Who is Kate Wilkinson taking aim at?
By John Ryall, SFWU National Secretary While The Standard readers know that the air traffic controllers were the excuse that Kate Wilkinson used […]
Economy
Posts on the economy, work, business, income, and labour
Soak the rich
Coming soon to a workplace near you, if Kate Wilkinson gets her way: According to this report by Roll on Friday, a receptionist […]
Shock, Horror – Infratil managers strike for more pay!
Yesterday Infratil got their NZ Bus hand-puppets to announce that they will be going on strike. On Wednesday, if the bus-drivers refuse to […]
Heavy-handed tactics from NZ Bus
Auckland bus drivers have been in negotiations with NZ Bus (which is owned by Infratil) for a 70 cent an hour pay rise. […]
Climate change in action
The world’s oceans reached a record high temperature in July of 16.37 degrees, 0.59 degrees above the 20th century average. That might not […]
Kate’s pretext falls over
Yesterday, National’s Kate Wilkinson tried to use a dispute over how to apply the new rest breaks law for air traffic controllers as […]
OECD child poverty report
I’ve been having a look at the OECD’s report on child poverty. A lot of the data is quite of of date and […]
Rest-breaks under attack
In 1908, the miners at Blackball took a famous strike over the right to take rest breaks at work. For most of the […]
Foodstuffs: Voluntary regulation fails
I find myself in the curious position of sympathising with a company reneging on an environmental promise. Foodstuffs announced yesterday that the charge […]
Wee gripes: temporal confusion and the recession
The Herald editorial this morning calling for mining DoC land: “That resource represents wealth which this country is in little position to ignore. […]
Wee gripes: Business confidence
Question: ‘Do you expect business conditions to improve in the next 12 months?’ Answer: ‘Well, we’re in the worst recession in a life-time […]
Capitalism, it’s not a love-in
I find the Right’s assumption that the bosses are acting in some greater interest fascinating. There’s this unwillingness to believe that the bosses […]
Victory for Zeal320 workers
A good outcome from the Zeal320 dispute. The deal doesn’t quite close the gap between Zeal320 workers and other AirNZ flight attendants but […]
Telecom and the logic of capitalism
There’s nothing like a Tory Government in power and a monopolistic corporate flexing its muscle to remind you that capitalism is all about […]
To my friend
We haven’t talked lately and that has partly been my fault. Just doesn’t seem that we share as much in common now that […]
Trippin’
How’s this for some positive spin? Australia is coming off worse in the battle for trans-Tasman tourism, with New Zealand reporting a record […]
Who do you think you’re fooling, Kate?
“I’m not going to resign” – Kate Wilkinson It’s one of the truisms of politics that when you’re a minister and you say […]
Collins’ smear backfires
Excellent piece by Patrick Gower in the Herald today on Judith Collins’ attempt to smear Corrections Association president Beven Hanlon. Collins has leaked […]
Apply the brakes, before it’s too late
The real estate agencies and the newspapers, both of which have an interest in a booming property market, are predicting that housing prices will surge […]
NDU catches govt lying
This morning the National Distribution Union put out a statement saying the Minister of Labour, Kate Wilkinson, had refused to attend an executive […]
Don’t look for help from the bosses’ party
Red Alert continues to get better and better. Beaumont’s latest is one of those powerful stories that deserves to be told, and Red […]
Ultra-fast broadband? Eventually, but not now
For what seems like the fiftieth time, we’re being told to expect an announcement from Steven Joyce on the shape of the Government’s […]
Fisking Farrar
I don’t know what it is about the word “Labour” that the right finds so hard to understand. David Farrar has a piece […]
More than just a job
Recently, Bill English has been trying to make excuses for not doing anything about the spiralling numbers of unemployed. He says that the […]
Playing catch up?
In the 1980s and early 1990s, during the Right’s neoliberal economic revolution, New Zealand’s economic output per person stalled – growing just 0.01% per […]
Well done National
The polls are still fine but National are looking a wee bit crispy round the edges right now. Nice Mr Key has a […]
Tax reform mustn’t be a gift for the rich
Vernon Small’s pieces on tax in the Independent and Dom this week have been interesting. He provides a good overview of the issues around […]
Telecom’s profits first, NZ second
You’ve heard about the Telecom dispute. But while a lot of the focus has been on what it means for the lines engineers […]
GST up? It depends
The Government’s Tax Working Group has proposed increasing GST to 15-20% to pay for cuts to income tax. I’m not automatically against GST […]
A question of trusts
Here is Bill English in the cocktail tapes talking about Working for Families: “the reality is if we had been the government, with […]
DPB: it’s for the kids
A lot of right-wing beliefs can be traced back to a few core values. Two apply to the DPB debate: a penny-pinching self-centredness […]
Breeding for a business
In 2002, John Key (then a free-speaking backbencher) told the Sunday-Star Times: “We’ve seen enormous growth in the number of people on the […]
On their coat-tails
Jon Stewart talks to Austan Goolsbee, Chief Economist for President Obama’s Economic Recovery Board: “when you’re looking in the face of the next […]
Let the bashing begin
I see Paula Bennett has been busy dog-whistling on beneficiaries, firstly by releasing figures showing 307 beneficiaries receive more than $1000 a week […]
Reverse Robin hood
John Key’s policy to get kids into sport turns out to be a transfer of dollars from low decile schools to high decile […]
It’s Labour’s fault it didn’t rain!
One of Bill English’s favourite lines is that New Zealand entered recession ahead of the rest of the world ‘due to Labour’s mismanagement […]