Written By: - Date published: 10:40 am, February 26th, 2010 - 46 comments
If National is going to legislate democratic procedures for unions taking industrial action, aren’t they bound by consistency to do the same for employers?
Requiring a secret ballot of shareholders before lockouts are allowed would be a good start.
Written By: - Date published: 9:11 am, February 25th, 2010 - 22 comments
Another day, another anti-beneficiary story beaten up by Paula Bennett to justify her bennie-bashing policies. Punitive measures against people who genuinely want to find work will not help them. All it does is waste WINZ’s resources re-approving genuinely unemployed workers leaving fewer resources for helping people into work.
Written By: - Date published: 12:59 pm, February 24th, 2010 - 58 comments
The faulty logic behind Roger Douglas’ bill to cut the wages of young workers could just as easily be applied to any number of groups hit hard by the recession – Maori, students, men, dropouts, singles, people in Northland. What if we were to change a couple of key words in his bill?
Written By: - Date published: 6:58 pm, February 23rd, 2010 - 14 comments
Two industrial relations bills from the Right were pulled from the ballot today.
The first, Roger Douglas’ bill to restore youth rates, is just the usual ACT Party kick the poor stuff.
But Tau Henare’s bill on strike ballots is just plain stupid.
Written By: - Date published: 1:15 pm, February 22nd, 2010 - 26 comments
No chance some gang f#ckwits would be deterred by longer sentences.
What happened to that plan of Key’s to end whaling?
How do we get a high wage economy when National opposes each and every wage rise?
Written By: - Date published: 11:22 am, February 19th, 2010 - 11 comments
When you’ve got a Finance Minister who can’t get stats right, a Social Welfare Minister who can’t define her flagship policy, and an Education Minister who can’t explain her flagship policy, it’s easy for an incompetent Women’s Affairs Minister to slip through.
Written By: - Date published: 10:43 am, February 19th, 2010 - 15 comments
John Key’s recent stint at the Big Gay Out wasn’t all target marketing and niche political branding. He also had a run in with living-wage campaigners who took him to task for his government’s poor response to minimum wage earners and asked if he could live on the minimum wage.
Written By: - Date published: 1:00 pm, February 15th, 2010 - 38 comments
When the Government came under fire over National Standards John Key was quick to raise the anti-union bogey. The old stereotypes are certainly still strong in National, but they have led Key into a trap. What might have worked for Muldoon or Maggie in the past won’t work now for a number of reasons.
Written By: - Date published: 10:41 am, February 13th, 2010 - 13 comments
Protests are taking place around the country today against the National Government’s miserable 25 cent increase to the minimum wage.
Written By: - Date published: 12:10 pm, February 12th, 2010 - 5 comments
Relating to what I wrote yesterday about the Right and much of the media being largely blind to the existence of those of us on low and middle incomes, here’s an interesting piece from the New York Times: The folks in the upper-income group are not suffering much, if at all, from the profound reversals […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:03 am, February 12th, 2010 - 24 comments
The best political commentary these days doesn’t come from the political journalists. As Zetetic shows, they have turned themselves into government minders. But there are others who tell it like it is. Such as Karlo Mila in today’s DomPost. The article was headed up “If you could just suck it up, that would be nice.” […]
Written By: - Date published: 7:39 am, February 12th, 2010 - 35 comments
Paying a person doing the same work as another person less money because of their sex or religion or ethnicity or any other grounds prohibited under the Human Rights Act is illegal and abhorrent. Yet, the Right wants to do just that with a private member’s bill from Roger Douglas reintroducing a lower minimum wage for 16 and […]
Written By: - Date published: 7:37 pm, February 11th, 2010 - 13 comments
Campaign for a living wage is protesting the offices of National MPs this Saturday to protest increases in GST and the miserly increase in the minimum wage. The protest is part of Unite union’s campaign to force a referendum on raising the minimum wage to $15. At the moment they have 100,000 signatures but need […]
Written By: - Date published: 4:29 pm, February 11th, 2010 - 38 comments
Over the last month or so National’s pollster David Farrar has been running a series of posts desperately trying to pin the spike in youth unemployment under National to Labour’s decision to abolish youth rates. I’d been wondering why the obsession with youth rates until I saw this exchange between Roger Douglas and Kate Wilkinson […]
Written By: - Date published: 3:02 pm, February 10th, 2010 - 64 comments
Number of jobless Kiwis = 276,000 Number of jobs plans from Key Government = 0 Key can make all the vague references to faster growth and better economic performance that he likes but while the potential and skill of over a quarter of a million Kiwis is being wasted it will never happen. Getting people […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:56 am, February 9th, 2010 - 21 comments
30 years ago, according to John Key, wages in Australia and New Zealand were the same. Since then New Zealand wages have stagnated and Australian wages haven grown away from us to the point where they are nearly 40% higher. The conventional wisdom is that this is due to faster economic growth in Australia, driven […]
