Are you a “blue-collar hard-working Kiwi” or a “weirdo with purple hair?” New Zealand First, Winston Peters claimed in his March State of the Nation speech, is the only party that “understands what a worker is.” Colour, of collar and of fringe, has a lot to do with it in Peters’ claimed dichotomy. Heaven knows what to do with purple-haired weirdos who wear blue shirts, but that’s a topic for another article.
More seriously, New Zealand First is, in common with right-wing parties across the advanced capitalist world, trying to exploit a real contradiction in the country at the moment, and real social misery. A wave of factory closures and threatened closures will bring job losses to regions already suffering from decades’ long underinvestment and stolen futures. Hundreds of jobs will go when Heinz Watties closes factories and packing lines in Hastings, Christchurch, and Dunedin. The McCain processing plant in Hastings is set to close, too, threatening a hundred jobs. Juken may sell up its Kaitaia mills, costing hundreds of jobs in a town already suffering high unemployment. All of these jobs are hard work, and all fit the traditional image of “blue collar” factory work. Different employment patterns make different places in the country look, and feel, very different from one another. Unemployment is distributed unevenly, as are migration patterns. So the difference in experience is real. And, importantly, these are job losses happening on New Zealand First’s watch. They are part of the Government overseeing an austerity agenda as unemployment rises and cuts go through public and private sector alike.
New Zealand First, like Reform in Britain and One Nation in Australia, tries to make class a “cultural” political category, a question of identity, location and tradition rather than a category to do with production. Inner-city elites, or “woke” progressives, or minority groups, or the “professional managerial class” are, in this approach, put in contrast to honest, hard-working, “normal” people working in manufacturing, mining, fisheries and factories. The Right’s pro-capitalist politics – in New Zealand First’s case its craven advocacy on behalf of mining and fishing companies – are, in this politics, packaged as somehow “pro-worker” against the “lifestyle” issues of the urban elites. A cultural approach to class is not just the preserve of the Right, either. After Trump’s win in 2024 many liberal journalists for outlets like the New York Times wrote articles looking for the “lost” or neglected working class. Their features inevitably focused on White, small-town, and blue-collar workers rather than big-city, multi-racial service workers. For socialists, however, class is not a cultural category but to do with how we relate to production.
Do you need to sell your labour power to someone else to make a living, or are you making your living from the labour of others? That, for socialists, is the key division in society. People who live off selling their labour power (people, in other words, who receive a wage or a salary and who labour in a job to make a living) have interests in common – and opposed to those who live off that labour (people, bosses, who live from the profits made from others’ labour). We can find unity with each other, and act together in common cause. Unions are a first expression of this – the 30,000 finance, industrial transport and retail workers who have joined together in First Union, for example, or the 95,000 public service workers in the PSA – and, ultimately, we believe that workers’ unity can make a radically different kind of society, a socialist, truly democratic and cooperative one. This goal is not inevitable, by any means: real divisions exist in the working class and work against unity. Racism, sexism, bigotry and prejudice all reflect real divisions and, in turn, reinforce and sustain division. This suits employers very well – if unity is strength, as the old saying goes, division sustains weakness. This is why understanding the reality of class is so important. Attempts to blur class into a cultural category are, in reality, attempts to blur it into invisibility as a real social force. Billionaire mine owner Gina Rinehart, for example, Australia’s richest woman, is often referred to by The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald as a “miner.” But Rinehart isn’t down her own mines risking her health and wellbeing to extract rare minerals. Her wealth comes from the labour of those who do. That’s a crucial difference!
In January, EB Games closed its 38 New Zealand stores, and hundreds of staff lost their jobs. Some of them may have had purple hair, but their relationship to their jobs was not, fundamentally, different to factory workers in Kaitaia or Hastings. The patterns of work in New Zealand have changed as capitalism changes, and there are more service roles (in places like EB Games) than there were in past decades, and manufacturing jobs of different types as technologies change. Health care assistant roles went up 1.6 percent in January 2026 compared to January 2025, against a 2.8 percent drop for construction. Health care workers, just like retail workers, labour for a wage and face the pressures of speed-ups, longer hours, and reduced conditions as their bosses try to squeeze more potential profits from them. These sectors are particularly multi-cultural and multi-racial, reflecting changes in the wider New Zealand working class (two in five Aucklanders were born overseas). New Zealand First’s rhetoric of “hard workers” against “weirdos” tries to make these connections and points of unity harder to see, and does so in the service of the bosses.
That rhetoric sometimes comes up on the Left, too, with talk of a “professional managerial class” – echoing New Zealand Herald columnist Jonathan Ayling’s language of the “lanyard class” who “live inside the system.” But here, too, class as a relationship is a more helpful guide. Capitalism requires complex organisation, technological development and information processing, and an educated workforce to manage all of this. Most of those who do this “white-collar” labour are workers reliant on a wage and answerable to a boss. They are in better-paid parts of the workforce, certainly, but subject to the same pressures: witness the layoffs in the public service since 2023, the AI-driven job cuts across coding roles, the place of teachers, nurses, and other degree-level jobs in union struggles over pay equity these past years. Rather than glorifying a mythical (White, male, blue-collar) “worker” we should look to real potential for unity in struggle across all those who labour.
