First of all, please don’t comment on this post by saying you don’t the title of one of my favorite TV shows, “Ugly Betty,” because lead actress America Ferrera is actually quite dishy. Yes, she is - in fact, it would be hard to name a sexier actress on TV nowadays - but that objection misses the point, and it’s getting old.

A review in Salon by Rebecca Traister gets it:

But those who have taken the title’s bait and examined only the aesthetics of the show have missed the point. “Ugly Betty” is not about being unattractive, or at least not simply about being unattractive. It’s about class. And ethnicity. Its smart take on cultural and economic differences, enmeshed as it is in a fresh, funny package, makes it positively subversive television.

Betty Suarez is the 22-year-old daughter of Mexican immigrants. She lives in Queens with her widowed father; older sister, Hilda; and Hilda’s son, Justin, a fashion-obsessed preteen. But when we first meet Betty, it’s in the marble lobby of Meade Publications, where she’s awaiting a job interview with an H.R.-bot who needs only an eyeful of her metal-mouthed grin to shut the door in her face. […]

“Ugly Betty” is the American adaptation of the Colombian telenovela “Yo soy Betty, la fea,” which began airing in 1999 and has since been translated and remade around the world. […] “Betty la fea’s” creator, Fernando Gaitán, who is also a producer on “Ugly Betty,” told the Guardian in 2000 that telenovelas “are all about the class struggle. They’re made for poor people in countries where it’s hard to get ahead in life. Usually the characters succeed through love. In mine, they get ahead through work.” The U.S. version of “Betty” offers a bracing look at how those class struggles are further fraught by cultural diversity and intolerance, thanks to “Betty” producers Salma Hayek and Silvio Horta, who insisted that it retain a Latina heroine.

The scorn with which Betty is treated at Mode has less to do with her looks than with her place of economic and cultural origin. “Are you DE-LIV-ER-ING something?” enunciates receptionist Amanda when Betty first arrives, assuming that a brown girl in a bad outfit could only be a messenger. “Sale at the 99-cent store?” she later remarks when Betty misses a party. When Daniel frets because Betty has taken the “book” home to Queens, Amanda purrs, “You’re going to get it back and there’s going to be chimichurri sauce all over it.”

“Ugly Betty” is an unabashed soap opera, with all the silliness and melodrama you’d expect. It’s just that this soap is situated in a world in which classism and racism are subtexts lurking behind almost everything.

Although the Salon article doesn’t comment on it, sexism also lurks in “Betty’s” reality. Betty’s boss is a good guy within the show’s plot, but his constant sleeping around - and his objectification of and indifference to his many sexual partners - is treated harshly by the show’s writers. Betty’s boyfriend, Walter, is cute (in a totally non-mainstream-media way) and sweet, but he’s also petulant and whiny whenever Betty makes her career a higher priority than being Walter’s always-on-call girlfriend.

Still, the show’s critique of sexism is soft compared to its razor-sharp depiction of classism and racism. From the Salon review:

But the show again escapes the too-good-to-be-true trap by making clear that Betty is not above wanting to belong or look good. In Episode 3, at Hilda’s urging, she undergoes a makeover. “You want to fit in with these people? They’re not going to change. You have to,” says her sister. “The hair, the face, the clothes. You gotta look it to be it.” She whisks Betty to Choli, a local beauty technician who works her magic on Betty’s hair, nails and wardrobe.

Betty’s transformation is dramatic. With hair piled on top of her head, an outfit of jangling jewelry, a tight skirt and heels, Betty becomes a goddess to the men who catcall her (”She’s hot!” exclaims one) as she walks to the subway the next morning. But the look doesn’t translate in Manhattan, and it provokes the most scathing round of jeering she’s yet received. The other assistants photograph her as if she’s a zoo animal, and Wilhelmina scoffs, “It looks like Queens threw up.” The message is clear: Queens pretty is not Manhattan pretty. Poor pretty is not rich pretty. Latina pretty is not white pretty.

Switching into total fanboy mode, one more thing I love about “Ugly Betty” is that as the show has gone on, the villains who mock and torment Betty have become increasingly humanized. My favorite such moment so far is a brief encounter between Betty’s nephew Justin, an effeminate 13-year-old who loves fashion, and Mark, a flamboyantly gay co-worker who constantly mocks Betty (on Halloween, he comes to the office dressed in cruel Betty drag). After Justin admits that his schoolmates don’t like him very much, Mark sympathetically advises Justin to “Be who you are; wear what you want. Just learn to run real fast.”

Sometimes, “Ugly Betty’s” fish-out-of-water story seems like a metaphor for “Ugly Betty” itself. Like its title character, “Ugly Betty” is optimistic, sincere, and smart, which because of these traits sticks out among the cynical, mean-spirited, and clueless TV shows / co-workers surrounding it. I’m an addict.

(Hat tip: Racialicious).

I saw this study a few week ago, and at the time I didn’t have much time to write about it. The study has important ramifications for women’s rights and the prevention of sexually transmitted infections.

The general findings indicate that at the national level (not the individual level) westerners have more sex partners and fewer sexually transmitted infections (STIs). This challenges some common myths about HIV in Africa, and it seems to me that this study furthers the case for condom distribution and comprehensive health care. Here is a quote:

“We did have some of our preconceptions dashed,” she said, explaining that they had expected to find the most promiscuous behaviour in regions like Africa, with the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases.

That was not the case, as multiple partners were more commonly reported in industrialised countries where the incidence of such diseases were relatively low.

“There’s a misperception that there’s a great deal of promiscuity in Africa, which is one of the potential reasons for HIV/AIDS spreading so rapidly,” said Dr Paul van Look, director of Reproductive Health and Research at the World Health Organisation, who was unconnected to the study. “But that view is not supported by the evidence.”

Professor Wellings said that implied promiscuity may be less important than factors such as poverty and education – especially in the encouragement of condom use – in the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases.

The study’s findings don’t bode well for people who advocate marriage as a way to lower STI transmission, and they show a connection between the status of women and the spread of STIs. Specifically they found that gender equality seems to be correlated with fewer STIs.

Researchers also found that married people have the most sex, and that there has been a gradual shift to delay marriage. While that has meant a predictable rise in the rates of premarital sex, experts believe this doesn’t necessarily translate into more dangerous behaviour.

In some instances, married women may be at more risk than single women.

“A single woman is more able to negotiate safe sex in certain circumstances than a married woman,” said Dr van Look, who pointed out that married women in Africa and Asia are often threatened by unfaithful husbands who frequent prostitutes.

There is much greater equality between women and men with regard to the number of sexual partners in rich countries than in poor countries, the study found.

