We send solidarity greetings to Resistance's young workers' fight-back rallies at McDonald's in Sydney and Melbourne.
Last weekend, Workers Charter began a Supersize My Pay campaign with a 50-strong picket outside a KFC store in Auckland.
"KFCs across the nation, finger lickin' greed and Exploitation" and other chants rang out on our noisy and colourful picket. An ultra-imperialist Colonel Sanders was challenged by two rebel chickens holding signs reading: "KFC workers are cheap! Cheap!"
The occasion was the re-opening of the first of KFC's 95 stores in New Zealand after an expensive makeover. Yet the corporation has no money for a pay rise for its workers who start around the minimum wage which nobody can live on. Staff under 18 years old get youth rates, which are lower still.
The fast food industry is notorious for low pay, youth rates, management bullying and anti-unionism.
The Unite Workers Union, however, has been busy organising thousands of low wage, young and casual workers in McDonald's, KFC, Wendys, Pizza Hutt, Starbucks and Burger King. That's a major success story for our side.
This unionisation drive has opened space for Workers Charter to start politicising the struggle with a Supersize My Pay campaign. We are demanding a minimum wage of $12 an hour for every worker in every industry, plus the abolition of youth rates which discriminate on the basis of age.
The second action in our campaign will be a picket of McDonalds on September 17, election day in New Zealand. The politicians' war of words will be over, but the workers' war for justice is just starting.
Workers Charter is heartened by the parallel Resistance campaigns in Sydney and Melbourne.
With politicians and bureaucrats from Australia and New Zealand busy negotiating a single market, which will reshape the politics and constitutions of our two countries as well as our economies, it's vital that our working classes see themselves as part of one trans-Tasman team.
Let's do all we can to unite our fightbacks into a joint trans-Tasman campaign against low-wage bosses, youth rates and anti-union legislation.
All power to your campaign in Australia. Please send word of how you get on, and we will do the same. The spread of information between us will open the way to closer unity in action.
Kia Kaha (Stay Strong),
Grant Morgan From Green Left Weekly, September 21, 2005.
for Workers Charter steering committee.
Email <workerscharter@actrix.co.nz>
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