Work rights focus for Hawke’s Bay mass member meeting

More than 200 EPMU members from across Hawke’s Bay attended a mass member meeting on Wednesday to discuss the union’s campaign plans for 2008.

The meeting came off the back of Labour Day and focused on the importance of our hard-won work rights and the challenges that lie ahead for all of us as union members.

EPMU national secretary Andrew Little told the meeting that union members need to stand together to protect their rights at work.

“Labour Day is about the role unions have played in winning every work right we have. It’s an interesting fact that the 8 hour day was never actually legislated. Workers won it industrially and it became so widespread that it was made a public holiday.

“And just as union members stood together to overcome injustices in the past, we need to organise to confront the injustices that face us in the modern workplace – challenges like the increasing use of temporary labour to undercut conditions, the misuse of migrant labour to depress wages and contracting out that confront us every day.

“But there’s only one answer to these challenges, and that’s to organise through our union and stand together for a better deal. That means growing our union, confronting freeloaders who want to benefit from union wins without doing the hard yards, and remaining vigilant against attacks on our work rights.

“Next year workers face a major attack on our rights at work. The National Party has said it plans to strip away protections against unfair dismissal, our rights to bargain collectively for better wages and the right to have a union organiser visit our workplaces.

“We need to stand together next year to protect these rights, and that means getting active as union members. Because if we don’t stand up as unionists to defend these rights no one else will. We showed that we can do it last year with the defeat of National’s 90 Day No-Rights Bill, and it’s our challenge to do that again next year.”

For more information about the EPMU’s WorkRights campaign go to www.workrights.org.nz .