For example, men and women in Australia, Britain, France and the US tend to have an almost equal number of sexual partners.

By contrast, in Cameroon, Haiti and Kenya, men tend to have multiple partners while women tend only to have one.

So my sense is the more sexual freedom for women, the better the economic and education opportunities for everyone, and the better the health education system, the fewer STIs are spread.

The Labour government is obviously committed to doing something about the wage-gap between men and women - they’ve released a study. This study compares the wages in male dominated industries, such a building and painting, with wages in female dominated areas, like hairdressers and caregivers. This research does show that wages in male dominated industries and female dominated industries tend to have similar start rates, but after five years workers in male dominated industries earn over 45% more. However, the conclusion the Minister of Women’s Affairs comes to is ridiculous:

I have a theory that if women knew more about the potential earnings and career opportunities in some of these trades more traditionally occupied by men, their choices might be different. We quickly realised however that there was a dearth of information about what young people earn in different trades and occupations. So the Ministry commissioned a piece of research on ‘Wages & Training Costs in Male- and Female-dominated Trade-related Occupations’ and I thought this was a good opportunity to release the findings, because I think they are relevant to any young woman making decisions about her career, something that has always been a priority for the YWCA.

If only women had realised there was a wage gape earlier sooner then we would have solved it long ago!

There are some structural reasons women don’t go into male dominated industries. It’s not like girls and boys emerge fully formed at 18 to decide what to do with their life. My all-girls school did not have a wood-work department or a metal-work department - there was nowhere within the school was there anywhere where you could learn these sorts of skills.

Being the only women in a male dominated situation is often an extremely unpleasant experience. One of the way men have continued to dominate the male dominated trades is to act in a hostile way to any woman who enters. I haven’t personally organised in male dominated trades, but I know women who have, and women who know the female apprentices. Not everyone has a hard time of it - not every male-dominated worksite has a misogynist atmosphere, but enough do that it’s not easy - and for many women the risk may not be worth the pay-out.

Knowledge is the last problem that needs to be solved. But even asking the question “why aren’t more women painters?” ignores the more pressing question “why aren’t caregivers paid more?” If we’re going to look at the wage-gap we have to look at the low-wages.

For the government to tut-tut about women only being 8% of the modern apprentices is hypocritical. When they set up the modern apprenticeship scheme it didn’t cover hair-dressing, or any other traditional female trade. They could have included female trades in modern apprenticeships, but they didn’t - that’s the reason this scheme is male dominated.

But the bit about that speech that most enraged me is that they studied caregivers. The government is probably the funder for at least 80% of caregivers employed in this country. If they wanted to do something about the wage gap, then getting pay-equity for caregivers would actually be a really good start.

The wage-gap is complicated, I’m aware that I’ve only covered a few of the many ways in which sexism, misogyny, and capitalism work together to screw women over, but I’m fairly sure I’ve got a better grasp on it than Lianne Dalziel does.

Note on comments: I’d like the comments to focus on the reasons we don’t have pay-equity and how to achieve it.

The minimum wage was a winner in last night’s election. In the six states (Montana, Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Nevada) with ballot measures to raise the minimum wage, the ballot measures passed. Even better, all six laws are indexed to inflation - meaning that the MW in those states will automatically go up over time, rather than having to be fought for again and again.

Here’s a summary table, from this Economic Policy Institute page:

If trends in these six states mirror national trends, then about 60% of the 1.5 million workers getting the raise will be women. A disproportionate number of the 1.5 million will be people of color.

Interestingly, this is the first time in US history that the majority of states have state-level minimum wages which are higher than the Federal minimum wage. That’s a reflection of how much the Federal government has allowed the real value of the minimum wage to drop, forcing the states to step in:

(Curtsy: Angry Bear).

Plus, new overlord Pelosi has said that raising the minimum wage will be at the top of the Democrats’ national agenda (one of a bunch of items at the top, admittedly). Fresh from a electorial beating, Republicans won’t have much stomach for fighting a minimum wage increase - polls show that raising the minimum wage is popular with voters of both parties.

A couple of links:

Dean Baker points out that when restaurant owners say that raising the minimum wage would hurt them, and anyway waiters may a ton in tips, the numbers don’t add up.

This Economic Policy Institute brief from 1999 — “The Minimum Wage Increase: A Working Woman’s Issue” — is, sadly, still current today. EPI has a bunch of good articles about the minimum wage, by the way.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

I was travelling last week, and I didn’t get to write about a whole lot of stuff I meant to write about. So I thought I’d put together my first link post. It’s not a link farm, because I don’t have that many links. Think of it more as a link lifestyle block, without the hard work of an actual farm link lifetyle blocks are in privileged areas (no this metahpor doesn’t work).

First of all you should just go and read brownfemipower. She has written some amazing stuff recently, and I want to quote whole posts. But I will just content myself with two snippets, from a poem in there somewhere

a thing i’ve noticed as i’ve been shifting through pictures of oaxaca and palestine is how many women bring their purses to rallies and protests. and not just a little purse they can hook over their head and forget about, but huge ass mama purses that you know the kitchen sink is in.

and every time i see a picture of some fierce mama facing down a tank or running away from bullets, clinging to her big ass purse, i want to cry. what is in that purse? did she pack extra tylenol in case somebody needed it? are their baby wipes (cuz they come in so handy, even when the kids aren’t around!)? is there a couple of extra bottles of water (in case one of the children lost their’s?)?

Also from Why feminists must stand against government repression in Mexico:

All feminists MUST pay attention to what is happening in Oaxaca. Indigenous women are leading the way to female liberation–which means that just as their demands for access to birth control carry the same weight in their actions that their demands for access to community radio do, they are also taking the brunt of the violence liberation often brings. But thier entire community recognizes that they will never have liberation (aka community health, freedom from poverty, clean air to breath, workers rights, sexual freedom, control of the land etc) as long as the nation/state has ultimate control over what happens to their bodies and souls–or as long as violence against women is acceptable in any form.

To some good news

PARIS, Nov 3, 2006 (AFP) - Unions at Paris’s main airport said Friday they plan to call for a strike over the withdrawal of security badges from scores of airport workers, mostly Muslims, denouncing it as discrimination.

This is an awesome display of solidarity from France’s airport. All credit to the workers involved, but there’s also a lot to be said for the constitutional right to strike.

While I was away Sophia from At the Bay wrote an excellent post about an article written by Anjum Rahman, a member of the Islamic Women’s Council. The article isn’t on-line so I’m quoting Sophia’s transcript:

Yet that seems to me to be a circular argument. It again relates sexual violence to women’s behaviour (ie their clothing - too much or too little) rather than men’s behaviour. It’s the same as the argument that covering up allows men to beat women without the results being visible. If that were the case, then women who dress scantily would suffer much less from domestic violence.

