Written By: - Date published: 2:55 pm, December 11th, 2008 - 36 comments
Categories: education, national/act government, workers' rights -
Tags: anne tolley, nzei
Here’s Anne Tolley telling teachers before the election that they would not be covered by the fire at will legislation.
Turns out she was lying. Teachers at at least 800 schools nationwide will now have no work rights in their first 90 days on the job. Whatever it takes to win, eh National?
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Scoopit!
“If people could be depended on to act in a good manner all the time we wouldn’t need laws and rights in the first place. SP”
You should distinguish between laws that are necessary and those that are implemented for political reasons.
If I see that there is a strong union movement affiliated to Labour and that Labour benefits directly from the union affiliation then I would have real tangible doubts about the impartiality of Labour passing laws and implementing policies that make the unions stronger and able to more easily able to enrich themselves on workers’ union dues.
100% enforcement is not possible except in a police state, does that sort of end justify the means? It is a fact that Labour in its past term of government is very anti-business, for a lot of reasons, many of them purely ideological.
One of the reasons why the unions are so up in arms is that they know full well that this policy is targeted at small businesses, an area which is very hard to unionise. It would be a different story in the larger businesses where unions have a strong and established presence and are well placed to oppose this law by all practical means.
Small businesses, after all, have been targeted by Labour by other means to make life a lot harder for them, because Labour wants to control them by any means and the unions can’t do it so well.