Posts Tagged ‘living standards’
The argument for Open Borders
(above: refugees in an Australian concentration camp)
This was originally a post I wrote on Revleft, a forum I frequent. JimmyJazz and Spartan are the names of two people on the forum, and this post was a reply to a thread JJ started advocating that the US somehow “close it’s borders”. I tried to cover all the arguments against Open Borders put forward by leftists, and raised many of the arguments for it.
JimmyJazz, don’t quote from my sig to justify you’re position. I am an advocate of Open Borders, and the Lenin quote in question does not in any way justify more border controls.
Basically, you’re entire argument is disconnected from reality. You see the capitalist state repressing and discriminating against immigrants, and you see the capitalist class using the fact that these immigrants are illegal (and thus denied contracts, union rmembership etc) to make them a social underclass, and your solution is… “closed borders”.
JJ, the US border is already closed, You are only able to cross it legally with the permission of the capitalist state in the form of visas or whatever. And please explain to me how, in concrete terms, the border can be made any more closed than it is. Do you really think the US is going to build a gigantic wall along it’s border, so high (and perhaps electrified and covered in poisoned spikes) that noone can cross it? Do you have any idea how much that would cost? There already is a wall being built along the US-Mexico border, and that’s proven to be both ridiculously expensive and ineffective – immigrants can still get in.
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.
Armed cops no solution
June 2008
The recent series of killings in South Auckland has led to a frenzy of politician¹s calls to “get tough on crime”, and for increased powers for the police and the state in general. While such “law and order” orgies come and go, there are some disturbing concrete proposals emerging from this one, in particular the call to put armed cops on the streets of Auckland 24/7.
The police are recommending a six-month trial period; if the idea is approved by Police Commissioner Howard Broad, the armed patrols could be on the streets of Auckland by March next year.
“Very, very keen” on their guns
The idea is that there be four cars, each carrying two cops and carrying Bushmaster rifles and Glock 9mm pistols. The police say they are “very, very keen” to test these “mid-range lethal weapons”. The police also want to carry other weapons, such as the Taser Xrep, which fires a Taser projectile from 12-gauge shotgun, and bean bag guns, which fired “socks” filled with shot.
Police spokesperson John Rivers said that the patrols were inspired by police in the UK for the past two decades. This is hardly a reassuring statement, given the history of the British police forces. Take the case of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, the completely innocent man murdered by British police, who shot him eight times at close range after he had been restrained. Countless similar cases in the UK, the US and other countries together make a strong case in themselves for opposing any more weapons in the hands of the police.
The police have stated that the patrols will not cover the entire city, but will instead focus on “high risk” areas. No prizes for guessing which areas these will be! Those cars won’t be spending nearly as much time in North Harbour as they do in Otara or Manurewa.
Tough on crime? Tough on poverty!
The police and their supporters will argue that police need greater access to guns in order to deal with violent crime, such as the Manuwera liquor store robbery that left Navtej Singh dead. They will argue that the solution to the perceived “crime wave” is to increase police powers, put harsher penalties in place for everything under the sun, and so on.
This approach won¹t work. It doesn’t deal with the underlying root causes of crime poverty and social deprivation. Violent crime, such as the robberies that have been so highly publicised lately, goes hand in hand with the poverty rate.
Someone growing up in a household on a secure income that pays for a decent standard of living, in a community with decent infrastructure and facilities, where nobody is stressed about paying the monthly bills, is highly unlikely to end up robbing a liquor store or joining a gang to achieve a sense of belonging and gain respect they haven’t been given by the capitalist system.
You’re not likely to see dairies getting robbed in higher income areas, nor are you likely to see many of the social problems that are prevalent in poorer areas. If poverty was eliminated, the crime rate would plunge dramatically.
True nature of the police
The role played by the police is a class society like New Zealand is not based on creating “safer communities together”. The fundamental role of the police force is to defend the rule of the capitalist class, and to defend the oppressive system we live under. This is plain to see whenever workers go on strike or are locked out they can’t call 111 and tell the police that the boss stole their jobs! Instead, the police show clearly whose side they’re on, as they escort scabs across the picket line and arrest any workers who get too uppity.
It was also clear to see during the so-called “terror raids” late last year. The police smashed their way into homes, threatened school children with guns and blockaded entire communities in a nation wide series of arrests that targeted Maori activists, environmental campaigners and left-wingers. To this day, no charges have been brought against the people that were arrested, and the police themselves have admitted to being unable to produce a shred of evidence to lay “terror” charges.
The police are not friends of the working class. They are its enemies, and they exist to prop up an oppressive system that working people get no benefits from. With that in mind, it is obvious that workers have nothing to gain from the police sending armed patrol cars into working-class communities.
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