[…] To put hijab (covering) in the context of rape prevention is to negate its power. In reality, that is why the sheik’s comments are so destructive and harmful, and why they make me so angry. For me, hijab is a position of strength, but he turns it into a position of weakness and oppression. For me, it’s a personal statement of my relationship with God, but he makes it a statement about my relationship to man.”

BitchPhD has an excellent post about feminism, the division of labour, and a whole bunch of other things:

The second story is smaller, but bigger. In my Spanish class, there was an older woman who was returning to school. Over the course of the semester, we found things out about her: her husband was a doctor and she’d been a homemaker. He’d agreed to “let” her go to college as long as–she emphasized this–nothing changed at home. She was to continue to do all the housework and all the childcare (if memory serves, they had two school-age children) and could take classes and do homework in her spare time. I thought, of course, that this was fucking horrible, and although it was clear to me that her husband was a jerk, there was part of me that wondered why the hell she’d married him, and why she stayed married to him.

I don’t remember what prompted her outburst one afternoon, but I do remember her saying, passionately and seemingly on the verge of tears, “you young girls look at me and you all think you can have it all. You think that you won’t end up like me. But I’m telling you, you can’t have it all. Just wait. You’ll get married, and you’ll think you’re marrying someone who loves and supports and respects you, but that’s not how it works. I know you look at me and you think I’m crazy, or you feel sorry for me, but I’m telling you: look at me and realize that this is where you’ll be in twenty years.”

My Mum has said that she didn’t understand feminism until she had me (see I have magic powers). Although I have no children myself my feminist analysis is centred around reproduction, as much as it’s centred around control of women’s sexuality. I love reading personal blogs by feminist women who have children (my favourite is Raising WEG), because to me individual stories often speak really powerfully to the wider issues.

While I’m posting links I don’t think I’ve ever linked to my favourite post ever. When I first read this I said to a friend “I want to give this to everyone I know - no I want to turn it into a protective bubble around myself so that everyone who came within 50 metres had to read and understand it.” It starts with the absolutely awesome phrase “the crazy maze of eating while female” and is mostly about the problem of not replicating (and reinventing) negative attitudes towards food within supposedly feminist groups. After careful consideration I’ve decided this is my favourite paragraph:

At the very least, I think we need some new ways of approaching the issue of food in groups, so it becomes less about the fear of food and fat, less about our personal responsibility for our health, and more about encouraging women to feel strong in our ability to make food choices with integrity.

But I really do recommend you go read the whole thing.

The New Zealand Police have launched a new campaign Get Better Work Stories. The thrust of this campaign is that your life is boring and a waste of time at the moment and you should rectify this by joining the police. The stories themselves are noble stories of fighting with young people, and having things thrown at you by protesters.

But they seem to have missed a few. Here are some of the ‘real work stories’ from the police this week:

Pepper Spray
I was called out to a party and there was a guy there we were supposed to arrest. He was coming towards me and I told him he was under arrest but he just kept walking. I thought ‘no-one gets to walk past me’ so I pepper sprayed him. I love this job, normal people don’t get to use pepper spray when they want to be violent.

Handcuffed
So I was called out to this party in South Auckland, and I thought to myself I haven’t been able to beat up any brown people for a while, this seems like a good opportunity. So I arrested the owner of the house, handcuffed him, and beat the shit out of him in the back of the car on the way back to the police station. It was awesome, made me feel like a real man, I even got to knock him unconcious.

Four on One
I thought it was going to be a normal night - not doing anything particularly exciting. But then a mate brought someone in for driving while diqualified. We decided the only way to protect the public from people who commit this terrible time was to beat him up. Two of my friends did the actual beating up part and I got to use pepper spray - I love pepper spray.

Other uses for Handcuffs
The police force can give you great opportunities even if you’re not working. I’d left my wife at home to look after the kids and was at the local, totally off my face and looking to score. I failed a couple of times, but then I pressured this woman to give me a lift home. I was obviously too drunk to drive and was all “I’m a police officer” - which worked. So I got her to the police station, hand-cuffed her and raped her, and then I did it a few more times. The best bit was my buddies covered it up for me for years.

These are just the stories that have made the news in hte last week or so. They’re just the cases where police officers actions have been made public and are considered unaceptable to the police force. I’ve watched four police oficers jump on top of someone who wasn’t resisting with one person kneeling on his head. I’ve seen plain-clothes police officers pull pepper spray on people without identifying themselves. I’ve had a police officer say to a group of women “If you get robbed attacked or raped, don’t call us because we won’t come.” I’ve seen police use unreasonable force at least half the time I’ve seen them arrest someone. There were no serious consequences for any of the police officers I’ve mentioned.

I’m a political activist - when I deal with the police there are always other people around me, watching. We know the nuumbers and names of all the human rights lawyers in Wellington and all the media outlets. The police know this, and they treat us accordingly. What I’ve seen is nothing compared to how poor Pacific Island kids from Porirua are treated every day.

Also posted on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

One question that I’ve never resolved to my satisfaction, is why I write a blog. When I started I saw it as an opportunity to do some writing. I didn’t have any grand ideas for my blog and I don’t see it as political action in itself.

Ever since I’ve started I’ve been feeling obligated to write about certain topics - to write about topics that don’t get covered in the mainstream media. To use this odd little platform I have, to raise issues that are important.

I generally haven’t been able to do that, because I generally don’t have anything to say about those topics. There’s a limit to the number of times you can say “This happened; it was awful”, or (more rarely) “this happened; it was awesome’.

But there are exceptions, and the situation is Oaxaca is one of them. I would have written about it sooner, but I’ve been away from home, and it’s taken me a while to get a handle on what was going on.

Resistance

From Democracy Now:

Over the past four months, the residents of Oaxaca - sparked by a teachers strike - had turned the city into an autonomous zone. The police and official government had been kicked out - in its place the protesters formed the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca or APPO.

For months entire families have been camping outside to oversee barricades protecting the city. The protesters have been demanding the resignation of the state’s governor Ulises Ruiz and the formation of a more representative government.

From La Luchita: Paz, Justicia y Libertad:

This all started as a routine labor strike by Section 22 of the Mexican teachers union (often referred to in Spanish language press as “el magisterio”) escalated into a state-wide revolt after state police tried to violently evict the encampment of striking teachers on June 14.

The teachers union and the newly formed Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca made the ouster of unpopular governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, widely considered to have won the election by fraud, their primary demand. As violence by police, paramilitaries and mercenaries escalated, the protesters began barracading their neighborhoods in self-defense. For example, after the Radio Universidad radio station used by the teachers union was attacked, protesters responded with a wave of radio station takeovers. But the protesters also began organizing to put their demand into action, declaring Gov. Ulises “banned” from Oaxaca, seizing government buildings and chasing out politicians from the local and state governments.

