be drinking. Journalist Laurie Penny said it best, “Here is the politically unspeakable truth: life is hard and drugs are fun.”

When I speak out and advocate against the poor work conditions so many of us face and the implications these conditions have on entire generations, both spiritually and emotionally, I am told to “suck it up”. People spit at me that I should not have made “bad life choices,” and then more well-intentioned people assure me “things will get better”. But statements like the last one are meaningless and amount to magical thinking and quite frankly are exhausting to listen to. As far as I can see it isn’t going to “get better” for most of us. Life is only getting much, much harder for the unemployed and underemployed of a generation at the coal face of a Hyper Casualised Work Economy where The Boss Class and welfare case managers decide whether we can eat next week.

When your employer holds your economic survival in their hands it means you are less likely to speak out against workplace injustice or demand your basic entitlements and a living wage. Large sections of workers who lack access to unions in Aotearoa – such as hospitality workers – become compliant labourers, and are coerced into accepting low wages and are forced to accept exploitation and poor work conditions. They often believe they deserve no better. That’s when capitalism wins: When workers truly think, they deserve to live in poverty and subjugation.

The problem is not workers taking drugs or drinking booze on shifts (which is much more likely than us pill popping or doing lines in the toilets). The problem is that we are hardly surviving; we are barely subsisting in a broken economy which produces broken people, doing whatever it takes to keep going within a fatally fractured society that was created, in part, because of dysfunctional governmental policy enforced by neoliberal politicians.

The problem is that what were once considered stepping stone positions in fast food and service is now the only type of work people like me can find. The CTU (Council for Trade Unions) points out that over 30% of our workforce is now subject to insecure work. This means tens of thousands of us have no set start or finish times, no guarantee of hours, and therefore no idea what our paycheques will be one week ‘til the next. Any employer who denies economic security to their workers is denying them a decent life. This is something Bill English and John Key neglect to point out. Full-time and salaried jobs that offer upward progression and more economic security are limited and have been purposely destabilised. The rising precarity in the workplace is now structurally embedded and has been normalised as part of our working lives.

Another problem is that as precarity and insecurity have risen in the workplace, governments have violently ripped gaping holes in social safety nets such as welfare payments which were designed to mitigate the inequality (often wrought by insecure work). These ‘holes’ now feel more like gaping wounds for those of us subject to ongoing funding cuts to state support. As such, workers locked into low-waged work are left with few options other than to work multiple minimum wage jobs to stay afloat.

But no matter how hard you work or how many shit jobs you graft at, we are not given a life jacket and are left to drown below the tsunami of crushing economic deprivation or swim for our  lives against the current. Sometimes I feel like I am caught in a rip and no matter how hard I swim, I can’t get out. Professor of Law Jane Kelsey, writes in her book, The Fire Economy, “People are told not to look to the government for help or protection. Harm thus becomes individualised and the victims can be blamed for their misfortunes.”

Most of the unemployed or underemployed young working class folk I speak with are internalising this blame and are using dangerous and harmful coping strategies to deal with their misfortunes. Addiction is not by any means the only choice in terms of self-harm we can weaponize against ourselves in a bid to cope with the reality that we have no future.

I spoke to 27-year-old Amanda*, who has struggled to maintain employment throughout her working life. Last year she had the Hire and Fire at Will law used against her and after months of looking she finally found a new job at a retail store but one morning her car would not start before work. Amanda told me this triggered a panic attack as she was scared arriving late would result in job loss. Amanda said she “disassociated from the situation,” and the next thing Amanda knew she had sliced open her arm with a kitchen knife, cut through muscle, leaving a 4-5 cm wound.  Amanda ended up missing an entire day’s work which resulted in further anxiety in regards to keeping her job. Amanda told me,

“For someone who already suffers from depression or self-esteem issues, losing a job is an absolutely crushing blow.”

That crushing blow Amanda spoke of is plural, not singular. Since then Amanda was let go from the retail job because she was late a couple of times, and was accused of falsifying her time sheet, something Amanda swears she did not do. Soon after this she was admitted to respite care as she became suicidal after losing her job. Once released, Amanda began the lengthy process of applying for jobs and trying to get welfare to support herself in between.

As an advocate, I went with Amanda to her welfare meeting and witnessed the caseworker blatantly lie to her about her entitlements while actively making up WINZ policy. It took two hours of me demanding to see actual WINZ policy in writing and speaking to the manager of this WINZ branch before we got Amanda the economic support she needed. Her experience is not unique; per Auckland Action Against Poverty (AAAP), nine out of 10 people are being denied their basic entitlements at WINZ.

