Written By: - Date published: 10:46 am, February 20th, 2008 - 96 comments
Categories: john key, national, tax, workers' rights -
Tags: john key, national, tax, workers' rights
“We would love to see wages drop”. You would think that given the simmering debate about our wage gap with Australia at the moment that would be the last thing you’d expect to hear from the leader of the National Party. Especially when he’d gone on record in the national media just a week ago claiming under pressure that his party “will raise wages“.
But that’s exactly what John Key told the Kerikeri District Business Association in late December last year.
“We would love to see wages drop”
Think about what that means for a second.
For most people their wage is the only income they have to pay their mortgages or rent, to feed and clothe themselves and their kids and to make sure they can have some kind of a decent life – all the things most Kiwis need and want.
And John wants them to have less.
We’ve talked about the wage issue time and time again on this blog and how the National Party has no answers on how to raise wages. They seem only to want to talk about tax cuts, and I guess this explains why.
That Key would say this to an audience of employers and within two months try to tell the New Zealand public the complete opposite is a disgraceful act of dishonesty, and it shows his real attitude to working New Zealanders.
Disdain.
I’m starting to understand how Key can claim his tax cuts wouldn’t be inflationary – his plan is to take them out of our wages.
UPDATE: Around the blogs Jordan Carter, No Right Turn, SproutBean and Kiwiblogblog have all weighed in. Scoop has press releases from Labour and the EPMU
UPDATE 2: The Council of Trade Unions has entered the fray, challenging Key to come clean on wages.
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For those who may try and portray this comment as a “one off” the overall direction is confirmed by things he’s said previously – he just hasn’t been quite so blunt (maybe this is why we are all taken aback – we’re not used to such straight talking from Mr Key! but then i guess he was addressing a group of fellow business people).
For example: Key is an advocate of flexible labour markets and says under National expect “quite significant’ changes to the Employment Relations Act.
He reckons there was nothing wrong with employment legislation – the Employment Contracts Act – as it was when National left office in 1999.’ The Independent 8 September 2004
I agre with all the outrage above. Although it’s not a shock so I’m not really that surprised.
Sorry to be a pedant, but it’s ‘disdain’, not ‘distain’
Na I’m with g on this – when he says wages, how do we know he means “wages” in the income sense.
I think he means “wages” as in “wages war”.
He actually wants peace. God bless you, John Key.
Is that the “context” you’re after, g? I could have more fun spinning it if you wish, but at the end of the dsy, I’ll still be talking out my arse
Again a typical ploy from the left who take one statement out of context and assume that this is the thinking of John Key.
Read the whole article. Your headline is misleading. A headline that more accurately reflects the thinking of the article would be “Key’s plan to improve productivity, and living standards.”
Labour wants to increase wages without regard to the capacity of industry to sustain them. What John Key is saying is that is not how wage rises should occur.
If you bother to read the article, John Key is saying improved productivity leads to higher wages and that is how it should proceed.
See, I just had a look and the Labour release hit the newswires yesterday at 5.30pm so it’s hardly breaking news. Even on the blogs No Right Turn and Just Left both beat the standard to the story with posts last night.
Michael Cullen dropped it in Parliament at the end of the commencement debate around 16:20, and I to wait for his press release.
John Key’s been saying this kinda thing for a while, like in 2004 when he attacked unionism in parliament, said he wanted to scrap the Employment Relations Act and said employers should be abble to pressure workers not to join a union. Dancer is right – there’s heaps more where this came from.
This is not a one-off statement, nor is it taken out of context. National’s employment policies attack workers. It has no concrete policy on how to increase wages. Its agenda is the reverse.
National’s “answer” is tax cuts. This will do nothing for workers. If you’re earning $12 an hour a tax cut is not a huge amount of money. A tax cut for workers will give them next to nothing while cutting the public services they rely on (and pay for through their taxes). Businesses and employers have the most to gain from tax cuts, not workers.
Let’s not forget that it was National that encouraged the low wage and low investment employment landscape of the 1990s, the legacy of which remains. New Zealand competed by having very low wages. This did not encourage investment in training or technology and it did not increase workers’ skills or productivity. National is responsible for the vast gap in wages with Australia that it now purports to want to remedy.
