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“Blame the System, Not the Victim!” Organizing the Unemployed in New Zealand, 1983–1992

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2007

Cybèle Locke
Cybèle Locke
Affiliation:
Connecticut College
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Abstract

The restructuring of capital and the transformation of the workforce in the late twentieth century has produced a newly-shaped working class; one that encompasses those in insecure work and unemployed workers. With this repositioning has come new political organizations of unemployed workers, of which Te Roopu Rawakore o Aotearoa, the national New Zealand organization for unemployed workers, is an example. This organization of unemployed was not only significant for its existence in the face of poverty, status disintegration, and a perceived sense of social worthlessness, but also for the tripartite ideology its members employed. Unemployed workers in New Zealand combined the identity politics of race and gender with a class-based critique of society to demand “the right to work and a living wage for all.”

Type
Research Article
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 71 , Issue 1 , Spring 2007 , pp. 162 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © The International Labor and Working-Class History Society 2007

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References

NOTES

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71. ibid.

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