Rent Strike Aotearoa

If you haven’t already, sign up to our rent strike pledge here. Signing up to the pledge will link you up with rent strikers in your local area and nationally so you can help organise rent strikes locally or nationally.It also puts more pressure on the Government to implement our demands, as it will show them how many renters are willing to go on strike across the country to implement it. The more people that pledge, the more powerful our strike will be!

Once you’ve signed the rent strike pledge, you’ll be linked up with rent strikes in your local area so you can get to know each other, provide each other advice and support and work together to organise rent strikes. We currently have local Facebook groups in Auckland, Dunedin and Queenstown(we’ll update this with new local groups as they’re created.

If you have signed the pledge and there is no local Facebook group in your area, create one and let us know at rentstrikeaotearoa@protonamail.com so that let other rent strikers in your area know about it.

For a rent strike to be successful, you will need to have the majority of renters with the same landlord to go on strike. If this doesn’t happen, landlords will harass and pick on the minority of striking renters to break the strike.

To make this happen, you will need to find out who the other renters of your landlord are. To do this, if you don’t know who your landlord and/or property management company is, find who owns your property through your local council or through https://www.linz.govt.nz/. Then, use these resources to find out if your landlord owns other properties.

Within your flat, engage in one to one conversations with your flatmates about their problems with their rent and how a rent strike could help solve their problems. One-on-ones are the heart of organising rent strikes and other collective actions. They are an organiser’s main tool for changing someone’s motivations and bringing them onboard the rent strike. They are vulnerable conversations where you discover someone’s issue, make them face the reality of it, and get them to realise their issue is the result of a system (i.e. a landlord) and that collective action has the power to change it despite the risks. Without one-on-ones, you cannot get solid commitments from people.

When you talk to your flatmates about this, you should mostly ask your flatmates questions about their situation, listen 80% of the time and talk 20% of the time. You should aim to agitate them and get them angry about the issue while also being empathetic with your flatmate. One-to-one conversations are always a little uncomfortable. You are probably asking someone to do something outside their comfort zone.

You must be comfortable with silence if the other person does not have an immediate response to your question, and be comfortable waiting until they give you one. One-to-one conversations involve asking someone to both seriously consider the risks involved, and what will happen if they don’t take action. Only that way can you get authentic, lasting commitments.

There is a process to one-on-ones: see here, here, and here for what it looks like!

Practice helps. If you haven’t done one before, try practicing with a friend or fellow organiser! No one starts out being good at one-on-ones. It is a skill to learn and it takes practice.

When you’re trying to contact other renters in your building or other properties owned by your landlord and/or property management company, make sure you do so in accordance with the Ministry of Health’s guidelines so you do it in a manner that reduces the risks of transmitting COVID-19.

So instead of door knocking and having a physical one-on-one conversation put a note (like these ones) in the renters mailbox or under their door asking them if they need any help, if they’re concerned about paying their rent and if they are then to talk to you through contact information you provide (be it your phone number, email etc.)

Once they have contacted you, schedule a time with them and have a one-on-one conversation with them in the way detailed above.

In both cases, once a majority of renters in your flat, your apartment complex or the other properties owned by your landlord support a rent strike, you should invite them to a meeting to organise one.

To ensure your meeting is held in accordance with Ministry of Health guidelines, instead of meeting physically, meet online through apps like Facebook, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, Zoom, and Jitsi. Set a day and time and suits most of the renters and remind them about the meeting the day before.

For the meeting, set up a simple agenda. Have a facilitator, whose job is to keep the conversation on topic, include all participants in discussion and make sure every task has someone assigned to it. Also have a note taker, whose job is to write down at least the most important points, any decisions, and who commits to doing what. These help with knowing what happened as you move forward and with keeping people in the loop who missed a meeting.

At the meeting, ask people attending the following: Who they are? How they’re coping with the pandemic? What opportunities are there for mutual aid to build trust? How is the pandemic is impacting their housing — are they struggling to make rent? Is it forcing them to confront the difficult conditions in their house they were otherwise avoiding? How much of the building is here? Does anyone here know the missing units and can someone reach out to them? How are people feeling about rent striking? What questions do people have? What demands do they want to make? When’s the next call?

While you want to be wary of time, it’s important to make space for people to vent and agitate themselves over this situation.

