Posts on the economy, work, business, income, and labour
Written By: - Date published: 7:26 am, August 10th, 2010 - 9 comments
Lost your job? Screw you…
Written By: - Date published: 4:33 pm, August 9th, 2010 - 31 comments
Unions are getting together to oppose the government’s changes to employment law with rallies in the Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.
Click through for the schedule.
Written By: - Date published: 10:36 am, August 9th, 2010 - 17 comments
For the poll junkies – yes there’s been another poll. It’s headed “Labour make gains”, but it’s margin of error stuff, so don’t get too excited.
Written By: - Date published: 8:00 am, August 9th, 2010 - 44 comments
The rate at which National have been spinning of late is giving me nausea. It can’t be long until they get to the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide scenario of declaring black to be white and getting run over on the nearest zebra crossing.
Written By: - Date published: 7:31 am, August 8th, 2010 - 82 comments
For the last several decades the over-riding mantra across western governments has been that what is important above all else is economic growth. Now is the time to question whether it should still be our main aim and guiding light.
Written By: - Date published: 10:17 am, August 6th, 2010 - 280 comments
When National rammed through the first version of the 90 day fire at will law it claimed the period would be a ‘choice’ negotiated fairly between employees and employers.
Now employers are advertising it as a precondition in job ads, with the Minister backing them all the way.
Written By: - Date published: 1:13 pm, August 5th, 2010 - 36 comments
Pita Sharples wants Maori flag to fly over prisons to raise prisoners’ morale. What a bizarre and useless suggestion. Instead, how about alleviating the poverty that is the main driver of crime?
Written By: - Date published: 1:00 pm, August 5th, 2010 - 100 comments
Statistics NZ has just released the Household Labour Force Survey for June 2010 and it’s grim reading, with an astonishing increase in the unemployment rate from 6.0% to 6.8%.
Maori unemployment is now up to 16.4%, Pacific unemployment is at 14.1% and there’s been a 70% increase in long-term unemployment to 37,600.
Written By: - Date published: 11:39 am, August 5th, 2010 - 13 comments
Labour has rightly challenged National on its failure to make any progress on its core promise to “close the gap” with Australia. And rather than responding with action, National has responded with spin and bullshit. And that is very telling indeed.
Written By: - Date published: 6:03 am, August 3rd, 2010 - 130 comments
John Key trotted out a huge lie in Parliament last week: “It took 9 years for Labour to make a complete and utter mess of the economy; it might take a bit longer than that for us to sort it out”. Let’s compare National and Labour’s economic records shall we.
Written By: - Date published: 9:20 am, August 2nd, 2010 - 98 comments
Perpetual growth is the cornerstone of our liberal democratic/capitalist system. It is fundamentally threatened. A double-dip recession is widely expected but most aren’t prepared to acknowledge the underlying problem that isn’t going away.
Written By: - Date published: 2:08 pm, July 31st, 2010 - 51 comments
Kiwis are amongst the highest consumers of bananas per capita in the world but for decades the banana industry has had a record of significant exploitation of workers including slave labour practices, execution of trade union members and a homicidal disregard of basic heath and safety practices. There’s a reason for the term “banana republic”. […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:43 am, July 29th, 2010 - 20 comments
Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard has lifted the official cash rate from 2.75 to 3 per cent, while expressing concerns about the weakness of New Zealand’s economic recovery.
Written By: - Date published: 11:39 am, July 28th, 2010 - 95 comments
Closing the wage gap with Australia was one of National’s key promises in the leadup to the 2008 election, but the Dom Post reports today that the wage gap has grown by another $40 a week under National’s watch.
Can we stop pretending now that National ever really had a plan to close the wage gap?
Written By: - Date published: 8:41 am, July 28th, 2010 - 3 comments
During the election the National Party packaged up its policies so as not to scare voters. The 90 day probationary period was for two specific reasons. It was targeted toward people on the margins of the employment market and only applicable to small businesses. Either the original justifications still hold true, hence undermining any argument to extend the scheme, or the original justifications were rubbish from the very start.
Written By: - Date published: 7:34 am, July 28th, 2010 - 35 comments
National is making a total mess of industrial relations. Two different news items yesterday tell the same story: the unions are angry, and the PPTA teachers are angry. Nats beware. Nice Mr Key could so quickly become Dear John…
Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, July 26th, 2010 - 13 comments
National wants to make a change, they’ve got to make a powerful case that the change will have the results they claim. So where’s their evidence? Where are the models, the studies, the scenarios? They haven’t got any. This is faith-based government. Based on faith in the neo-liberal god. This is guess based government. The guess being that we’ll keep voting for that Nice Man Mr Key.
