Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, November 18th, 2010 - 16 comments
Bill English and brother Conner, CEO of Federated Farmers, share a vision for the world. It’s one where the environment and workers are exploited to the hilt in the name of ‘growth’ and the fruits of that ‘growth’ flow to a privileged elite (like the Englishes). Yesterday rich-boy Conner chided the rest of us with a speech titled “There is no free lunch”
Written By: - Date published: 6:58 am, November 18th, 2010 - 93 comments
Here’s a little something that Kris Fa’afoi and his team might like to being to the attention of Mana voters as they prepare to go to the polls. On National’s watch, the median Maori income has fallen 11.5%. For Pacific Islanders the fall’s 19%. Pakeha are down 2.6%. No tax cut for the rich can cover the gaping holes in those family budgets.
Written By: - Date published: 9:57 pm, November 17th, 2010 - 23 comments
Who would have thought that while Hone was talking up Matt McCarten in Mana the other day he was getting ready to vote with National and Act to undermine Kiwi workers’ annual leave and sick leave rights?
Written By: - Date published: 5:16 pm, November 16th, 2010 - 15 comments
So people get sick and become less productive. I would have thought that that was pretty much stating the obvious.
Spending tax payers money trying to quantify how much imaginary wealth these sick people could have created for their employers if they had been perfectly well, seems to me to be bordering on lunacy.
Written By: - Date published: 10:22 am, November 12th, 2010 - 47 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, November 10th, 2010 - 10 comments
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?
Written By: - Date published: 7:00 am, November 10th, 2010 - 53 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 2:44 pm, November 9th, 2010 - 45 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 12:31 pm, November 9th, 2010 - 41 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 5:05 pm, November 7th, 2010 - 38 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 11:45 am, November 5th, 2010 - 11 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, November 3rd, 2010 - 52 comments
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?’
Written By: - Date published: 8:35 am, November 3rd, 2010 - 33 comments
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:
Written By: - Date published: 5:11 pm, October 29th, 2010 - 56 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 11:59 am, October 29th, 2010 - 34 comments
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:
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, October 29th, 2010 - 41 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 9:07 pm, October 28th, 2010 - 11 comments
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. It comes from the producer of “Calendar Girls” and is called “Made in Dagenham”. It tells the story of women sewing machinists who went on strike for equal pay at England’s largest […]
Written By: - Date published: 7:36 pm, October 28th, 2010 - 44 comments
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?
Written By: - Date published: 12:35 pm, October 28th, 2010 - 97 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 11:30 am, October 28th, 2010 - 84 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 7:39 am, October 28th, 2010 - 25 comments
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 Oct 2010
Written By: - Date published: 8:30 pm, October 27th, 2010 - 180 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, October 27th, 2010 - 10 comments
Wallace Chapman has a thoughtful Open Letter to the visiting Warner Brothers executives on his blog, inviting them to front up to the New Zealand public: We have a small segment called “Soapbox” and we’d just love you to come over and join us and speak your mind to camera for 60 seconds. We know […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:00 am, October 27th, 2010 - 17 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 11:30 am, October 26th, 2010 - 30 comments
Otago Law Professor Paul Roth says possible law changes by the Key Government to provide more tax-payer funded charity to corporate giants Warner Bros Entertainment is ‘Third-World’ lawmaking and a ‘race to the bottom’ in an attempt to compete against developing nations with little or no labour rights. Roth says if we ‘lie back and prostitute ourselves […]
Written By: - Date published: 1:59 pm, October 25th, 2010 - 41 comments
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….
Written By: - Date published: 8:57 am, October 25th, 2010 - 32 comments
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)
Written By: - Date published: 7:58 am, October 25th, 2010 - 142 comments
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!
Written By: - Date published: 11:47 am, October 24th, 2010 - 10 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 9:35 am, October 22nd, 2010 - 27 comments
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”…
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, October 21st, 2010 - 72 comments
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.
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