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Socialist Equality Group holds online meeting on New Zealand bus drivers’ dispute
The Socialist Equality Group in New Zealand held an important online meeting last Saturday to discuss the way forward for NZ Bus drivers in Wellington, who voted on June 23 to reject a sellout agreement backed by the Tramways Union.
The meeting made the case for building rank-and-file committees, independent and opposed to the unions, to break the isolation of the 280-odd drivers, and to expand the struggle for decent jobs, wages and conditions by linking up with other workers in New Zealand and internationally. It featured speakers from New Zealand, Australia and Britain.
Friday, 2 July 2021, 11:21 am
By John Braddock, Socialist Equality Group
Several
New Zealand health experts have warned that Jacinda
Ardern’s Labour Party-Greens coalition government has
become “complacent“ over COVID-19 and didn’t act fast
enough to suspend travel with the Australian state of New
South Wales after a positive case from Sydney surfaced in
Wellington last week.
The New Zealand capital went
from alert level 1 to 2, which mandates some social
distancing measures, on June 23 after an Australian visitor
who spent the previous weekend in the city tested positive
on his return to Sydney. That city had been under limited
restrictions following an outbreak that began on June
By Chris Ross, John Braddock At a stopwork meeting last Thursday, bus drivers in New Zealand’s capital city Wellington voted 204–3 to reject a new pay offer from NZ Bus and approved a fresh round of strikes. Drivers also passed a unanimous motion .
New
Zealand’s Labour-led government, which includes the
Greens, recently declared a pay freeze across the public
service for the next three years. The move, which extends a
measure introduced last year during the COVID-19 pandemic,
will inevitably be used to suppress wages in the private
sector as well.
Public Service Minister Chris Hipkins
announced that workers earning more than $NZ60,000 will only
be offered pay increases under “exceptional”
circumstances, while increases for those on salaries over
$100,000 are ruled out. Only about a quarter of public
servants earns less than $60,000 and will theoretically
qualify for pay increases, which still have to be