Written By:
IrishBill - Date published:
3:10 pm, March 23rd, 2010 - 5 comments
Categories: workers' rights -
Tags: nzier, robert muldoon
Remember back before the election when Key said he’d “love to see wages drop“?
Well it looks like that wish is about to come true with the NZIER reporting:
Real wages are likely to decline to March 2011 and remain flat through March 2012, which may dampen a recovery in household spending
Which is what you’d expect with high unemployment and a government that has been chipping away at work rights and thus reducing Kiwi worker’s bargaining power.
But that’s this government all-over. They’re not the multinational capital worshiping cargo-cultists we saw in the eighties and nineties but they’re also not the centrists they claimed to be until recently either.
What they are is a good old fashioned small-time National outfit and that means they’re here to help their (mostly Australasian) medium to large business backers.
And that means chipping away at wages by eroding work rights and doing nothing about unemployment (and implementing welfare policies that force the labour market down). It means opening up conservation to mining (although anyone who thinks they’ll mine Great Barrier has failed to see it as the shell game it is and that Kaye is the shill). It means cutting up ACC and flogging it to their mates. It also means giving their mates in fisheries gifts like increased quotas of endangered fish and high bycatch rates for sealions and dolphins.
In some ways it makes me a little nostalgic to see a tory government that’s more interested in rewarding it’s small-time provincial mates than in turning the whole game over to the titans of international speculation (although that might be because the Atlases are in no position to buy) but in reality going back to a small-town style old-boys club isn’t exactly my idea of ambitious for New Zealand.
And a word of advice. If you don’t want to be one of the poor chumps who sees your wages drop you need to join your union ASAP.
The current rise of populism challenges the way we think about people’s relationship to the economy.We seem to be entering an era of populism, in which leadership in a democracy is based on preferences of the population which do not seem entirely rational nor serving their longer interests. ...
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Yup piggy would be proud and concerned at the same time with that pesky MMP holding up the works for a concensus/balanced view.
But that’s being beautifully worked by sideshow and mates by getting an easy 5 votes from a certain minor party by giving them the trappings of office, excluding them when it suits…… and they get some blame when it all goes pear shaped…..win win !
Kept one promise, anyway.
Ambitious, much?
Come 2011, one term and the wage gap has closed, er um increased by x%.
I suspect many employers may now ditch their “far too greedy” employees in favour of minimum wage former beneficiaries, who will have no choice but to suffer what employers choose to dish out to them.