A few months later she landed a Graphic Design job, but was let go again under the Hire and Fire at Will Law after only two weeks of employment. Amanda was simply told, “[she] wasn’t fast enough.” But the question needs to be asked: When do workers ever work fast enough for their employers? Amanda was given no training and no support in her new role. I asked her how this latest round of unemployment made her feel and she told me,

“It’s at the point now where I’m used to job loss. I’m applying for the same low-waged jobs because there isn’t much else, but it’s not enough to be employed as it’s not stable or secure. So, I’m anticipating that this is a way of life for me now and I am looking at alternative lifestyle options.”

I hear many other examples like Amanda’s on a weekly basis. Her story is a very real example of the personal devastation wrought by governmental policies enforced by politicians who wash their hands of the social and personal pain they have caused. One such example of a politician simply washing their hands clean is ex National MP Ruth Richardson, known as Ruthanasia, who, in 1991, oversaw what was known as ‘The Mother of All Budgets.’ Andrew Dean, author of the book Ruth, Roger and Me: Debts and Legacies, writes,

“In Richardson’s logic, individuals gain more access to opportunity through greater exposure to the free operation of the market. In practice, this meant cutting welfare and creating markets for public goods such as education and healthcare. The cuts were severe: in that 1991 budget the domestic for a single, childless woman was reduced by 17 per cent, the unemployment benefit for single 20-24-year old’s by 20 per cent and the sickness benefit for single 18-24-year old’s by 20 per cent. These beliefs and this budget fundamentally reorganised the way New Zealanders work, study, and live, and the legacies of her tenure as Minister for Finance, without a doubt, are still felt today.”

 

Dean’s premise for his book was that young people are feeling disconnected and enduring discomfort, in part because of such cuts to welfare and other state support.  But as he points out, Richardson rejected his premise when he spoke with her. She said to him “our words of discomfort, loss, and disconnection don’t resonate with me”. But to the thousands of young workers in Aotearoa struggling to stay afloat in this Hyper Casualised Work Economy where state support is shrinking, those feelings of loss and disconnection, as Amanda’s story so clearly illustrates, are being acutely felt by many of us.

The pain we are feeling is directly related to policy which politicians like Ruth Richardson pushed through and which we had no democratic say. Some of us were not even born when polices that now negatively affect us today were passed in parliament. Regardless, now, we must bear the burden of those politicians’ actions and pay for their heartlessness.

And by no means is it just the young suffering social pain because of precarity and sub-human wages, welfare cuts, and shitty governmental policy. I spoke with a 61-year-old man who was working two jobs, one as a groundskeeper at a school during the week, while on the weekend he works at a racecourse where he quite literally shovels horse shit for a measly $16 an hour. With Auckland’s spiralling rental prices, he can’t afford to live on just one full-time income. As the saying goes: “No one should work and be poor at the same time”. Any government that enforces, year after fucking year, a minimum wage policy that does not sit at a living wage is intentionally denying their citizenry economic security and personal dignity. I think it is time that we stop pretending as a society that people can survive on the minimum wage.

The only people who deserve relentless public shaming and calling out are Politicians like Bill English and John Key, who have actively and very publicly put down, bullied, and shamed low-waged workers by using false information and anecdotal stories that don’t reflect universal truth neither for workers in Aotearoa nor globally.

It is employers like Barbara Olsen-Henderson, who publicly shamed a worker with addiction issues, who deserve to be called out and shamed for her behaviour.  Olsen-Henderson stated in the same Stuff article that she would support a worker through rehab if they tested positive and were willing to get help. The worker she fired because he failed a drug test was in a methadone program, which means he obviously had actively sought help and support for his addiction issues. He was just trying to get his life back together. Still, she fired him.

Most bosses are full of shit when they say they care for their workers. They aren’t your friend. Don’t be fooled into believing they are; the truth is they profit hugely off the ongoing exploitation of our labour. Why would they want to share with us and engage in an equal relationship? The economic benefits of them subjecting us to the minimum wage and insecure contracts are greatly to their advantage. We should, as workers, be absolutely speaking out about the injustices we face at work, and we need to continue to disrupt the lazy and harmful narratives spat at us by politicians and employers who use the language of shame to bully us into silence.

* names have been changed

Postscript:

Kia ora all! I am freelancing which means I have no secure income so, I rely on donations from the wider public to keep myself economically afloat. If you like what I have to say and want to support me, you can make a direct contribution via my bank account:

Name: MISS C A KING

Bank Details: 12-3040-0580277-01

Thanks very much for your aroha and time.

 

 

‘A place of healing and a place of hurt’: on abuse and assault in the BDSM community

Content warning: Contains explicit content and references to sexual assault and rape, which may be triggering to survivors.