National’s talk about supporting productivity is meaningless unless mechanisms are in place to ensure that workers get a fair share of increased productivity. National still opposes the 2004 amendments to the Employment Relations Act 2000. It is clear that it opposes collective bargaining and laws to prevent exploitation of vulnerable workers in contracting out situations.
National and its employment spokesperson Kate Wilkinson should drop the veneer of concern for workers. The damage to our social fabric caused by poverty wages is too important to ignore, and workers need to know the truth from National.
Well put Tim.
Hey Sod, some of us on Jonkeys side of the argument just have more productive things to do with our time…
Anyway, as I see it here, we have a combination of three things.
One; an off the cuff response to a question that was worded poorly
Two; a Journalist who sees some mileage in the quote
Three; IB getting wet and randy over something else top try to pin on Key
If you read the rest of the article, John’s talking about increases in productivity. I think it is fairly apparent that what he means is that wages, as a percentage of employer costs, should come down.
Leaving aside the fact that ‘wages’ as a cost to employers are NOT the same thing as ‘wages’ in your pocket, I think what he’s getting at is that businesses must take steps to improve productivity in such a way that they have ample reasources to reward employees once the benefit of capital spending and investment has made it’s way through their production process.
yes well put tim
Tim, you’ll never get a job in the msm saying stuff like that
Phil, thanks for the handy “contextualization”.
did you do “the war in Iraq is over” too?
Key’s plan to cut wages is probably one of the reasons that K Rich left
Phil, and slightlyrighty,
I’ll put it to you that if this idea is so fantastic, why hasn’t Key been shouting it from the rooftops?
Why has he been either (at best) deliberately misprepresenting his position or blattantly lying about his intentions?
Fact is, he has no answers to th eproblems laid out there, or his solution isn’t one that he considers fit for general consumption.
Anyway, Phil, as his official spokesperson, what did he mean to say, instead of “We would love to see wages drop”? Maybe get him to give me a call, cheers.
I also detect a little underpants gnome in there – cut wages, ??, and raise productivity.
three; IB getting wet and randy
Hey Phil – you’re KBR is showing.
‘sod: “your”. Funny though
Jeez – I didn’t get much sleep last night…
Too busy blowing goats aye Sod?
No need to worry, your goat-blowing days will be over when John Key has you working double shifts to pay your mortgage.
phil: I have no problems with all of that. IMHO employers have been dragging the chain on increasing productivity. It invariably requires capital investments that haven’t been that noticeable in the last couple of decades. It has been cheaper to get cheap labour. Consequently our productivity rate rises have been minimal.
The best thing that employers could have happen to them is to enter a tight labour market. There is finally an incentive for them to get off their arse and get real productivity increases.
cap: the Corporate
Ahh, the policies of the soundbite.
Having read the whole article, what John Key has actually said was that a wage rise simply for the sake of a wage rise is counterproductive. What he would like to see is more competitiveness with Australian wages that have come about with a combination of tax cuts, and wage rises linked to increased productivity which has come about as a result of infrastructure investment. And what, may I ask, is so wrong with that.
But of course, you lot simply take one line from the speech, quote it out of context, and make no effort to quantify the very reasonable statements on infrastructure investment.
Shame on you!
Bart. Key says “we would love to see wages drop”. He also says that increasing productivity would be good but that’s nothing new or surprising, every party says that. Not every party says “we would love for wages to drop”.
The big question now, for those trying to defend Key’s statement is how much of a pay cut are you willing to take under a National government?
captcha: Public Tingling, I think they’ll be more than tingling after they see this on the news tonight.
SO none of you have ever missed a word in saying something so it doesn’t come out we meant.
I mean, you seem to have missed the fundamental contradiction of the phrase you are so loving with his immediately following statement: “the way we want to see wages increase is…”
As a former sub editor and journalist, it leapt out at me and my instant reaction was – “there;re some words missing in the quote, otherwise it makes no sense whatsoever (ignoring whether the sentiment fits your preset agenda).”
