Workers Rights Campaign to picket Christchurch Jobs Summit

The Workers Rights Campaign will picket the Government’s “Jobs Summit” at the Town Hall on Friday 17^th between noon and 1:00 p.m.

Campaign spokesperson Paul Piesse said the picket is because:

• "We know it (the Jobs Summit) to be essentially a pathetic public relations exercise for the Government and its fat-cat Business friends;”

• “We know that its decisions on employment – especially issues of job creation, redundancies and reductions in paid hours of work and thus income - will not and cannot assure working people of properly paid, secure employment;”

• "We refuse to pay the price for the failure of the capitalist system in yet another of its periodic ‘busts’. We’re tired of bailing out the rich, who use us and discard us for their own benefit.”

The Workers Rights Campaign, Mr Piesse said, “Notes the contemptible hypocrisy of Business and Government, weeping crocodile tears about job losses while they happily contract out and shift our jobs offshore to cheap labour countries.”

The Campaign demands full employment. Mr Piesse said that the Campaign has the view that “it is the absolute moral duty of any decent government to ensure that all citizens have honest work available with liveable wages”.

“One way to ensure that”, Mr Piesse said, was “to legislate for a basic 35 hour week without loss of pay”. He noted that “there isn’t much point to our civilisation unless generation by generation and decade by decade, technological development allows for a reduction in the portion of people’s lives they were obliged to devote to earning a living. The economy should be about people, not Capital.”