Written By: - Date published: 10:46 am, July 26th, 2010 - 16 comments
Remember when John Key used to talk about the “underclass”. Much recently of course John Key’s policy direction has been more about pandering to the wealthy elite, so you don’t hear so much from John Key about his concerns for the underclass anymore. But worries about the underclass still concern some people.
Written By: - Date published: 7:50 am, July 26th, 2010 - 54 comments
The Herald reports that Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union members have won the right to a substitute holiday to make up for the fact that Anzac Day and Easter Monday fall on the same day this year as well as a three percent pay rise for this year and another next year.
You read that right, at a time when the government is attacking workers rights two thousand EPMU members are increasing their holidays and getting a pay rise.
Written By: - Date published: 12:21 pm, July 25th, 2010 - 86 comments
Having just watched the q + a interview with Council of Trade Unions President Helen Kelly and Alasdair Thompson from the EPMA (a must-watch, Kelly did a great job) I think there are a few things that need to be said:
Written By: - Date published: 12:25 pm, July 24th, 2010 - 10 comments
No Right Turn had an interesting post on National’s Energy Strategy or more correctly a general lack of it yesterday.
Yesterday the government released its Draft New Zealand Energy Strategy [PDF] for consultation. So, how does it compare with Labour’s 2007 version? The difference is easy to spot. Labour’s energy strategy was about shifting to a sustainable, low-emissions energy infrastructure. National’s is about finding oil.
Written By: - Date published: 6:53 am, July 24th, 2010 - 42 comments
Albert Einstein’s essay “Why Socialism?”, originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949).
Written By: - Date published: 7:18 am, July 23rd, 2010 - 20 comments
Brash’s call for a “flexible pension” is the thin end of the wedge leading to a rise in the age of eligibility for super. At the moment National are rejecting his call, as Key would be obliged to resign if the age is raised. But the problem remains. National have weakened Labour’s Cullen fund and KiwiSaver, and they seem to have no ideas of their own…
Written By: - Date published: 6:55 am, July 23rd, 2010 - 42 comments
Despite a textbook response by the world’s major governments to the great recession, US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says the outlook remains ‘unusually uncertain’. The economic players can’t understand why the normal strong recovery hasn’t followed the recession. They don’t understand we have reached the limits to growth.
Written By: - Date published: 9:00 am, July 22nd, 2010 - 23 comments
We’ve seen the last minute back down on mining after tens of thousands of Kiwis stood up, we’re seeing a growing tide of anger as Kiwis realise that all our work rights and wages are for the chop.. but one policy that has avoided public criticism on the level it is getting from within the industry is Gerry Brownlee’s mad electricity reforms.
Written By: - Date published: 7:02 am, July 22nd, 2010 - 29 comments
National’s promises aren’t worth the paper that they’re printed on. They’ve broken plenty and downgraded most of the rest to “aspirational goals”. Now John Key’s current anti-worker employment policies add a whole new chapter to the list of broken election promises.
Written By: - Date published: 7:21 pm, July 21st, 2010 - 40 comments
Remember the billboards comparing Helen Clark to a series of dictators in 2008? Funny thing is she’d never had anything to do with a dictator. But at least one MP who will be voting for John Key’s attacks on workers did.
Written By: - Date published: 2:31 pm, July 21st, 2010 - 35 comments
The country is short about 10,000 houses and many of the houses we do have (mostly privately owned rentals) are unhealthy. The housing shortage was a driver of the last housing boom and is still keeping house prices excessively high, while poor quality housing means higher health costs, more sick days, and kids that are sick so often it disrupts their education. It would be sensible on every level to build the extra houses we need, and the government should take the lead role.
Written By: - Date published: 12:20 pm, July 21st, 2010 - 106 comments
It became increasingly clear this year that National’s longer-term economic plan, such as they had one, could be summed up as “tax cuts and miningâ€.
With mining in national parks now out of the picture, just what is National’s plan to grow the economy and lift our wages to Australian levels?
Written By: - Date published: 9:33 am, July 21st, 2010 - 7 comments
In the 2008 election campaign, National carefully packaged up its policies in such a manner as not to scare voters. One of the policies John Key was very careful to frame was the 90 day probationary period for new workers, rightly called Fire at Will. This removal of rights for working people, he explained to us, was for two specific reasons. It was targeted toward people on the margins of the employment market and only applicable to small businesses (less than 20 workers).
Written By: - Date published: 7:12 am, July 21st, 2010 - 29 comments
Good to see John Key’s lies over the 90 day fire at will law are starting to catch up with him. An employment specialist has come out contradicting Key’s smug assurances that even though his fire at will law will explicitly remove our right to even be given a reason why we’re getting the sack, somehow good faith provisions would still require the employer the give one.
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