Violent attacks had for months been escalating against protesters, in what protesters said was part of Gov. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz’s repressive Operation Iron (”Plan Hierro”). Brad Will himself documented this with an article a week ago called “Death in Oaxaca”. With the murder of the indigenous teacher Panfilo Hernandez, the death toll was at 9 for the protesters. Meanwhile, political parties and the commerical Mexican media were reporting that the protesters were killing people, often without saying the name of the supposed victim or the time and place of the supposed killing. The killing of dissident teacher Jaime René Calvo Aragón, (who argued for the teachers to return to classes) was blamed by the government on protesters, while protesters blamed the government or paramilitary mercenaries of the PRI of killing the teacher as a pretext to repress the protestors, as reported by La Jornada.

I only wish I’d paid enough attention to learn enough to write about the autonomous zone when it was still an autonomous zone.

Reaction

On Sunday Mexican Federal Preventative Police entered the city. I don’t think I can give a good summary of events so I recommend the following sites:

Narco News
La Luchita: Paz, Justicia y Libertad
Infoshop
Indymedia Oaxaca (if you speak Spanish - I’m sure there are many many other great Spanish sites about this conflict, it’s just I can’t find them).

Three people died in the assault, and the fight is still on-going.

What Next

The Zapatistas are supporting the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca:

The EZLN announced that “for the entire day on November 1, 2006, the highways and roads that cross territories where the EZLN are present in the Southeast of Chiapas will be closed.”

The battle isn’t over.

Why this is important

I’m not writing this as a call for support. I think it’s fairly clear that the people of Mexico are doing a far better job of organising and resisting than almost anyone in the first world.

I’m writing this because I want people to know that resistance is met by repression. Efforts to organise and liberate ourselves do threaten the interests of those with power, and will be met with force. To the extent that that doesn’t happen to you, is the extent that your priviledge and/or powerlessness prevents you from threatening society.

Thanks to brownfemipower andVegankid for most of the links.

Note for the comment thread: I’m not prepared to host comments attacking the people of Oaxaca or their resistance (disagreeing with me is OK though).

Also posted on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

I’ve written before about the experience of waiting for news. In New Zealand waiting for news generally means listening to the National Radio news bulletin every hour on the hour. There are six pips and then they tell you what’s happened in the last hour. Usually it’s OK if you miss some, usually not that much happens between one hour and the next. But, sometimes, when you really care about what happened it matters desperately and you never miss a bulletin.

From the 28th August to the 21st September 600 workers were locked-out of their jobs. I listened to the news so obsessively that when the lock-out ended I realised I’d forgotten how to listen the news with mild curiosity. I am going to write a brief history of that struggle, because I think remembering that we can win if we work together is an important part of the battle.

There are 600 workers who run the distribution centres for Progressive Enterprises. Progressive run three separate supermarket chains, so the distribution centres receive goods from the suppliers and distribute them to the different supermarkets. In 2003 Progressive Enterprises closed down their Auckland and Christchurch distribution centres, made all the workers redundant, and then reopened in another location, rehiring the workers on lower pay. They weren’t able to do that at the third distribution centre (in Palmerston North), because they either weren’t able to find a new site, or weren’t able to get rid of the lease. So workers in three different locations, doing exactly the same work, were paid three different rates. Workers were paid $2 an less in Christchurch than they were in Palmerston North, for doing exactly the same job.

This picture comes from Friday 25 August, the workers at the three distribution centres went on strike in support of their claim for a single collective agreement and one rate of pay. I was only vaguely aware of it at the time. I’m a unionist - I support striking workers - so I was excited. But I didn’t pay that much more attention than I’m currently paying to the workers at TVNZ who are currently taking industrial action.

That all changed on the Monday (28 August). Progressive Enterprises responded by locking the workers out. All the workers were locked out (without pay), unless they dropped the claim for a single collective agreement. The company started putting out ridiculous lies - they said the union was demanding a 30% payrise. Lock-

At the start it was about Woolworths distribution, going into the second week it was about New Zealand workers in general, there was a lot of members of the public that saw that, and rallied behind us.

That’s from Shane Cooper, a worker at the Palmerston North distribution centre.

That was my experience as well, although I was paying attention during the first week of the lock-out I still saw it as an issue for that site. When the company and the union went into mediation later in that week I haunted the radio (and peppered anyone who might tell me what was going on with text messages asking if there was any progress), because being locked-out is an awful experience.

The families who were locked out were facing an indefinate time without wages. For the first week, before substantial funds came in, the union couldn’t give out money. It just paid the most urgent bills people had, provided food (many donations of kind came in - but it cost $1000 a day just for food on the Auckland picket line), and tried to defer the rest (all the major banks gave mortgage holidays). The stress that that uncertainty puts on people is hard to imagine. Most people can’t afford to be without work for weeks at a time, particularly not knowing when that time will end. There were some families where the locked-out workers was the only wage-earner, other families where both parents worked in the distribution centres.

It was frustrating, being in Wellington as that first week came to an end. We were desperate to help, but didn’t know how. We had no distribution centre near by (Palmerston North was two hours drive away). We went to a picket outside one of the Supermarkets (the retail workers at those supermarkets were also negotiating for a wage increase, but they weren’t locked out).

After a week of closed distriubtion centres the supermarket shelves started emptying. It was really exciting to go in there and see a sign say “We apologise if your favourite product is out of stock.” The situation was really odd as well. The one product the supermarkets had in abudance was budget toilet paper. The managers had obviously been told that they didn’t want the shelves to look empty, so everywhere they were short the shelves were filled with toilet paper. You’d be looking at the biscuit aisle and in between the Tim-tams and the Shrewsberries there’d be Toilet Paper.

The second week things started to get serious, both on their side and on ours. In New Zealand if workers are on strike, or locked-out, it’s illegal to hire or contract any one else to do their work. Progressive were breaking this law in two ways, one they were getting suppliers to deliver supplies directly,¹ and two they had hired Linfox, a supply chain company, to distribute the goods in the meantime. Christchurch and Auckland workers were 100% union, and stayed strong throughout the lock-out. However, Palmerston North was less than 100% union, and also had the least to gain from a settlement, since they were already on the highest rates.²

At the beginning of the second week workers in Palmerston North started resigning the union and going back. The only way the company would let them back to work was if they resigned from the union, and therefore renounced their claim for a single collective agreement. By Tuesday 5 September (just over a week after the lock-out began) enough workers went back that the company could reopen the Palmerston North distribution centre with scab trucks. They did this with the aid of the police - who once again made it clear which side they were on in industrial disputes.