When deciding on your demands, while you can support our demands, especially when you’re participating in a national rent strike, we encourage you to create your own demands that will solve your local problems. When deciding on your demands, consider the following.What exactly do you want? A winnable demand might be a repayment plan with no evictions or reduced rent for two months. Maybe the biggest complaint is something other than rent altogether — maybe people are upset that essential maintenance is frozen. Good demands are: Specific, given with a timeline, widely shared among the group, and achievable. What your landlord gives up is roughly equivalent to the damage your collective action is doing. Landlords operate logically (…more or less). If your collective actions are doing equivalent or more damage to the landlord because a demand isn’t being met, then it is in the landlord’s interest to agree to the demand. If your collective action does not meet this threshold, then it is extremely unlikely the demand will be won.

A demand does not need to “go for the gold” right off the bat. In fact, demands often fail if they do because there is usually not enough collective power built in the beginning to achieve the highest demand. Smaller demands that can initially be won more easily, such as simply getting a video chat with your landlord when they wouldn’t previously, can build up the collective confidence in order to eventually lead to calling for the highest demand.

Who has the power to fix the problem? For smaller companies, this might be easy: the landlord whose name is on all your rent checks. For larger developers, it may be less clear. Identify a person in management who has the ability to either fix the problem or make the call, and whose pockets would be hurt by collective action.

Which tactics can work? Tactics can leverage social, political, and/or financial pressure on a landlord. Social pressure means impacting a landlord’s personal relationships in their community, or impacting their sense of power over tenants. Political pressure means leveraging media, city officials, and legislative means to influence a landlord. Financial pressure means hurting a landlord’s profits. Typically, financial pressure with some political pressure is the most effective in achieving a demand.

It deserves special mention that a demand on your landlord for rent suspension with no back pay owed would be extraordinarily difficult to achieve. The actions renters can possibly take against a landlord can’t match up to the financial losses the landlord would take by agreeing to this demand. Strongly consider a different demand — winning something is better than winning nothing. Demanding this of the government is another matter though, and one we can fight for when we organise citywide or national rent strikes.

Once you have collectively decided on a set of demands, you should write a letter that contains these demands, a deadline for when these demands should be implemented and what action will be taken if the landlord doesn’t implement them (e.g. a rent strike). You can find a template of a demand letter here. There are others, feel free to reach out to us at rentstrikeaotearoa@protonmail.com if you’d like to see them.

Once you’ve finished your demand letter, have your renters sign it if they wish and send it to your landlord. Due to current Ministry of Health guidelines, you should send it your landlord via email, preferably through a collective email address so that your landlord doesn’t pick on one of you. You can also ask for your landlord to meet all the rent strikers on Zoom and deliver your demand letter that way.

If you are using a collective email address, include in your demand letter that all future communications with your landlord during the struggle for these demands will occur through this email. Keep a record of all of your correspondence with the landlord.

We can share any information about your local rent strike page on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages. In addition, you should create pages on these and other social media platforms in order to inform other renters about your rent strike and to put forward your own messaging and framing of the rent strike that isn’t filtered by traditional media.

In addition, having your own social media pages is a great platform to use to shame your landlord during the rent strike and gain greater public support. You can use hashtags and taking photos of signs put on your flat windows calling for a rent strike to expand public awareness of your strike in visually striking ways.

Talking to television, newspaper and online media about why you’re going on rent strike can be a powerful tool to use during your rent strike. Talking to the media allows you to share your stories of being exploited by your landlord, explain why you’re organising a rent strike and what your demands are. This will lead to greater publicity and public support for your strike and your landlord being publicly shamed, which could contribute to your rent strike being successful.

We have connections with several journalists which we can put you in contact with if you wish to talk to the media about your rent strike.

Contacting your local councillor and Member of Parliament by sending your demand letter to them and asking them to have a meeting with you to talk about supporting your demands and pressure the landlord to implement them is one way to bring additional pressure on your landlord.

If they refuse to meet you and support your demands and pressure the landlord to implement them, then do research on the councillors and MP’s organisational allies as well as on their donors.

Sometimes the easiest way to pressure a councillor or MP is through other organisations they are allied with, such as chambers of commerce, neighborhood associations, development non-profits, etc. Find a reason that these groups would also be upset with the landlord you are fighting and pressure them to speak with the councillor or MP.

If the councillor or MP still refuses to meet you, support your demands and pressure the landlord to implement them, then make your councillor or MP another target and engage in future actions against them to intensify the pressure on them.