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I just had the most uncomfortable conversation with my mum about some handcuffs she found under my bed which I’d left there by accident. To be exact, what she found were not handcuffs but shackles I’ve used for hog tying people. I decided against pointing this out because: awkward as fuck. I’m just so glad she missed the ball gag and the cat o’ nine tails I’d also left under the bed.

I’m sure my mum noticed the look of horror on my face but it didn’t stop her from saying, “I know you are into BDSM and that’s fine. You should do what makes you happy.”

Oh. My. God. I nearly died. Despite being utterly mortified that my mum had just bought up my involvement in a scene/subculture considered by many as deviant and deranged (and more misunderstood than ever thanks to 50 Shades of Grey), I resisted the urge to shut the conversation down. Instead I told her the initial reason that I had gotten into BDSM was that the cornerstones of kink culture are meant to be: Safe, Sound and Consensual.

My involvement in BDSM goes deeper than the explanation I gave my mum. I have always felt I could have more sexual agency as a woman within the kinkster community than in wider mainstream sex culture. I have more freedom to discuss my sexual fantasies, boundaries and needs with less risk of being ruthlessly slut-shamed by men and, yes, sometimes by women. In wider mainstream culture, women aren’t meant to have their own sexual needs or desires; we are socialised into believing we should serve the fantasies of men, while suppressing our own….

To continue reading this essay please Click Here, and you will be taken to The Spinoff where you can read it in full…

Podcast: Chloe King on the Problem with Positive Thinking

A short time ago I did a podcast with BFM on The Wire with host Xiemna Smith, we focused on the problems with the corporate takeover of spirituality and how so often, mindfulness and other holistic concepts are used in coporate settings to increase worker productivity and profits. We also spoke more broadly about the occupy movement, unions, grassroots activism, and why positive thinking, probably, want magically transform your life — no matter what self-help gurus have to say on the matter. As Xiemna writes,

“We live in an age where we are bombarded with social media messages telling us we can find happiness if we just drink a kale smoothie and have a more positive mindset – if we can fix ourselves, then everything will be OK. But community activist and writer Chloe King thinks this approach is a harmful one.”

If you’d like to hear what I have to say on this subject click here or listen below:

 

You can follow me on twitter

John Key, I am a low waged worker, and neither “lazy” nor “drug addled”

Prime Minister John Key is making international headlines for all the wrong reasons again. In a recent Radio New Zealand interview he shamed low waged workers, calling them, “drug addicts” and describing them as being “lazy.” Okay, I am one of the hundreds of thousands of low waged workers in this country and I feel devastated by his comments which further included stating we, the apparently lazy and low waged workers, also have no work ethic. Key is using these reasons to justify bringing in record numbers of migrant workers into New Zealand, to take up roles in work considered unskilled, such as fruit picking, hairdressing, labouring, baking, driving trucks, managing cafes, and working in hospitality. 

“[…] go and ask the employers, and they will say some of these people won’t pass a drug test, some of these people won’t turn up for work, some of these people will claim they have health issues later on,” Key told Radio New Zealand reporter Jesse Mulligan,

“So it’s not to say there aren’t great people who transition from Work and Income to work, they do, but it’s equally true that they’re also living in the wrong place, or they just can’t muster what is required to actually work.”

I want to be very clear here: I support immigrant workers. I embrace the diversity they bring to Aotearoa. I stand firm in solidarity with migrant workers for many reasons, the most important being that nearly always the migrant workforce is subject to low wages and exploitation, something of which I also have personal, plentiful, painful experience. What I do not embrace is John Key pitting workers like myself, already being paid poverty wages, against immigrant workers being exploited as cheap labour, all to further suppress wage growth and help his corporate mates get richer.

Most low waged workers who I know are some of the hardest working people you will ever meet. We undertake multiple jobs, which is hard, I promise you, and we have no choice other than to do this. There has been a major rise in the casualised and part-time economy, and full-time work is almost impossible to come by. We are left stitching multiple jobs together to make up full-time work. We give up our nights, days and weekends to pour your pints, flip your burgers, to serve food we can’t afford ourselves, and to clean your damn toilets. Yeah, you know all those jobs people don’t want to do? We do them. We work twice as hard as CEOs and workers considered “highly skilled,” for measly paychecks in high stress environments, and we endure the poverty shaming which comes with underappreciated low waged work. Being poor is to incur ridicule and constant put-downs from strangers, people we know, the mainstream media, and now, even our own political leaders.

Many of our most vulnerable and precarious workers, nearly always women, new migrants and people of colour, typically have no protections, no benefits and nowhere to turn. In part this is because consecutive governments have actively undermined and weakened unions through laws such as the 1991 Employment Contracts Act, which made it much harder for them to operate. This has restricted workers’ ability to negotiate pay and access the most basic of benefits like sick leave and holiday pay, and we are routinely denied breaks.