By this time the fight was for all New Zealand workers, and it was clear that the company was out to destroy the union. Progressive enterprises is an Australian based company that is Australasia’s largest private sector employer. It’s cheif executive Roger Corbett earns $8.5 million a year (Australian), the claim the workers were seeking would have cost a fraction of that. Australia has recently passed extremely anti-worker employment legislation, and it seemed they were testing their tactics in New Zealand. Progressive and Walmart seem to have a friendly relationship, and have had management exchanges, so they can learn how to screw over workers together.

The intractability of the company made it a union-wide issue. If they could break such a well organised site, they could break anyone So many times over the next few weeks someone would say to me “thanks for what you’re doing” and I’d say “it’s just we have to win this you know?” and they’d nod.

You see the New Zealand union movement hasn’t been known for fighting for a number of years. In 1991 the National government introduced extremely anti-worker legislation. Despite a mandate from around the country the central union organisation the Council of Trade Unions wouldn’t call a general strike. The next decade saw stagnation and decreases on wages, attacks on unions, and workers and unions to afraid to stand up for themselves. Just now, 15 years later, the union movement is starting to fight again.

Laila Harre, the current secretary of the National Distribution Union (the main union in the distribution centre) challenged the incumbent and won in that rare thing, a contested union election.³ She was personally attacked during the lock-out and one newspaper editorial blaming the whole thing on her personal ambition to lead the CTU (quite how she’d have the power to make the company lock-out the workers is unclear). She didn’t drive the workers to the picket lines, the actual story does her a lot more credit. When, after the first 24 hours on strike the workers decided not to go back, she recognised that this was their decision to make and her job to work to make that decision work.

In terms of union leadership this was a huge step forward. I believe that if we’d lost this the union movement wouldn’t have fought for anything, and that would have been the death blow (union movement’s are always much stronger when they fight).

I only got up to the Palmerston North picket-line once, on my way somewhere else. The camp was amazing and it was great to meet the workers. I came about lunch-time and they offered me lunch, I demurred - I hadn’t had lunch, but I didn’t want to take food that was meant for someone without an income. They insisted and one guy said to me “We can’t stop the trucks going in, and we can’t stop the trucks coming out, but we can give you hospitality, and cook good food”

Those workers couldn’t stay out alone - the union movement came in behind almost immediately, giving substantial amounts of money to the lock-out fund (over a hundred thousand of dollars). That was great, but the public reaction was something else. The only thing we could really do in Wellington was collect money, so we threw ourselves into it and got to see, first hand, the level of support out there for the locked out workers.

We were just out there on the street, rattling our buckets, and the response was amazing. People would go to get money out so they could give it to us; people would empty their wallets into the buckets; after a couple of hours our buckets were heavy with coins and we’d raised over a thousand dollars. It was really clear to me that the people of Wellington understood that this was a fight for all New Zealanders. The street collecting was just one way people were contributing, there was a 0900 phone line, and a bank account people could put money into. Ordinary workers gave over a hundred thousand dollars to the lock-out fund.

This picture comes from the Auckland rally to support the locked-out workers, there were rallies like this all over the country.

I had my first ‘We’re going to Win’ moment on Friday 8 September two weeks into the lock-out.⁴ The Council of Trade Union called a special meeting to decide what the union movement could do to help. As well as contributing substantially more money, people began to talk about solidarity action (which is illegal in New Zealdand). The Maritime Union of New Zealand and the Maritime Union of Australia, both started talking about refusing to work on Progressive cargo, that would have broken the company. Just the possibility made us feel so much stronger. Unions were starting to pledge serious funds. The richer workers, from well organised workplaces, agreed to pay $20 a week for the duration (that’s how I began to think and talk, everything was for the duration). These were work places with thousands of workers, so it would be $20,000-$40,000 a week.

It was also becoming clearer and clearer that the company was breaking the law and the union was going to be able to sue.⁵ There was even the possibility that the whole lock out was illegal. By the third week I really did believe we were going to win, with the legal options and the industrial options, we were strong and the company wasn’t going to break us. It was just a question of how long, because those workers were hurting. Although we’d raised a lot, it doesn’t go very far when it was split 600 ways.

These cases were due to go to court Tuesday 19 September, they didn’t - because the company blinked. They agreed to go back into bargaining and post-pone the court date. Then, for the first time, the company actually agreed to negotiate. It took all day and all night (negotiations finished sometime between 3.30am and 4.30am the next morning), but they pieced together a deal. It was a three year deal for three seperate collective agreement, but the rates were aligned so by the end of two years the workers would have pay parity.

Two days later, on the 21st of September the workers voted to ratify this deal, and the day after that the lock-out formally ended and the workers returned to work.

To fight and win, is the most amazing experience. The union didn’t choose the fight, the company did, which made it even sweeter that we won. I say we, but I don’t work in the distribution centre, and while this was a victory for everyone, it’s the workers who did the hard work.

My favourite story from the strike came from the partner of a worker in Palmerston North. She had recently been made redundant, so they were in a particularly difficult position. Her 7 year old daughter went to visit her grandmother (who worked in a nearby factory) during the grandmother’s afternoon smoko. The little girl was standing on the pavement asking, and her grandmother asked what she was doing. She replied “I’m on strike, I’ll wave at them and they’ll toot at me, because they agree.”

So with the risk of sounding like a placard - dare to struggle, dare to win:

1. They had legal advice that said something along the lines of in order to keep this legal avoid talking about payment until after the lock-out is ended. (back)
2. In New Zealand you can’t close a shop, so people join the union on an individual basis not a worksite basis. (back)
3. As one official put it “Democracy has broken out in the union movement.” (back)
4. Yes this is a Buffy reference, sorry about that. (back)
5. Yes I have a problem with the company breaking the law and don’t have a problem with the union breaking the law. It’s not because I’m a hypocrite, it’s because I’ve picked a side - deal with it. (back)

Should supply and demand determine the cost of adoption? Tariq sent me this article about a campaign by Rev. Ken Hutcherson in Washington state. Hutcherson is taking on the adoption industry. Here’s a quote:

When a couple seeking to adopt a white baby is charged $35,000 and a couple seeking a black baby is charged $4,000, the image that comes to the Rev. Ken Hutcherson’s mind is of a practice that was outlawed in America nearly 150 years ago — the buying and selling of human beings.

The practice, which is widespread among private adoption facilitators, of charging prospective parents different fees depending on the race or ethnicity of the child they adopt is one that Hutcherson is fighting to change from his Redmond, Wash., church. The Antioch Bible Church has established its own adoption agency, and is lobbying state legislators to change Washington’s laws.

