Maranga Ake
Oct. 23rd, 2024 03:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nerwengreenThe entire speech that I prepared for Nelson's #FightBackTogether #MarangaAke. I didn't end up voicing all of this, but it's what I would've said if I'd had twice the time.
Tēnā koutou e nga hau e wha.
Nō Haina tōku tīpuna. Nō Amerika ahau. Ko Mimi tāku ingoa.
Kei Whakatū ahau e noho ana. Kei Waimeha ahau e mahi ana.
Ko Te Pūkenga Here Tikanga Mahi tāku uniana.
Nō rēira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.
Good afternoon everyone.
My ancestors are from China. I'm from the United States. My name is Mimi.
I live in Nelson and work in Richmond.
My union is the PSA, and I'm also the south island regional convenor for the PSA Eco Network, which is all about climate action.
I'm here before you today to speak to Motion Five.
We demand action to meet the challenges of the future for workers, to help us adapt to new technology, to create lower emissions to tackle climate change, and to create high skill and high wage industries supported by a just transition so that no workers are left behind.
If Aotearoa is going to have a successful future, we need to become a high wage, high skill, low emission economy.
Let me start with a few words about the economy. The "economy" is a human construct. Its purpose is defined by people. I doesn't need to be about funneling all of our money to the super-rich, or about how the stock market is doing. We need to redefine the purpose of the economy to work for us, and make it about looking after the wellbeing of the people and our natural environment.
Have you ever wondered where the super-rich get all that money? Where does the wealth of a nation come from? It comes from us. We create wealth by doing work. Then, it gets stolen from us when our employers don’t pay us fairly for that work. It gets stolen from us when the super-rich, who didn’t do any of the work, manipulate our societal infrastructures.
Why is our food so expensive? Because New Zealand only has two supermarket companies, and they’ve agreed not to compete very hard against each other so they can charge us more. Why is there a surcharge to use Paywave? It doesn’t cost extra for our financial institutions for us to Paywave instead of inserting our cards into the machine, and I say the vast majority of all surcharges and fees are theft.
More to the point of motion five, what about our electricity? The prices have gone up, so has gas. New Zealand only has four major companies that generate all of our power, and if they want to deliberately withhold supply when there’s high demand, they can charge us more. But the good news is that we can bypass the entire power industry by putting solar panels on our roofs, and get our electricity directly from the sun, for free. Minus the cost of installing the solar panels of course. I firmly believe that if landlords are going to get all these tax breaks from central government, they should be required to use those tax breaks to put solar panels on every home that they own and don’t personally live in.
And of course, who will be doing the work of installing all these solar panels? Workers! We need to be retrained to do the work of the green industries of the future, so we can move away from the fossil fuels industries, the high emissions industries, because they are of the past.
Speaking of technologies of the future, what about AI? AI is anti- worker and anti-environment, and should be banned from New Zealand. AI stands for “artificial intelligence.” But there’s nothing intelligent about what it does. It doesn’t have any comprehension of the responses that it sends you when you ask it to do something. It’s mostly just extremely sophisticated pattern matching. And you know what the pattern matching is based on? Theft. Of intellectual property. That was created by workers. Artists, songwriters, poets, who have copyrights that the super-rich ignore when they take it without paying for it to make their AIs. AI is anti-worker because it’s based on theft. AI is anti-environment because it costs an enormous amount of resources to run. Did you know that New York City has recently turned back on a nuclear power plant, just so it can run AI? Every time you ask a question to Chat GPT, it uses up an entire small nation’s worth of power and water resources for a day. It’s not sustainable. And finally, it’s anti-worker because employers will be looking for excuses to replace their employees with AI. We need to be vigilant against that.
But if it can’t be banned, if we have to realistically learn to work with it because all our employers insist, then we need our employers to ensure job security against it and through any change. We need our employers to provide training and support, negotiate just transition agreements that protect worker interests, and add climate clauses to our collective agreements to help us all be more sustainable in our workplaces and our communities and protect the planet.
