Tag: exploitation

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Beware, creepy men of the right: Rawshark returns (briefly)

An old handle flickered back into life briefly this afternoon:

Rawshark – presuming the account is still held and operated by the hacker who exposed the dodgy shenanigans between the WhaleOil blog, corporate lobbyists and senior National Party politicians – started with a screenshot from the previous run, in which Cameron Slater and Jordan Williams allegedly discuss how to get damaging anti-wharfie stories into the media at the time of the POAL lockout.

whaledump-screenshot-1

But something appears to have changed his or her mind.

So a bit more information has been released. (Highlighting added by me)

whaledump-screenshot-2If this is ringing a bell, it should, and not just because it’s no surprise that Jordan Williams has an … odd perspective on women:

It also sounds a lot like the way Luigi Wewege used sex to pressure Bevan Chuang to reveal details of her relationship with Auckland Mayor Len Brown.

Bevan Chuang told the New Zealand Herald she entered an intimate relationship with Luigi Wewege, a member of Mr Palino’s failed campaign team, who wanted her to expose the mayor’s infidelity when he found out about the affair.

“Luigi started pursuing non-stop about how I should tell on Len,” Ms Chuang said. “I was asked to record phone calls because that’s when Len would say all the dirty stuff.”

She says Mr Wewege wanted to publish the allegations on the Whale Oil blogsite, run by Cameron Slater, to ruin Mr Brown’s reputation before the election but she refused to swear an affidavit and produce text messages to corroborate her story.

It’s a bit hard to avoid the conclusion that rightwing men are so lacking a moral compass that they happily exploit sexual intimacy to manipulate women to gain political ammunition.

If women were doing the same thing to men they’d be denounced as cuckolding honeytrap Jezebels from every direction. That’s the patriarchal double standard for you.

So here’s my question, rightwing dudes: you love demanding that other people denounce extremism in their culture or party or religion. Are you going to denounce Jordan Williams and Luigi Wewege, and any other man who’s “taken one for the team” to manufacture a political scandal?  Or are you happy for us to assume that all rightwing men are sleazy creeps?

~

A quick note: I’m sure commenters will be quick to point out that leftwing men can also be abusive creeps, but show me (a) where a leftwing dude has used sex to gain political ammunition and (b) the bizarro universe in which I didn’t condemn that as scummy, too; otherwise sod off with your derailing tactics.

~

And a final thought, on a related topic: Rawshark’s brief return sent a very powerful message to the Dirty Politics crew. I’m still here. I’m still watching. And there’s a lot I didn’t reveal, so don’t make me want to come back.

Good on ya, mate.

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Midwives deserve equal pay

It’s another one of those less-easy-to-grasp pay equity cases: the College of Midwives has filed a discrimination suit on the basis that midwives aren’t paid as well as equivalently-skilled/trained/responsible workers in male-dominated industries.

The College of Midwives says the midwifery-led system in New Zealand has improved the outcomes for women and their babies to the extent that it is a world leader in maternity care and it has never been safer to be born.

Despite this however the LMC Midwife is paid the equivalent of someone considered unskilled, semi-skilled or junior staff. This is untenable and must be urgently addressed.

The thing is, unless you’ve had a baby yourself, you probably don’t know a huge amount about what they do or how they’re paid.

Thank god for living in the internet age: here’s a fantastic post on the subject from a Kiwi midwife:

Who do you compare the midwifery workforce to?  What group of  mainly men are specialized, medical care providers, with a responsibility for two lives, a 24/7 52 week a year responsibility for care provision, and the responsibility of two lives in every decision they make?  For that, I don’t have an answer.  But I am sure that as a group, we could come up with some ideas.  Leave a message in the comments if you have a job description that compares.  I am thinking maybe electricians?  Or something?

So.  i can’t resolve the “how do we decide who to compare to” question.  But I thought I would try and add a little light to the subject of “what do midwives actually get paid?”

Seriously read the whole thing before posting another snotty tweet about how ~unqualified~ midwives are.

I’m sad to see a bit of sneering and scoffing on this – from people on the left. I expect the “ew, be grateful for your scraps, peasants” attitude from the weirder parts of the right, but come on, people. We knew it was shady when Cameron Slater was trying to smear Ports of Auckland workers over their salaries. We know that capitalism seeks ways to devalue people’s labour in order to exploit them economically. We know that our healthcare system is stretched and our present government doesn’t value the long-term benefits of properly investing in skills and services.

This is part and parcel of the same project, to undermine women’s work, to paint midwifery as “just holding someone’s hand and telling her to breathe”, not “real qualified medicine”. This is one battle in the wider workers’ struggle. So get over the fact that 99% of the workers involved are women and back our midwives.

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Repost: Employment law: it’s toasted

In an early episode of Mad Men, when the company’s going for the Lucky Strike account, sleazebag antihero Don Draper asks the client exactly how cigarettes are made. They talk through the process, mentioning the tobacco is toasted – and Don says, “there’s your line. It’s toasted.”

But, the Lucky Strike guys protest, all cigarette tobacco is toasted. There’s nothing special about the way Lucky Strike toasts its tobacco.

“Doesn’t matter,” Don says. “You’re the only people talking about it.”

Watching Mad Men explains a truly depressing amount about the success of John Key’s government.

Take their employment law changes: right now, they’re legislating away the right to a tea break, replacing the current mandatory minimum rest periods (two 10-minute breaks and one half-hour break for an 8-hour shift) with non-mandatory, “if your employer thinks it’s unreasonable they can take it away” rest periods. And the examples that keep getting cited are of teachers (those unreliable moochers) “just” walking out of a classroom when break time rolls around, or air traffic controllers “just” downing tools and letting all the planes crash.

The fact is, minimum breaks aren’t currently set to a compulsory schedule. The law does not say, “if you start at 8am then you must stop work at 10am for 10 minutes”. They’re a minimum level because some employers absolutely would make you work a twelve hour shift non-stop if they could (and probably pay you $2 an hour for it too.)

But you never hear about it. And because people are generally well-natured and assume their political leaders are well-natured too (and that their media is well-informed and analytical and will provide any necessary context) it just gets taken for granted that there must be a problem with our current break system. Because, well, the Minister says of course he supports regular rest breaks! National wouldn’t take them away unless there was a problem, right? It’s just giving people flexibility, and they obviously need flexibility, you can’t just have air traffic controllers wandering off and letting all the planes crash.

It was the same story around 90-day fire-at-will trials. Under the old law, employers could put new workers on probationary periods – longer probationary periods than the 90-day trials, even! The difference was, those probationary periods had to be genuine trials. Workers had to be given feedback on their performance, and still had basic work rights – unlike the 90-day trials.

But you never heard about it. And because people are generally well-natured, etc, it just got taken for granted that we needed the 90-day trial period. Because, well, they wouldn’t do it if it already existed, right? It’s just fair to allow employers to give someone a go, right? Why are you complaining about job creation?

It’s lying by omission, capitalising on people’s goodwill and faith that our government isn’t really an out-of-control pack of cynical profiteers, who rule for the rich and powerful and put no stock in ideas about wellbeing, community or anything besides the money they can get their hands on right now.

Watch for it.

(For a side-by-side comparison of the tea break rules, check Helen Kelly’s Twitter.)

Added: I’d already written this article when Mike Hosking’s diatribe about “just work hard and your boss will never exploit you” came out. Suffice it to say, I think if you’ve never worked in a role where your rest breaks were strictly scheduled, and you didn’t have to worry about how much you earned in your first job, you are a very, very privileged person.