It was likely the word “gap” between the words ‘wages’ and ‘drop’ was missed either by Key or by the reporter – probably the former given the extensive quotes used by the reporter (that said given s/he is irregular in the spelling of both the people quoted, I’m not sure I’d pin all my faith on that). Insert that word and there is clarity.
ALways consider cock up theory before conspiracy theory.
tinkling more like, as National pisses more votes down the toilet
keep opening your mouth John
no doubt about Key and cock-ups Phil
Key: “under a Labour government I lead…”
But of course, you lot simply take one line from the speech, quote it out of context
Begging your pardon there Bart, but the post references an image of the entire article as printed in the newspaper. You can’t supply much more context than that!
and make no effort to quantify the very reasonable statements on infrastructure investment.
Quantify them? Could you please show us how that’s done Bart? Serious question, not at all sure what you mean here.
Shame on you!
And for supporting a call to lower wages, honour and glory to you do you think? Some might disagree…
ALways consider cock up theory before conspiracy theory.
Because that’s what National and the media are doing with the Williams/Glenn fiasco right?
I don’t buy this nonsense about a word missing from the quote. They’ve selected it and put it in bold, they would have checked they had the words right.
In the next paragraph after the quote, Key talks about tackling wage inflation, which is tory speak for wage rises.
I’d say (also as a former sub) that a quote of this significance (especially when used as a pullout would have been checked). I’d also say that National would have had this article come through their clippings service and would have flagged it for a retraction or would have been organised to point out as soon as it came up that it was a misquote. They’ve also had 18 hours to respond (what would be a better deflation of the story than – “simple, I was misquoted”) and haven’t done so.
I don’t buy this nonsense about a word missing form the quote. They’ve selected it and put it in bold, they would have chekced they had the words right
Quite apart from the fact that Key would have screamed blue murder if an error of that magnitude had occurred.
OMG, National proving that it hasn’t changed it’s spots since the 1990s. It still wants mass unemployment, low wages and extreme poverty – who’d ha’ thunk it.
Yeah DTB – I was also stunned. I thought they were a party of the centre.
Sprout just gave another good example of one of Key’s misspeaks. And face it, he is not a great orator, to be blunt. Not exactly bushlike but certainly not a Blair or Cullen. I suspect he accidentally left the word out as he responded to a question. (look how many times people have mistyped or misused a word in this thread – it happens).
Journalistically speaking, if the quote deserves the weight you place on it I have to wonder why that wasn’t the lead of the story – the reporter missed a massive scoop surely, which does call into question his/her reporting skills. So perhaps in context it was not quite the issue being imagined here.
The next bit was that he wanted to see wage inflation not automatically echo the economy’s inflation but be built on productivity gains.
So it is a nice little thing to chuck jibes at him about, but it is a bit much to see this as a major polciy announcement or sinister revelation of a hidden agenda.
If that’s the best you can do, you haven’t got much.
“captcha: Public Tingling, I think they’ll be more than tingling after they see this on the news tonight.”
This is not newsworthy, if it was stuff or NZ would have picked it up not just left blogs looking for a distraction from ‘Glengate’
The 6 o’clock news will focus on the sad state of our killer hospitals etc etc..
Robinsod
The pullout is a good point, but I would look at the quality of the newspaper – it is not in the first class. If you have ever dealt with these community papers they are a bit hit and miss – staff are often very young or lack training. See the spellings of the names, the sub didn;t even pick that up so I wouldn’t rate his/her skills and s/he probably processed the copy as written without asking too many questions.
In terms of clipping services, you could also ask why it was being sat on by Labour. In my experience these community papers take a long time to come through. I suspect the nats haven’t put out a clarification because the story has no legs.
Hey Mike – I kinda agree with you but I would say it has the potential to grow over the next few days (as the Key DVD story did). “Glengate” please tell me you didn’t make that up? ‘Cos if you did bro you should stick to your day job.
Insider – As you know, journalists (especially regional journalists) often don’t realise the story they have. The angle often makes the story. As for the policy stuff? They’ve not released employment policy and they won’t because it shows them for what they are. In fact National has a habit of keeping their less appealing policies quiet – at least once at the request of their private backers.