The Nats are determined to push through more attacks on the rights of working New Zealanders. The latest stories of abuse of the Fire at Will law to emerge involve a chef who ‘who used too much sauce’ and a dairy worker who stood up for an abused immigrant worker. The Nats want all of us to be subject to Fire at Will. Our job is to fight back.
While the unemployment rate continues to jump around like mad, the dole numbers are telling a consistent story. And it’s not a good one. Every month this year has been worse than normal. In October, the number of Kiwis on the dole fell by 0.1%, that’s compared to a 1.1% fall last October and an average 3.1% drop each October under Labour. This October there were 4,800 more people on the dole than last October. Didn’t you say we were coming out of the recession strongly, Mr Key?
Wages rose for the rich and fell for the poor this year, according to a Employers and Manufacturer’s Association survey. Managing Directors got a 3.7% rise from $190k to $197k, whilst the unskilled production workers beneath them saw their wages drop 6.5% or $2000 to $29.5k.
The recession, combined with this government, hurts the poor the hardest.
The gender pay gap is increasing by about 1 percentage point each year under Pansy Wong’s watch – it’s now 13%. And a new report out shows women’s level of participation in key leadership areas is static or falling. Female unemployment had passed 7 percent for the first time in 12 years. National’s policies equate to an attack on women.
I’ve never really understood the logic of paying CEOs multi-million dollar salaries. Can Telecom’s $7m man, Paul Reynolds, for example, really be worth 100 skilled technicians? Is there no-one who is basically as good who would work for a million or two less? Now, research shows high pay gaps for CEOs actually makes them worse bosses.
This NAct government is so anti-worker that they have managed to re-arrange the calendar so that we get 5 fewer holidays in this government’s term than the last Labour one. And that’s before they sell off our 4th week.
At 6.4% unemployment appears to be falling, slowly. But it also looks to be above where it was at the start of the year, when it supposedly plunged to 6.0%. Economists are viewing the wildly fluctuating numbers sceptically. Whatever precisely is happening, with one in ten working age Kiwis unable to get work, it’s not time for dancing in the streets.
In a highly-charged debate like the Hobbit fiasco, it’s easy to lose sight of the real issue amongst the claims and counter-claims over petty details. In a second post that strips things back to what matters, Blue asks the big question: ‘how exactly did NZ taxpayers end up handing over tens of millions of dollars to Warner Brothers?’
I went to see Made in Dagenham last night. The parallels between the dispute, that began when female workers at a Ford plant in the UK struck for better pay, and then equal pay with men, and the Hobbit fiasco were striking. But it’s the dissimilarties in the outcomes that I was left pondering. Let’s take a look at the two events:
The Hobbit Enabling Act is meant to do is say ‘you’re an employee if you are called an employee in your contract, if not, you’re a contractor’. But it doesn’t say that and it doesn’t override the Bryson case that caused the ‘uncertainty’ Warners supposedly feared. Now, nobody knows what the law actually is. Well-founded disagreements will mean court cases.
It takes a lot to screw up a great country like New Zealand. It can’t be done overnight. But if you’re really negligent, anti-worker, and focused on hand outs to the rich, you can start to make things worse pretty quickly. Let’s look at the key measures of National’s performance, according to their own criteria:
I’m confused by the up beat coverage of the tourism figures released on Wednesday. Have people actually read the numbers? Tourism is in decline. Employment and revenue are still going down, and the next time oil prices go through the roof, the situation will get worse. No cycleway will change that.
Wellington’s Embassy theatre hosted the New Zealand premiere of the Ring movies a few years ago. There’s another good movie showing there now. […]
The government is currently rushing through changes to employment law.
But the change won’t make any difference to the kind of action Actors Equity took.
So what’s the point?
Today, the Hobbit Enabling Act will be slammed through Parliament by National removing the right of employees working in the film industry to get employment rights if their contract calls them a contractor. It’s the latest in a series of anti-democratic laws that show National is the party of big business, not democracy and ordinary Kiwis.
The Right argues that an already settled labour dispute involving a small union somehow scared a multi-billion film company enough to make them consider abandoning the $100 million already invested in NZ. Blue has gone beyond the slogans and done some excellent research to answers our questions on what really happened.
There was some expenditure that didn’t qualify under the old scheme…We’ve looked to broaden that out. John Key on Warner Brothers, 27 […]
The Government will give the Hobbit producers an extra $33 million to stay in New Zealand and it’s going to use this ‘crisis’ as an excuse to slam through more anti-worker laws. New Zealand has been played like naive hicks. The Hobbit was never leaving. We let Jackson and his Hollywood mates whip us into a frenzy of fear – now we’re paying the cost.