And we need our leaders to provide redundancy plans, social insurance, and to support us through unemployment while we transition our economy toward one that works for all people, not just rich people, and for the natural environment. We collectively have the power to decide what we do with the wealth that we create, and to define what the economy should be for.
Tēnā koutou e nga hau e wha.
Nō Haina tōku tīpuna. Nō Amerika ahau. Ko Mimi tāku ingoa.
Kei Whakatū ahau e noho ana. Kei Waimeha ahau e mahi ana.
Ko Te Pūkenga Here Tikanga Mahi tāku uniana.
Nō rēira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.
Good afternoon everyone.
My ancestors are from China. I'm from the United States. My name is Mimi.
I live in Nelson and work in Richmond.
My union is the PSA, and I'm also the south island regional convenor for the PSA Eco Network, which is all about climate action.
I'm here before you today to speak to Motion Five.
We demand action to meet the challenges of the future for workers, to help us adapt to new technology, to create lower emissions to tackle climate change, and to create high skill and high wage industries supported by a just transition so that no workers are left behind.
If Aotearoa is going to have a successful future, we need to become a high wage, high skill, low emission economy.
Let me start with a few words about the economy. The "economy" is a human construct. Its purpose is defined by people. I doesn't need to be about funneling all of our money to the super-rich, or about how the stock market is doing. We need to redefine the purpose of the economy to work for us, and make it about looking after the wellbeing of the people and our natural environment.
Have you ever wondered where the super-rich get all that money? Where does the wealth of a nation come from? It comes from us. We create wealth by doing work. Then, it gets stolen from us when our employers don’t pay us fairly for that work. It gets stolen from us when the super-rich, who didn’t do any of the work, manipulate our societal infrastructures.
Why is our food so expensive? Because New Zealand only has two supermarket companies, and they’ve agreed not to compete very hard against each other so they can charge us more. Why is there a surcharge to use Paywave? It doesn’t cost extra for our financial institutions for us to Paywave instead of inserting our cards into the machine, and I say the vast majority of all surcharges and fees are theft.
More to the point of motion five, what about our electricity? The prices have gone up, so has gas. New Zealand only has four major companies that generate all of our power, and if they want to deliberately withhold supply when there’s high demand, they can charge us more. But the good news is that we can bypass the entire power industry by putting solar panels on our roofs, and get our electricity directly from the sun, for free. Minus the cost of installing the solar panels of course. I firmly believe that if landlords are going to get all these tax breaks from central government, they should be required to use those tax breaks to put solar panels on every home that they own and don’t personally live in.
And of course, who will be doing the work of installing all these solar panels? Workers! We need to be retrained to do the work of the green industries of the future, so we can move away from the fossil fuels industries, the high emissions industries, because they are of the past.
Speaking of technologies of the future, what about AI? AI is anti- worker and anti-environment, and should be banned from New Zealand. AI stands for “artificial intelligence.” But there’s nothing intelligent about what it does. It doesn’t have any comprehension of the responses that it sends you when you ask it to do something. It’s mostly just extremely sophisticated pattern matching. And you know what the pattern matching is based on? Theft. Of intellectual property. That was created by workers. Artists, songwriters, poets, who have copyrights that the super-rich ignore when they take it without paying for it to make their AIs. AI is anti-worker because it’s based on theft. AI is anti-environment because it costs an enormous amount of resources to run. Did you know that New York City has recently turned back on a nuclear power plant, just so it can run AI? Every time you ask a question to Chat GPT, it uses up an entire small nation’s worth of power and water resources for a day. It’s not sustainable. And finally, it’s anti-worker because employers will be looking for excuses to replace their employees with AI. We need to be vigilant against that.
But if it can’t be banned, if we have to realistically learn to work with it because all our employers insist, then we need our employers to ensure job security against it and through any change. We need our employers to provide training and support, negotiate just transition agreements that protect worker interests, and add climate clauses to our collective agreements to help us all be more sustainable in our workplaces and our communities and protect the planet.
And we need our leaders to provide redundancy plans, social insurance, and to support us through unemployment while we transition our economy toward one that works for all people, not just rich people, and for the natural environment. We collectively have the power to decide what we do with the wealth that we create, and to define what the economy should be for.
