Solidarity Union

Solidarity Union is one of the youngest unions in Aotearoa. Many of us who formed it in August 2006 were activists and job delegates who wanted to go out and organize the unorganized- over 85% of workers in the private sector have no protection.

In the last few years, the word UNION has come back in a big way in NZ- the Nurses Strike, the Stagecoach Bus drivers Strike, the SupersizeMyPay.Com campaign of fast-food workers, and the huge solidarity for the Locked Out Progressive Foodstuffs workers in Favona Road.

However, unions still have a long way to go to. We think a new approach is needed, one that organizes by area and not by industry.

Most workers in New Zealand work for small sites, between 10 and 100 workers, that the Big Unions overlook or are not that interested in. An area approach organizes all these people street by street, giving them a sense of their own power.

So far, we have concentrated our fire power on two areas of South Auckland, where we have made our first break throughs. Many of us have had negative experiences of bureaucracy in Big Unions. With Solidarity, we want workers to run the union themselves, through local Workers Councils.

We are not interested in being insurance salespeople, or recruiting a thousand passive members who pay dues to pay rent for a big office and a swish car. We want to see a return to the fighting spirit of New Zealand’s first unions, the Red Feds, and think that South Auckland’s industrial estates are an industrial uprising ready to explode. That’s our mission, and anyone angry about poverty and social injustice is welcome to help us.