Most landlords and property managers are part of community organisations (like charitable foundations, churches etc.), so sending demand letters to them can be effective. This is because your demand letter exposes your landlord’s callousness during a pandemic, which can reduce their standing in the community organisations.

This reduced standing can lead to increased pressure on landlords to implement your demands in order to prevent further loss of standing and regain their lost standing.

A petition created through platforms like ActionStation or Change.org is a great way to publicise your rent strike through your petition being shared by your supporters to their friends and loved ones. It’s also a concrete way to demonstrate to your landlord that you have broader community support behind your rent strike, which can increase the pressure on them to implement your demands.

To ensure you have money to pay printing, legal, and other costs to fund your rent strike as well as to have enough money to pay your rent in case you need to, you should establish a rent strike fund. To do this, you’ll need to set up a bank account with your prefered financial institution.

Once you’ve set the bank account up, post on your social media platforms to encourage supporters to donate to your rent strike fund.

Doing mass emails and call-ins is a great way to flex some muscle and demonstrate how much community support you have.

To do this, come up with a short, concise script stating your demands. It should be two to four sentences tops. It should include something along the lines of “I demand that you negotiate with these tenants, the community is behind them.” Use respectful but firm language, and instruct your friends to do the same. Landlords love the opportunity to play victim if callers and emailers become aggressive or offensive.

Create a flyer with the script, the phone number and email address of the landlord, and the time period during which one should call and email. Pass them out to all your friends, other tenants in the building, family members, coworkers, etc. If you have the time, you could arrange a call and email party, where everyone gets together and makes an event out of it (this will also allow you to brain-storm the next steps after the call-in and mass emails ends).

For your online platforms, create a script, create a graphic (Google Slides is good for this) that contains the script, the day and time, and the phone number(s) and email address(es) to call. Create a Facebook event and invite all your friends (don’t include the landlord’s contact info until the day of the event, and remove it after the call-in and mass email ends). Email blast your friends and family. If you use Twitter, post the graphic on the day of the call-in and mass emails and encourage your friends to share. Tag Rent Strike Aotearoa in your post and we’ll signal boost it!

When scheduling your call-in and mass emails, remember that the best times to call are morning and midday. If you are calling an office, tying up the phone line will render them unable to do business – an added bonus! Schedule a 2-3 hour window — focused enough to be potent, long enough to be a pain in the ass. If this is a small landlord that works a day job, find out where their day job is and call and email there too. If the landlord refuses to answer or engage, feel free to send texts to them as well. Encourage supporters to update the event page on Facebook with the results of their calls and emails – it helps to keep up momentum and encourages others to participate.

If your landlord demands to met with you or another of your renters, then refuse that demand and counter-demand that you should meet with all of the rent strikers via Zoom. In the Zoom meeting, you can reiterate to the landlord your demands, that you won’t end your rent strike until the rent strike ends and that this is how you will communicate with the landlord for the rest of the rent strike.

This tactic is a powerful way to show the landlord that the rent strikers are united and will not be broken by the landlord’s attempts at intimidation or to break up the rent strike through negotiating with individual renters. You can also use this format to negotiate with the landlord in the future.

Landlords are not only part of community organisations, they also live in communities where they have a positive reputation that they seek to maintain. Damaging their reputation amongst their community through flyering is one more way to put pressure on them to implement your demands. No one likes being called out in front of their neighbours!

Keep all the information on the flyer factual. It isn’t slander if it’s true! Include the landlord’s name and photo, as well as the address of the building the renters are defending. Label it “COMMUNITY NOTICE” to grab attention, and ask at the end for the reader to reach out to their neighbour about the issue you’ve highlighted.

Leave a flyer on every building’s door, on every windshield of every car and in mailboxes.

While the Ministry of Health’s guidelines means that you cannot picket or protest your landlord’s home in person, there are other ways to protest your landlord in person until we can go back to more traditional forms of protest!

One way is to get all your fellow rent strikers into their cars and circle around the landlord’s home. This tactic powerfully demonstrates to the landlord, their neighbours and to the public that there are many renters that the landlord has exploited and that they are all standing united against them.

If you do a livestream of this on social media and invite along traditional media to cover the protest, this can also serve to not only advertise your strike and your demands, it can also shame the landlord by showing how much opposition they face from their renters.