More than 100,000 public sector workers in New Zealand—teachers, nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers—took part in an historic mass strike on October 23, the country’s largest industrial action since 1979.

The Socialist Equality Group (SEG) is holding an online public meeting at 4:00pm on Sunday, November 9, to discuss the political lessons of the strike and the way forward for workers in the fight against austerity, pay cuts, dictatorship and war. We urge workers and young people to register here to attend this important webinar on Zoom.

The “mega strike” was a demonstration of the potential power of the working class, and an expression of enormous anger towards the attacks on wages and conditions by the National Party-led coalition government. It was part of an upsurge of workers internationally—including the protests by millions of people against US President Trump’s moves to establish a fascist dictatorship, major strike waves in France, Italy and other countries, and global protests against the genocide in Gaza.

In the SEG’s statement distributed to striking workers, however, we warned that as long as workers remain politically subordinated to the Labour Party and its allies—including the Greens and pseudo-left groups—and trapped within the straitjacket of the union bureaucracy, their struggles will be sold out. 

All the capitalist parties and unions are complicit in the attacks on public healthcare, education and other services. The unions have not scheduled any further joint strikes and are seeking to demobilise and divide workers. Their aim is to negotiate separate deals with the government that will freeze wages and will not address the crisis facing workers. 

The Labour Party and the union leadership also support the diversion of tens of billions of dollars from public funds to double the military budget and integrate New Zealand into US-led plans for war against China.

At the November 9 webinar, speakers from the Socialist Equality Group in New Zealand and the Socialist Equality Party in Australia will elaborate a socialist and internationalist perspective, in opposition to Labour and all the capitalist parties, as well as the union bureaucracy, which functions as the agents of big business and the state. 

The meeting will also discuss the need for new workers’ organisations—rank-and-file workplace committees, democratically controlled by workers themselves, and independent of the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy. These committees must fight to unite all sections of the working class—in the public and private sector—in a powerful movement against austerity and war.

This movement must unite workers in New Zealand with those in Australia, the US and other parts of the world who are facing the same struggle against pro-corporate attacks. The struggles of the working class must be fused with the fight against dictatorship and fascism, to defend the rights of immigrants, and to stop the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza and the insane build-up to war against China.

The SEG proposes demands including the expropriation of the super-rich and an end to all military spending. Tens of billions of dollars must be diverted into schools, hospitals and other vital services, and all workers must receive an immediate pay increase of 30 percent to compensate for years of frozen wages.

Everywhere in the world, the ruling class is responding to the deepening breakdown of capitalism by grinding workers into poverty, and by launching imperialist wars to redivide the world. The working class must respond with its own socialist program and its own party. There is no time to waste.

The public meeting on November 9 will discuss the urgent need for workers to join the SEG and to build it into the New Zealand section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, to provide the necessary political leadership for the working class in the struggles ahead.