Wallace Chapman has a thoughtful Open Letter to the visiting Warner Brothers executives on his blog, inviting them to front up to the […]
At the last election we chose tax cuts and unemployment instead of stimulus and stability – which was the more ambitious, high wage way to go?
National are not fulfilling their government’s core reason for existence: closing the wage gap with Australia. No, we’re fast going backwards on that score, and it’s predictable: high unemployment causes low wages.
Otago Law Professor Paul Roth says possible law changes by the Key Government to provide more tax-payer funded charity to corporate giants Warner […]
One of the strange things about helping to run a left blog like this is looking at the varied opinions of those on the left of the political spectrum, and then looking at the monolithic opinions that the right seem to have of the left. I was musing on this while reading Matt McCarten’s excellent Saturday article. Now you have to understand that Matt and myself are almost at the ends of the spectrum when it comes to politics on the left….
I’ve just been reading The Age of Absurdity, which has many good ideas on modern happiness.
One of the ideas that won’t cause happiness – but will decrease motivation and quality of work – is performance related pay.
(Consumerism and a Sense of Entitlement also causes unhappiness, but big ups to Personal Responsibility. None of that is in this post though)
The Nats and their repeaters are trying to paint unions as some kind of public enemy. How can we be a public enemy when we are the public? Unions are just people. Unions exist to work for our rights. Rights like the eight hour working day, the origin of the celebration of Labour Day. If you enjoy decent conditions at work, if you’re enjoying your long weekend, why not thank a unionist!
The Secretary for Education Karen Sewell has just had a minimum pay rise of $30,000p.a. Ironically the same 4% that teachers are after. Here is some maths for Mrs Sewell. Her 4% is 30,000 dollars. 4% of a teachers salary of around $65k is $2,600 dollars.
Every time I think John Key can’t get any more cynical and hypocritical in his messaging, he manages to take it to a new level. Apparently spending money on the education system will create “a noose around the neck of young New Zealanders”…
National’s bully-boy tactics continue. Young people are trying to voice their concern to the select committee that is looking at the extension of the Fire at Will law to all workers. The Nats on the committee don’t want to listen so they’re bullying submitters and refusing to even accept submissions that don’t toe their line.
It looked like Actors Equity and Peter Jackson had come to an agreement.
They’d even written a joint statement to announce the boycott was off.
So why has the whole thing blown up?
Thousands of workers are now leaving their work places to attend one of the 27 protests taking place today from Kaiatia to the Bluff against National’s draconian anti-worker policies. This one could be big. This is the day that Kiwi workers stand up and say that they have had enough of this government attacking our wages and work conditions. Update: 5-6 thousand at Parliament.
Trying to get my head around the economic arguments going on. Hearing contradictory things. Who’s telling the truth? ls Labour’s new overseas investment policy Stalinism that will ruin the economy, as Key claimed on Monday and Tuesday? Or is the same as the existing law, as Key claimed on Monday and Tuesday?
National have been running some fine lines of bullshit lately. Keith Ng’s recent post at Public Address calls them out on two of them. The first, National is trying to claim credit for low inflation. The Second, National is trying to claim that recent wage increases have been better than the previous 9 years. Keith takes the bullshit apart – dirty work, but someone has to do it.
For some reason, the Nats hate public education. Even an elitist fool should be able to see that a well-educated workforce is valuable and public education is the cheapest way to achieve it. Yet National is attacking education at every level. The latest ‘offer’ to the secondary teachers would see them take 2 years of after-inflation pay cuts.
Unemployment is up, wages are down. But the Nats want to put the boot into workers to keep costs down for their rich mates. They’re trying to take away workers’ rights, remove protections, cut pay, reduce holidays and diminish access to sick leave. Tomorrow is the national day of action when we fight back.
Yesterday, former National media trainer Paul Holmes and former National Party President Michelle Boag attempted an extraordinary hatchet job on Phil Goff on Q+A. No analysis of the real policy divide that Goff and Labour with National carved out at the national conference, just attack – why? The economy, policy, Key’s fading brand, and the polls.
The government is refusing to step up to save IHC providers that are insolvent due to a recent court case that resulted in IHC carers being awarded hundreds of millions in back wages. The government is washing its hands, even though it is the primary funder of the services. Will the Nats let IHC collapse or will they use this to bring in their corporate mates?
It was a year ago that Paula Bennett first declared victory over rising unemployment. Since then, John Key has been working his economic strategy hard: high-fiving every schoolgirl he can find, playing with spiders, announcing and re-annoucing literally tens of kilometres of cycleway, smiling and waving till it hurts. But dole numbers are rising.