I don’t have time to write about this in detail, but this article outlines some of my concerns about the adoption industry and American’s views on children in general. Read the article, and tell me what you think.

The New Zealand government has announced some changes to its benefit system, and while I haven’t gone through the details yet I wanted to use it as an opportunity to discuss issues around work and disability.

In New Zealand the sickness benefit is available for people who are unable to work due to sickness, injury, disability or pregnancy. The invalids benefit is available for people who are permanently and severely restricted in their capacity for work because of a sickness, injury or disability (why the difference? I don’t know. Although it’s made even more pointed by the fact that the Invalids benefit is paid more. I’m lying I do know that it’s a nasty sort of moralistic division between really deserving, and possibly shirking poor).

The Ministry of Social Welfare has announced that more ’services’ will be offered to people on sickness or invalids benefit, to help them get jobs. The ’services’ currently provided by Social Welfare focus on teaching people how to look for a job and matching up people and jobs (I’m being very generous with my description here). By making such a big deal of offering these services to people on the sickness and invalid’s benefits (and later forcing people to use them) the government is saying that they think the main things people on the invalids and sickness benefits need to get into jobs is access to these services.

I say bullshit.* I’m going to explore the actual barriers that stop people who are sick, injured, disabled and pregant from getting a job.

The most obvious barrier is the sickness, injury, disability, or pregnancy. To get on the sickness or invalids benefit you have to have a doctor sign off saying that you are unable to work, so it’s not just a barrier - it’s a medically certified barrier.

There are all sorts of things that the government as a whole could do to ensure that people who are sick, injured, disabled or pregnant can participate fully in society. For example, many health conditions are exacerbated by living in low-quality housing that isn’t properly heated (read most NZ houses). The government could do something about this, both by providing more, warmer, state houses, and by instituting better building standards.

What about stress? Many (most?) chornic healthy conditions are exacerbated by stress. Poverty is stressful (and anyone who is on these benefits is poor). Dealing with social welfare is stressful (I’ve known people suffer from serious health relapses due to the stress of trying to deal with WINZ). There are many thing that the government as a whole, and WINZ in particular could do to improve the health of many people who are sick, injured or disabled. Why aren’t they starting there?

Lets move away from the sickness, injury, disability or pregnancy for a bit. After all to focus on those is still to imply that it’s a problem with the person that they are not currently employed, and that’s not what I believe. There is a huge amount of unreasonable prejudice against hiring people who are sick, disabled, or injured. Everyone I know who has fitted in those categories has had a much harder time finding a job than similarly qualified and capable people who don’t. Why not start by working on the people with the prejudice, rather than ask people who are discriminated against to jump through more hoops?

That’s only the start though, because it’s not just the unreasonable prejudice that is the problem, it’s the prejudice that is considered totally reasonable. For example, if someone had a chronic health condition that didn’t stop them working a forty hour week most of the time, but that flared up a few times a year and the worker required a couple of weeks off a time, then it would be considered perfectly reasonable not to hire them. Or if someone had a full-time job and then developed a health condition which meant that they could only work three days a week, it’d be perfectly legal to fire them.

WINZ is obsessed with work as the be all and end all of people’s contribution to society. But we only get to contribute to society on employer’s times. Employers don’t have to (and generally don’t) take on workers whose health allows them to work some of the time.

This is ridiculous. Why do we let our economic system dictate our participation in society, rather than organise an economic system that allows everyone to participate? Almost everyone can do some useful and meaningful work, if they’re allowed to do it on their terms. The fact that it doesn’t work like that, that we aren’t all able to contribute according to our ability is not the problem of individual people, who have sicknesses, injuries, or disabilities, which don’t fit employer’s wants.

* For the sake of clarity I also want to emphasise that these ‘services’ are generally not what unemployed people need to get jobs either. I think changing the Reserve Bank Act would do more to lower unemployment than all the ‘work4u’ seminars in the universe.

Also posted on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

In the summer of 2005, my financial situation, which had been shaky for months, finally reached critical point. A letter came from my bank demanding immediate repayment of everything I’d borrowed on pain of court action, and I knew I had no means of finding the necessary sum within the time they were willing to grant me.

I ran through an inventory of my assets, which didn’t take long. The most valuable thing I owned was my computer, and I’d only bought it for a tenth of the sum the bank was now demanding. Desperate, I started to wonder what an able-bodied white baby would fetch in a black-market paid adoption and whether I would be able to find a prospective buyer willing to make a down-payment while the baby was still in utero.

So I know what financial difficulties can do to a person’s thought processes, and that’s why I’m not rushing to criticise Amp for his decision to sell amptoons.com. If I’d owned a valuable domain back then and received the offer Amp received, I probably wouldn’t have even stopped to wonder what they would use it for.

I’m sticking around, but I know some people would prefer not to read or link to Alas now because of this connection. Some of these are people whose opinions I respect and whose comments I would hate to miss, so I’m going to start reposting the bulk of my Alas posts on my personal blog, The Iron-On Line. They will doubtless end up buried among memes, one-liners and updates about my life, but I hope people who can’t forgive Amp for this sale can still join in the discussion.

Amp put up a list of privilege lists on Alas. For those not familiar with the format, most are based on Peggy McIntosh’s White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.

When they stick to the specifics these lists can be illuminating - I’m probably not the only white person who had never had to think about the colour of ‘flesh-coloured’ bandages. But seeing all those lists together raised some real questions for me.

This is partly because I think there’s a real problem with the way privilege is framed in these lists - anything which one group of people have and another doesn’t is considered a privilege. I’m fine with describing a man who doesn’t do his share of housework and has women around him picking up the slack as privileged. I’m much less OK with describing a man who doesn’t have to worry about being raped, if he walks home after dark, as privileged. Not being afraid of rape is a right, not a privilege.

I disagree with the content of some of the lists. I think an extremely large proportion of the average sized person are not true for many women - whatever their size (particularly this one: I do not have to be afraid that when I talk to my friends or family they will mention the size of my body in a critical manner, or suggest unsolicited diet products and exercise programs - I find the idea that ‘average-sized’ women can be free from this fear almost ridiculous). The white-privilege list seems to assume that the white-people in question are middle-class. Some of the non-trans-privilege list also apply to many non-trans women (particularly the stuff about gender and medical care). This is from a social class privilege check-list: “There are places where I can be among those exclusively from my social class” - which suggests he’s never been to a factory, poor neighbourhood, or a prison. I get that it’s a blunt instrument, but a lot of these lists are obscuring more than they’re illuminating.