Written By: - Date published: 4:41 pm, February 6th, 2010 - 43 comments
The Herald reports: “[Key] also raised the 15 per cent Maori unemployment rate, saying improving education outcomes for Maori children would help address that.” Improved education sounds good but: 1) how is Key going to actually lift Maori educational achievement? Not by cutting millions from the education budget like he did last year. Not by […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:53 pm, February 6th, 2010 - 2 comments
Paula Bennett and John Key have been, once again, prematurely popping the bottle of champagne to celebrate the end of rising unemployment. In the face of the shocking 7.3% unemployment rate announced on Thursday, the pair responded by saying ‘ah, but that was December quarter things are better now.’ They pointed to the number […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:31 am, February 5th, 2010 - 48 comments
Nearly a year ago, John Key, shaken by the first whispers of disquiet over his government’s month-long holiday at the height of an economic crisis (whispers that would later grow into cries of ‘Do Nothing’ Key), decided to hold the Prime Minister’s Jobs Summit. This would not be a talk-fest, it would be a ‘do-fest’ […]
Written By: - Date published: 7:35 am, February 5th, 2010 - 53 comments
A panicked, chaotic series of excuses poured forth from John Key’s mouth yesterday as he attempted to shift the blame for the shocking unemployment numbers on to someone, anyone, else: “He told reporters it was important to note the economy was not losing jobs, it was a case of not creating new ones fast enough.” […]
Written By: - Date published: 2:54 pm, February 4th, 2010 - 59 comments
Andrew Campbell It should come as no surprise that unemployment hit 7.3% today. That’s what happens when a government does virtually nothing to support job creation when there is a recession. But instead of announcing a plan to address this massive economic and social issue the Minister for Unemployment, Paula Bennett, is blaming a growth […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, February 4th, 2010 - 113 comments
Unemployment hit a startling 7.3% in the December quarter, far higher than the 6.8% expected. There are now 159,000 officially unemployed workers in New Zealand. Add in the those who want to work but have given up looking and there are 276,000 jobless Kiwis who wanting a job. That’s the highest number of jobless since […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:24 am, February 4th, 2010 - 13 comments
Telecom is threatening to throw up to 1,500 workers out of their jobs so it can increase profits by offshoring. A good government in this situation is talks to the company, uses the bully pulpit. Telecom should be reminded that it is hoping to make a bomb off the government’s broadband fund. They should be reminded that the one […]
Written By: - Date published: 11:26 am, February 3rd, 2010 - 28 comments
Remember how John Key said he “would love to see wages drop“. You might remember the big corporate media refused to run it, and the head of APN held an emergency meeting with Key then pressured the journalist who had reported the comments to retract them, which he would not do, and then APN published […]
Written By: - Date published: 8:33 am, February 3rd, 2010 - 70 comments
The latest round of the Labour Cost Index is out and it shows that the nation’s 400,000 union members are the workers holding their ground as businesses try to cut wage costs to preserve their profit margins: Inflation was 2% this year. If you didn’t get a pay rise to match or beat that, your […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:15 am, February 2nd, 2010 - 127 comments
One of the old saws that the Right brings out whenever the topic of increasing the minimum wage comes up is ‘oh no, it will increase unemployment’. They said it this year. The Business Roundtable said it every year as the Fifth Labour Government put up the minimum wage and unemployment kept falling. Hell, they […]
Written By: - Date published: 1:10 pm, February 1st, 2010 - 86 comments
I see the DomPost is running a sniveling editorial claiming Labour’s commitment to raising the minimum wage can’t be done. It then breaks out the dodgy unadjusted maths to claim Labour would never have lifted the minimum wage to $15 if it was in power because it “only” lifted it by $5 last time and […]
Written By: - Date published: 3:55 pm, January 27th, 2010 - 115 comments
I really thought the rumour that the minimum wage would only rise by 25c had been put out by the government to make their eventual 50c or 75c decision look generous. But for a change they’ve surprised me. This is the first time in a decade the minimum wage has been cut in real terms. […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:56 am, January 27th, 2010 - 93 comments
The Government is set to announce its decision on the annual adjustment to the minimum wage today. So what’s it going to be? The three main positions out there are: Business lobby: Hold increase down to 50c an hour ($13 an hour). Unions: Step-change of $2.50 an hour ($15 an hour). Labour: $1.25 increase this […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:19 am, January 26th, 2010 - 23 comments
I can’t work out how to embed audio alone, so here’s a YouTube of Andrew Campbell and Matthew Hooton on the Key Government. Both agree that this government has done little and doesn’t appear to have a plan. Campbell sums up Key’s record: “The NDU yesterday issued a challenge to the Government to do a […]
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