On Wednesday 29th May 2019, there was a national teacher’s strike here in Aotearoa. It was reportedly the largest ever example of industrial action in our history, and the first time members of both the primary and secondary teachers unions had taken combined action. More than 50,000 teachers across the country were involved.

I attended a march in the city of Whangarei. Multiple hundreds of teachers and supporters marched in a long ragged line through the centre of the city to a rally on the eastern edge of town. We got lucky with the weather — it was a beautiful day, and the march was fun. I got to catch up with a bunch of my friends and colleagues from other schools, and there was a real sense of solidarity as we marched, waving signs and chanting. 

It seems a little sad to me that I’ve just had my forty-fourth birthday and it’s possibly the only protest action I’ve ever taken. I say possibly because I have the vaguest memories of student protests at Otago University when I was attending in the mid-nineties. There seemed to be annual protests about fee increases at the time, but my memories are so vague that I’m not sure whether I actually participated in any of them or whether I was just aware of them happening around me. I can’t pretend I was the most politically active of students, nor the most dedicated, and there’s every possibility that my experience of the protests came through the lens of a beer glass and the window of the local pub.

Since it was a combined primary and secondary teachers strike and my wife was working, I dropped the twins off at their grandparents and took my daughter with me. I was proud of her, and of the fact that she could be there with me and get a taste of collective action at such a young age.

Only a few days earlier we had the second national day of student strikes against climate change. As teachers, our reasons for striking are the usual ones — we’re overworked and underpaid — and they seem somewhat petty when compared to the existential threat of climate change, but the reality is that we all have our lives to live. In a world of increasing temperatures, weather extremes and rising sea levels, we all still have to earn a living so we can feed our families and keep a roof over our heads — until there’s some radical reorganisation of our social, economic and political structures anyway.

I do think these protests signal a change in the social landscape, and a positive one at that. While protesting against climate change doesn’t suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, just as protesting against poor pay doesn’t suddenly fill one’s pockets with fat rolls of hundred dollar bills, one thing it does do is make people sit up and pay attention. I think there’s a slowly growing awareness (perhaps painfully slow, on a global scale, but growing nonetheless) that the status quo is not a viable option for the planet or humanity’s place on it.

If that all seems a little morbid, then my apologies. I didn’t mean it to — it just came out that way. Really, I’m an optimist, and despite the doomscrollers and naysayers, I think we, as a species, will figure things out.

Been on any protests lately? What was your experience? Let me know in the comments.

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