Salvaging a hidden history: the Auckland Unemployed Workers Rights Centre Archive

Written by Sue Bradford - John Stacpoole Scholar 2025

In February 1983 I was one of the organisers of a public meeting of over a hundred people at the Pitt St Methodist Church Hall in Auckland.  Called in the face of high and rising unemployment and the punitive treatment of beneficiaries, those present agreed to set up a new organisation, the Auckland Unemployed Workers Rights Centre (AUWRC).  

Little did I know that I would spend much of the next 16 years of my life working with AUWRC, right up until the group’s decision to dissolve itself in July 1999.  

Last year I was grateful to receive the Auckland Library Heritage Trust’s John Stacpoole scholarship.  This gave me the opportunity to sort and inventory a selection of AUWRC materials which I had managed to retrieve and store over the decades since our closure.  The completed archive will be accessioned by the Libraries’ Heritage Collections shortly.  

The new archive presents a somewhat haphazard and incomplete account of AUWRC’s story and does not purport to be a full chronological record. Nevertheless, it contains invaluable primary sources including minute books, assorted papers, files, leaflets, publications and photographs. Associated archival and oral history collections are already held at Auckland Libraries (see Kotare Trust Archive NZMS-4108 and OH-1445)  

The scope of this archive ranges well beyond AUWRC’s origins as a simple unemployed workers’ group subsisting on free rent in a dingy church hall just off Karangahape Rd. Over its lifetime the organisation generated and nurtured a range of connected but separate organisations and projects. 

From its earliest days AUWRC provided frontline advocacy assistance for individuals needing help in their dealings with the Departments of Social Welfare and Labour (subsequently integrated into one organisation, the Department of Work and Income, in 1998).  AUWRC was also a proudly militant fightback organisations, organising pickets, demonstrations and occupations around its kaupapa of ‘Jobs and a living wage for all’ and ‘Blame the system, not the victim’.

We were always keen to lift our visibility and our sense of mutual solidarity in the face of adversity through what we called ‘cultural work’: the use of art, music, drama, and other creative forms.  We also published our own magazine Mean Times for a number of years, distributed to thousands of people who were part of our networks. 

We were also very conscious of those who we saw as our direct individual and organisational forebears in the unemployed workers’ movement of the 1930s.  The imagery on our leaflets and posters and the songs we wrote often reflected this.  

From 1983 onwards AUWRC was highly active in the development of the national unemployed workers’ movement, Te Roopu Rawakore o Aotearoa, playing a key organising role through until 1992. The collection reflects this involvement with several boxes of detailed records.

Also part of the new archive are papers and other information associated with the foundational role AUWRC played in the development and running of a number of other groups and projects, including:

• The three Peoples Centres in Auckland CBD, Manurewa and Māngere (provided free and low-cost medical, dental and other services for $10 a month per family) 
• The internal ‘New Vision’ group which brought together AUWRC people with friends and allies from the liberation theology and social justice wings of church-based activism
• The national Building our own Future project (1993-1994)
• The national campaign for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the mid-1990s
• COMMACT Aotearoa (local branch of a Commonwealth-wide NGO supporting community economic development)
• Major coalitions organising multiple days of action against CHOGM, the ADB and APEC in 1995 and 1999
• The establishment of Unite! union
• Two national Unemployed Roadshow theatre tours AUWRC undertook in 1996-1999
• The organising of two major conferences, Beyond Poverty and Social Responsibility: Whose Agenda? in conjunction with Massey University at Albany in 1997 – 1998, reflecting AUWRC’s growing interest in strengthening links between grassroots activists and academic friends and allies.

AUWRC lived and died as part of a generation of unemployed workers’ and beneficiary organising that is now almost invisible to the mainstream historical public or academic record.  Even though I was part of the group at the time, spending time with these records has surprised me again with how much we achieved over those 16 years, despite being on the losing side of history.  

Unemployment is on the rise again and the gap between rich and poor continues to grow in Aotearoa.  I hope that the contribution of this limited but vital archive to the library’s collection will help salvage a history that would otherwise be hidden – and likely lost altogether.

To hear Sue’s reflection on the project and the value of the archive tune into the Awekura podcast episode here:

Ngā Pātaka Kōrero - Auckland Libraries · Salvaging a hidden history with Sue Bradford

Image: Photograph of Sue Bradford.

Reference: Images taken by author from the AUWRC material ahead of its accession into the library collections or by Julian Lubin during the podcast interview.