item details
1995
Overview
This poster advertises the final leg in a march against unemployment led by Te Roopu Rawakore o Aotearoa.
The march began in Te Hapua, New Zealand's most northerly settlement (which was also the starting point for the 1975 Maori Land March).
Te Roopu Rawakore O Aotearoa was a national movement established in 1985 to encompass the many unemployed and beneficiaries’s groups throughout New Zealand. Members used protest actions to educate the government and public that unemployed workers were dispossessed workers not dole bludgers; unemployment caused poverty; unemployed workers deserved the right to organise in unions; and some groups in society were more likely to experience unemployment because of discrimination.
Labour historian Cybèle Locke notes that ‘unemployed workers’ unions were organised non-hierarchically and used Maori cultural processes to build the movement. They adopted a bicultural structure to share power and resources equally between Maori and non- Maori unemployed and beneficiaries in the movement’ (Workers in the Margins, 2012, p. 78).