So, if we don’t work our fingers to the bone for ruthless employers, we get fired or our shifts get cut. This leaves us scrambling to find other work in a stagnant and flooded job market. In response we become desperate and therefore easier to coerce into accepting offers for pay below minimum wage and having to deal with workplace injustices like harassment and assault. I have PTSD from the number of times I have had guys attempt to assault me and feel me up on shift when working in nightclubs and late night bars. There is almost no direct course of action I can take over this as the hospitality sector is unregulated and has no real union representation. So, if I seem “lazy” or wasted on shift it is likely because I am feeling depressed and anxious in response to a demeaning and sometimes dangerous work environment.

It is important to note that, while Key calls low waged workers “drug addicts” and “drug addled” in his RNZ interview, he fails to mention that drug addiction is a symptom of poverty, and low wages combined with insecure work induces poverty.  Wanting to check out of this grinding reality is a perfectly normal, albeit harmful response to an absolute feeling of hopelessness and despair. Comments like Key’s, which shame an entire class of people, make me want to pick up a bottle of booze and down every last drop, until I can feel nothing but that warm numbness wash over me.

Honestly, this type of shaming of low waged workers like myself makes me cry. I’m serious. It hurts. It hurts because no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to secure even low paid and unskilled work for long periods of time. I am not alone in this struggle. It was Key’s government which introduced the 90 Day Trial law in 2009, which only serves to compound the rising issues associated with precarious and low waged work. The Waikato Times reported in 2013 thousands of workers had been sacked under this law (this is a conservative estimate) and many were simply told they “did not fit in.”

Five weeks ago, I was personally subject to the harder edge of the 90 Day Trial legislation when I was not offered an ongoing contract only five days out from the trial period end date. The reason? I was told that I did not “perform my duties as a receptionist up to standard.” I had worked incredibly hard for this company, having gone above and beyond my job description. I’d lost considerable amounts of weight during my time in this role as I had spent so much time running between the multiple levels of the building to clean, run coffee and tea, and undertake errands for other employees. I often felt stressed and overworked, during and after work hours. Still, I was told my hard work was not good enough. When is our hard work ever fucking good enough?

Being fired under this law was a major blow to my confidence and since then I have struggled to get out of bed. I feel depressed and hopeless and I am battling suicidal ideation daily; I don’t want to die but I cannot keep bouncing from one job to the next with no chance of economic stability or progression. My experience of insecurity has been ongoing for years and years, and no matter how hard I work I have little hope that my situation will ever change.

Yet John Key has the audacity to call those living in poverty because of low wages, bad luck and under/unemployment “lazy” and “drug addicts.” His rotten rhetoric blames us alone for our circumstances, when it is his government that further entrenches poverty into the lives of blue collar workers and the working class. It was his National party’s MP, Paula Bennett, who enacted sweeping welfare reforms and sanctions which made getting a benefit a humiliating experience, not to mention the measly state payout barely covers rent, let alone rapidly rising living costs.

When you rip gaping holes in social security nets such as welfare, those with lesser means are left to drown under the rising tide of inequality, structural unemployment, and underemployment. So many of us who are bodily abled or not, and mentally well or not, are left with no choice than to take any work, no matter how dangerous, precarious, and sub-human the wages. What sort of a choice is that?

Young people who are born poor or fall into poverty and downward mobility are denied a future, or at least any economic and personal well-being. This is not the kind of future anyone deserves, especially our young, and no-one should just accept it as a given.

No matter what John Key tells the masses, the problem with New Zealand’s work economy is not our being “lazy” or “drug addled” workers who lack “work ethic.” I’d call him a cunt for what he said about workers like me but he has neither the depth nor the warmth. The problem is low wages. The problem is a rise in a culture of precarious and casualised work which has created structural unemployment and job scarcity. The problem is the laziness, incompetence and widespread sociopathy of both right and nominally left wing governments who have failed, dismally, to protect those of us who were not born into wealth and privilege. The problem is that Key is a millionaire who has absolutely no idea about, nor care for, the daily struggles and injustices the working class and migrant workers endure every single day. Perhaps then, aside from finally starting to deal with any of these very real issues, at the very least, John Key should simply stop talking about us as if he knows us.

You can follow me on twitter

Versions of this essay where also published on:

Stuff Nation

The Standard

Unite Union 

Postscript:

Kia ora all! I am freelancing which means I have no secure income so, I rely on donations from the wider public to keep myself economically afloat. If you like what I have to say and want to support me, you can make a direct contribution via my bank account:

Name: MISS C A KING

Bank Details: 12-3040-0580277-01

Thanks very much for your aroha and time.