I also think there’s a real problem in treating different sorts of oppression as if they operate the same way. I’ve written about this before. But these lists, which are all based on each other in some respect really seem to suggest that privilege all works in the same way. For example, representation in media plays a part in most lists, but I would say the role media plays in upholding different oppressions is really different.

But most fundamentally I just don’t have much time for analysing the world through privilege. It so often leads to individualistic non-action - to someone interupting a conversation to say “but even having this conversation is a privilege.” On an individual level I think it’s important to know where you come from, to know what you’ve been given, and to analyse how you benefit from this system. I absolutely think that everyone has a responsibility to not use the privilege, and power, society gives us - over people we know. But you can’t give up privilege as an individual - you can just fight to end it by working collectively.

*********

Note: I’ve had a disturbing amount of support from right-wing assholes for this post. I think they glided over this sentance:

On an individual level I think it’s important to know where you come from, to know what you’ve been given, and to analyse how you benefit from this system. I absolutely think that everyone has a responsibility to not use the privilege, and power, society gives us - over people we know.

I think I should make the point more explicit. I believe that when you interact with someone who has less power and resources tha you do you have a duty not to wield your advantages over them, or to act like you’re superior because you have that power and those resources. Snapping at workers in the service industry? Absolutely unacceptable for anyone who believes in any kind of equal society. Asking why those in poverty get hire purchaces (when you can always get credit from your parents)? Equally obnoxious. Obviously in order to do this, you need to understand what power and resources our society has given you.

However, I believe this step is only a necessary pre-requisite for meaningful political action, it is not meaningful political action in and of itself. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t realise what society gives you, it’s just that realising it doesn’t doing anyone any good at all unless you organise.

Also posted at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Admin’s Note: This is something I have been wanting to post for a while, but I was inspired by a big old blog fight among feminists this past week. The fight started in a debate over bikini waxing, but the larger issue is social class and standards of beauty and femininity. I was on the outskirts of it, so I missed much of the controversy, but I just had to get my two cents in now that I finally figured out whats going on. My primary exposure to this debate was over at Bitch|Lab’s spot. I left this comment on her blog, which basically sums up my feelings about the femininity issue:

I’m completely and utterly tired of hearing the word choice bantered around like it is the be all and end all of feminism. A week long moratorium on the word would be nice. It might get some folks to think outside the box.

In my experience people who talk about choices are the people who have the most choices to talk about.

The rhetoric of choice erases any sort of meso or macro level understanding of constraints on human behavior. It’s this overly individualistic mentality that drives me nuts.

I’m also tired of graduate students complaining about how poor they are, especially when so many of them have the money to travel abroad, have nice cars, and have an alcohol and weed budget in excess of $50 dollars a week. (If you fit this description, you ain’t poor.) Hell, I wasn’t poor in grad school (well not in my PhD program). I got paid $18,000 a year for a grad student stipend and managed to carved enough adjuncts together to make $30,000. Having grown up without indoor plumbing in Appalachia, I felt like I was in hog heaven. I was even able to buy a condo and a car.

My friend told me about leg waxing in grad school (people in southern Ohio just don’t do such things), and she said it was relatively affordable only $30-50 every 6 weeks. I remember thinking that I could get a pack of 15 razors, for $10.

Yes, this is an all over the place rant, but reading the post will address where the slightly unrelated thoughts are coming from.  I also think people may like to follow the discussion on this post over at Rachel’s Tavern since the discussion over at my place always seems be different from the one here at Alas.

A Little Piece of My Social Class Story

I have experienced a great deal of class mobility in my life, and I am the poster child for the idea that getting a good education can move you up the class ladder. For me this worked in two ways, through my mother’s education and through my own. See my mother’s family is the quintessential white working class family. Almost all of the stereotypes about working class white people apply to them. Unlike her 6 siblings, my mother managed to get a college degree. To this day, I don’t really know how she financed it. My Dad, on the other hand, came from a GI bill middle class family. My grandfather was able to go to college thanks to the GI bill, and he became a chemist, which allowed my grandmother to be a homemaker who raised 4 children. When her children left home, my Grandma went to college and started a career as a teacher. Even though they didn’t grow up well to do, my grandparents were vaulted into the middle class, and my father benefited from it.

It took a long time for my parents to enter the middle class because they came of age in the economic recession era of the 70s and early 80s, so most of my childhood, we were poor and our neighborhood was even poorer. (For those who don’t know, I grew up in Appalachia, southern Ohio to be precise.) But, we had an ace in the hole my Mom’s college degree. After years of substitute teaching, my mother finally got a full time teaching job in the mid-1980s (I think with a pathetic starting salary of $17,000.). Once my father’s income from a small business was added in we were over the $20,000 dollar mark right around the time I finished high school.

I have also benefited greatly from my own education. In spite of going to a low income school and having high school guidance counselors, who were incompetent, I went to college. My parents did a tremendous job of picking up the slack for my less than stellar school. I had the advantage of having a teacher mother, and a father who got me hooked on National Public Radio, sometime around kindergarten. I am not dissing my teachers, but they were expected to perform without many resources that other schools had.

I really noticed the social class gap in junior high and high school after I managed to get myself into this program at Northwestern University (thanks largely to John Smith the county gifted education coordinator and my teacher for the gifted class Mrs. Evans). The program was wonderful, and I got to be around other nerdy kids. However, it would not have been possible for me to go to this program, if I didn’t get need based scholarships (I believe from the University and a local foundation.). When I got there, I quickly realized I was the poorest kid around. In fact, one of the teachers decided that I had a self esteem problem (which is very far from the truth) when I noted that the other kids were way ahead of me. I never thought that I was slow. I knew that these kids were from rich suburbs around Chicago, Detroit, and Columbus, and they had schools with many counselors, AP classes, and all of the other advantages that wealthy people had (Most of the kids were also Asian Americans which was another interesting aspect of the camp that I should probably write about someday.). Truthfully, I thought I was pretty damn smart because I was in the same place as these wealthier gifted kids, and I had fewer resources. In fact, one of the things that angered me the most was when I saw other students getting a year’s worth of high school credit for taking these courses and the guidance counselors at my school said that they couldn’t do this because “it had never been done at our high school.”

The Northwestern program along with my other outside of the classroom experiences motivated me to get great grades in high school, and sometime around 10th grade, I started my college search. To make a long story short, I got into the University of Detroit Mercy with a full scholarship, and subsequently earned assistantships, which paid for my master’s degree program at Bowling Green and my PhD at the University of Connecticut. I had to pay small sums for fees and books, but somehow I managed to get a PhD and not pay any tuition. I was happy to earn scholarships, because I was worried that my parents were not going to be able to help me finance my education. (I suppose one of the more ironic twists to this story is that my father’s business took off while I was in college, and my parents moved into a very comfortable middle class status.)

