Posts Tagged ‘discrimination’
No justice for victims of police brutality
On June 25th, a white jury in Tauranga found Police Sergeant Keith Parsons, Senior Constable Bruce Laing, Constable John Mills and Sergeant Erle Busby not guilty of brutally assaulting Rawiri Falwasser, a young Maori, in October 2006.
With police like these, who needs criminals?
Rewi Falwasser suffered a mental breakdown on Labour Day 2006, and was not in control of his own actions. This is accepted by the police. He was arrested after stealing a neighbours car and driving erratically, endangering both himself and other people on the road.
The police took him to Whakatane police station, and put him in a holding cell. When they later came to remove him from the cell and take him to be photographed, he refused to leave the cell. According to Crown Prosecutor Fletcher Pilditch, Mr Falwasser was “stressed, confused and agitated”.
Following Falwasser’s refusal to leave the cell, Sergeant Parsons repeatedly sprayed him in the face with pepper-spray, and when he put up his hands to protect himself from this attack Parsons lashed out at his head with a baton, striking him on the hand and the wrist and leaving him with a 6½-centimetre cut to his arm.
Youth Rates – No Way!
There’s been a lot of talk over the last wee while on the issue of youth rates, and whether or not young workers should have a lower minimum wage than their adult counterparts. New Zealand has a split minimum wage. The minimum wage for workers aged 18 years and older currently stands at $11.25 an hour, which translates to $90 for an 8-hour day, or $450 for a 40 hour week. This is not enough to live on itself, and many workers are forced to work for 50 or even 60-hour weeks to make up the difference.
However, for workers aged 16 and 17, the minimum wage is only $9 an hour. That’s $72 for an 8-hour day, and $360 for a 40 hour week.
And for workers under 16 years old, there’s no minimum wage at all! Bosses can pay whatever they want, and the young worker will just have to take it or leave. A friend of mine who works at a United Video store started off on the grand total of $5 an hour, and only by working until midnight several times a week (during the school term!) was he able to get his wage raised to even close to what is legally required for older workers.
Understandably, there is a lot of resentment about this. Radical Youth, Unite union and others have organised protests and school walk outs about youth rates, including one recently in Auckland that involved over a thousand high school students leaving school to assemble in the central business district. Green MP Sue Bradford proposed a Bill to raise the minimum wage for 16 and 17 year olds to the same level as the adult wage, but nothing has come of it. A recent poll found that the vast majority of young New Zealanders were in favour of an equal minimum wage, and point two of the Workers Charter is “The right to pay equity for women, youth and casual workers.”
The basic argument against youth rates is that is inherently unfair. If someone is doing exactly the same job, under exactly the same conditions, at the exact same time as someone else, why should they be paid less than this person simply because they’re 10 years younger? It’s discrimination, pure and simple, and is no different from discriminating against someone because of his or her skin colour, religion, gender or political beliefs. All these prejudices still exist, but employers can no longer be quite so open about it, and have to at least pretend to be fair and open minded! Pay should be based on factors such as how long you’ve been at the workplace for and your skills and experience in the field, not how long ago you were born.
However, while this is certainly unfair on young workers, let’s face it, the majority of people below 18 don’t actually need jobs. Almost always they are living at home, and have meals, transport etc provided for them by their parents. There are teenagers that have to work to help support their families, and their numbers are increasing, but on the whole young people work just to get a bit of cash to spend at the movies. They aren’t selling their labour-power in order to survive.
And therein lies the main problem with youth rates. It means that jobs can go to teenagers rather than adult workers who truly need the money to support themselves and/or their families. If a boss has the choice between hiring a 15-year-old for $9 an hour or a 40-year-old for $11.25 an hour, its pretty obvious what he’s going to choose! He’ll obviously go for the cheaper labour, thereby reducing his costs and ensuring a greater amount of surplus value for himself. The capitalist class is by necessity driven to reduce costs and maximize profits, and this gives them a perfect opportunity to do so.
This is obviously not such a problem in higher paid jobs, but in low paid, casualised work, it means that jobs go to teenagers rather than people for whom this money is actually very important. Youth rates are a two edged sword, exploiting and discriminating against young workers on the basis of their ages, and ensuring in yet another way that jobs are not always given to the people who need them most.
Discrimination according to age, just like discrimination according to race, gender and so on, does nothing but weaken and divide the working class. There are no conceivable benefits from maintaining a split minimum wage, let alone not even having one for people below 16! A universal minimum wage of at least $15, no matter how old you are, is the only fair way to go. As long as we remain in a capitalist society, with the ownership of the means of production concentrated in a few hands and used for their own personal profit, we will never be able to overcome discrimination or provide jobs for all, only socialism can achieve that. But abolishing youth rates is certainly a step in the right direction.
Sources:
1. http://www.ers.dol.govt.nz/pay/minimum.html
2.http://www.myd.govt.nz/ayv/haveyoursay/youthminimumwage/youthminimumwagepoll.aspx