Tying it All Together–My Feminism and My Social Class

Each step in my education has marked a step up the class ladder. With every degree that I earned, I helped buffer myself from poverty. Moving up the ladder like this, gave me a different take on social inequality and ways of fighting it (i.e. socialism, feminism, anti-racism, heterosexism, and so on).

I don’t personally blog much about feminism and body hair or high heels, and I’m not going to put down people who do. However, I do worry that we need to stop framing everything in the language of choice, as it frequently, implies a smorgasbord feminism, where everything is laid out and we just pick from it. When I was young and we were poor, my concern wasn’t about choices I made, it was about opportunities–the opportunity to go to college, the opportunity to play sports, and admittedly, the opportunity to get out of southern Ohio and find a place that had a shopping mall, more than one TV channel, and good schools. Now that I have a middle class job and live in a county that is one of the wealthiest in the US; I have many more opportunities, and with those new found opportunities I get to make choices–whether or not to buy a designer handbag, whether or not to get digital cable and high speed Internet, whether or not to go to dye my hair, and whether or not to live in a wealthier community or a poorer community. Hell, I even get to choose which mall to go to or which gym to be a member of. Having many choices is the product of having many opportunities, and having many opportunities is the product of being a privileged class/group. This is something I have to remind myself all the time, and the best way to do it is to go back to high school and elementary school when my choices were more limited.

Endnote: I appreciate anybody who took the time to read this looooooong post.  I pledge to myself and my readers that I will try to post more short and fun posts. I have been producing long treatises lately. LOL!

This was going to be a tale of two protests - since I went on two protests today. But two protests in one day is tiring, so I only have time to write about one of them, more tomorrow.

Clean Start for Cleaners

Today is international anti-poverty day (a concept I find a little weird - today we’ll have international anti-poverty day - tomorrow we’ll go back to ignoring international poverty). The Clean Start for Cleaners campaign organised rallies in Australia and New Zealand today, which is appropriate because to be a cleaner is to live in poverty.

All around the world Cleaners are mostly immigrant and indigenous women. Despite the fact that cleaning needs to be done everywhere, everday and it is completely devalued. The union rate for commercial cleaners is just 70 cents an hour above minimum wage. Cleaners work two or three jobs to get their hours up and have no security of employment. Subcontracting makes it so hard for cleaners to fight for better wages and conditions, because the employer can always hire someone else.

All these points were made at the rally, of course. Plus some interesting facts I didn’t know (90,000 workers got a pay increase when the minimum wage went up -60,000 of them were women - low-wages, poverty and capitalism are all feminist issues). The most powerful speakers were cleaners themselves. There is no service recognition for cleaners, so two women who had cleaned for forty years were still only getting $10.95 an hour. Another woman spoke angrily about always being blamed for being a burden on the tax-payer because she got government assistance - even though she worked over 40 hours a week - she is blamed rather than the employer who won’t pay a living wage.

One of the women also talked about being involved in previous cleaning struggles, and strikes. It must be so hard to have struggled and won, but seen the victory slowly eroded over the last twenty years. Particularly as you’d know that if anything was going to get better you need to fight that fight again.

Now I have some problems with the Clean Start campaign - most notably that no-one really understands what its principles are (and last I heard these principles haven’t actually been translated into the first language of many of the cleaners). But I was really glad to be at this rally, in support of the cleaners.

(Part of my good feeling towards this protest is because I left before Ruth Dyson - (minister of labour) spoke. I needed to get to the other protest, and if you’ve heard Ruth Dyson say once that she’d like to change things, but she can’t - you’ve heard it once too many times).
Also posted at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Alas readers who saw Whale Rider might remember Keisha Castle Hughes, she was the young Maori actress who was nominated for a best Actress Oscar for her role as Paikea. It has just been announced that she is pregnant at 16. Span and Cactus Kate (of all people), have already covered some of the ways the coverage of these facts has been extremely offensive. But I want to look at this discourse in a little more detail, because it is pissing me off. From the NZ Herald:

National MP Paula Bennett, a mother at 17, said whichever way you looked at the situation, 16 was far too young to have a baby.

She believed there was no way a 16-year-old had the maturity to cope with the demands of raising a baby.

and from The Dominion Post

Family Planning executive director Jackie Edmond said New Zealand had the third-highest rate of teen pregnancy in the world. She hoped other teens would not want to “copy” the actress.

This level of tsk-tsking has a very clear subtext about young Maori girls who get pregnant. It’s part of a concerted strategy to blame poor people for being poor.

Look I’m a middle-class white girl, I find the idea of having a baby before I’m economically and socially secure terrifying, but I get to think that one day I will be economically and socially secure. Not everyone grows up with those set of assumptions about their life, and if you don’t have those assumptions your feelings about pregnancy and motherhoood are going to be qutie different.

But there’s actually a bigger issue here. Anika Moa has a song on her new album about the abortion she had when her music career was taking off, that she now regrets. She was told from all sides that if she continued the pregnancy she wouldn’t be able to have a music career - that she had to choose.

That’s why I hate the rhetoric of ‘choice’. Women shouldn’t have to choose between being a musician and a mother. Obviously in the months immediately after you give birth you do have physical restrictions on what you are going to do (longer the longer you breast feed). But so? Why does that mean that you can’t make music - and if you make music people want to listen to, why can’t they get to listen to it?

The answer is, of course, ‘capitalism’. I get that - most women do have to make that choice. But the way most people talk about it you’d think these choices forced on us by something people have no control over, rather than our economic system. You’d think that there was some law laid down that once you had a child you couldn’t do anything else, or if you did it would be 100 times harder. The reason that having a child at 16 is so very hard is that having a child is seen as an individualised project. Parenting gets no economic resouces and no support. It’s hard enough to do with a reasonable amount of money - if you don’t have a reasonable amount of money being able to do anything but parent when you have a child is really difficult.

We could organise our world so that parenting wasn’t just supported, but treated as the necessary work that it is. If we did that, if parents didn’t have to work huge amounts of outside hours (or live on the DPB, and all the poverty that that implies), then parenting wouldn’t be the end or your life. Women who were mothers, whether at 16 or 40, could do other things as well, parenting wouldn’t be seen as the end of your life, and your chance to develop.*

Maybe if we lived in a non-capitalist world that valued parenting women would have children young - when they had lots of energy. Maybe women would have them late, because they wanted to grow up first. Maybe women would make a wide variety decisions based from what they want from life.

But until we build that new world I wish people would just stop judging young women.

Note for commenters: This is not the place for a discussion about Keisha Castle-Hughes or her pregnancy - please keep the discussion general rather than specific, or on the discourse rather than the event.

Also published on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty