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Real social security; real jobs – not bennie bashing

Written By: - Date published: 10:41 am, March 27th, 2013 - 55 comments

Opposition MPs (e.g. Ardern & Mathers) and Sue Bradford highlight that the Social Security (Benefit Categories and Work Focus) Amendment Bill destroys lives, furthers NAct’s elitist agenda, & is more propaganda than social security or job creation.

Spinning the job market

Written By: - Date published: 9:43 am, March 27th, 2013 - 11 comments

Audrey Young and Simon Collins should get danger money for spinning this hard on jobs. But at least they’re trying, the best that Key can manage is some waffle about a “fluid market”…

Key loses 30,000 jobs in a single year

Written By: - Date published: 6:59 am, March 26th, 2013 - 148 comments

Key reacts to criticism of his appalling jobs record: “Throw criticism if you see things that we are not doing, but in terms of trying to stimulate jobs we’ve done a lot of things on that front. We’ve done everything from 90 day probation periods, to starting out wages.” That’s his solution? Cut wages and work rights? Meanwhile, a government department is firing people today.

One day older and deeper in debt

Written By: - Date published: 7:15 am, March 21st, 2013 - 105 comments

There’s this almost puritan kind of myth that we’ve got so much international debt as punishment for our spendthrift ways. We ‘live beyond our means’, apparently. But it’s not true. If ‘our means’ is the money we make in exports, then most of the time, they exceed what we spend on imports. Yet, we run a $10 billion deficit as a country. Why? Because of the profit outflow.

Key sends more Kiwi jobs to Aussie

Written By: - Date published: 8:57 pm, March 18th, 2013 - 52 comments

So much for all this propaganda about the asset sales being all about deepening markets here and giving Kiwis a chance to invest. When it came to building the website for the pre-registration, where did the Nats go? To Aussie. They got an Aussie company to build the site, saying Kiwi companies weren’t up to it. Cause, you know, the site is soooo secure and all.

The manufacturing crisis & the Right’s wilful blindness

Written By: - Date published: 3:18 pm, March 16th, 2013 - 19 comments

You would have thought that, less than 24 hours after another 185 manufacturing jobs were lost, the Right might be keeping their head down when it comes to the crisis in manufacturing. But no. Farrar’s popped up to cite a rinky-dink survey from Business NZ. The real surveys are very, very clear: 17,200 manufacturing jobs lost in the last year.

Mr Fucks It

Written By: - Date published: 9:29 am, March 16th, 2013 - 41 comments

In what is sure to be an interesting test of our amnesty, I want to point out that Steven Joyce is probably the most over-rated politician in living memory. The man has literally never achieved anything. He lost the unloseable election, his fossil fuels-centric economic policy is a predictable failure and he has completely failed on jobs.

The elite’s excuse for opposing a living wage

Written By: - Date published: 11:52 am, February 15th, 2013 - 66 comments

Don’t you love hearing the rich say the working poor can’t have more pay? The faux concern that higher wages cost jobs from the same people who support huge executive pay packets and tax cuts? If you really believed higher wages meant fewer jobs, you would cut the CEO’s pay in half, not dick around over a few dollars an hour for real workers.

$18.40 an hour to live, not just exist

Written By: - Date published: 8:01 am, February 14th, 2013 - 89 comments

The Living Wage Coalition has released the results of their research, calculating that a wage of $18.40 is needed for workers and their families to have a decent life and participate in society. About 40% of workers currently earn less. The pressure is now on bosses of businesses and public bodies to pay the living wage or explain why they deserve a decent life but their workers don’t.

Government report card: poverty, jobs, housing – FAIL!

Written By: - Date published: 8:34 am, February 13th, 2013 - 22 comments

The Salavation Army “State of the Nation” report is out today, and, as Metiria Turei says, it makes depressing reading.  It describes a nation of increasing inequalities, with those on low incomes, and their children, being hit particularly hard.

John Key discovers the usefulness of Yellow Peril

Written By: - Date published: 7:26 am, February 12th, 2013 - 146 comments

Bad jobs numbers and a succession of collapses of major businesses weighing your government down? You need: distraction! How about an old classic from the New Zealand politician’s playbook – the Yellow Peril! Passed on by Seddon and Peters, Yellow Peril’s now being wielded by John Key as he talks of vague, unsubstantiated threats that boatloads of Indonesians are heading for our shores.

The green economy

Written By: - Date published: 12:28 pm, February 11th, 2013 - 90 comments

There’s a lot of talk about the benefits of moving to a green, sustainable economy but details on what that looks like in practice in New Zealand are often frustratingly thin. Greenpeace is releasing a reportThe Future is Here – that puts meat on the bones. The main thing is getting us off expensive, polluting, imported oil and on to clean, local energy.

Missive to a parasite

Written By: - Date published: 9:58 am, February 11th, 2013 - 25 comments

Convicted fraudster and Herald columnist Damien Grant says ‘good riddance’ to manufacturing in his latest piece. A lower dollar would make his next smartphone more expensive, he says. When not in jail, Grant’s a receiver. Things are good for him at the moment. But, I’ll tell him this: even carrion birds ultimately need a healthy herd to scavenge off.

For a living wage

Written By: - Date published: 7:26 am, February 11th, 2013 - 175 comments

The living wage campaign is announcing this week the results of its study into the pay that a family needs to afford the basics for a decent life in New Zealand. It’ll be around $18-$20 an hour, which is more than 40% of workers get. I look forward to the proposal receiving strong support from the parties of the Left – the Left has always said a well-paying job is better than welfare.

Employment down – blame the data!

Written By: - Date published: 9:48 am, February 8th, 2013 - 5 comments

So the Nats have lost 30,000 jobs in the last year.  But it’s not their fault right?  If we can’t blame the global economy, it must be the stats!  And to be fair since this government came in the Household Labour Survey has jumped about a bit – between bad and horrendous.

Nats’ low wage economy hollowing us out

Written By: - Date published: 7:45 am, February 8th, 2013 - 42 comments

The Nats were elected on a promise of a high wage economy. When it became clear that they were achieving the opposite, they tried to spin a disaster into a “competitive advantage”. And so in the real world the exodus to Australia continues. Now it’s affecting even our naval capability.

Nats lose 30,000 jobs in a year

Written By: - Date published: 12:59 pm, February 7th, 2013 - 25 comments

When was the last time you heard John Key promise 170,000 new jobs? Just before the election in 2011, I reckon. Well, this last year 30,000 jobs were lost. Put that in context, it’s the 3rd largest annual job loss in history. The largest was 1988 as Douglas put the economy to the sword. The next was 2009 during the recession. And now, we’re losing 600 jobs a week during the ‘recovery’.

The unemployment curse

Written By: - Date published: 9:16 am, February 2nd, 2013 - 151 comments

Oamaru lost 192 jobs on Thursday as Summit Wool Spinners closed its doors. The knock-down effect could claim hundreds more. Events like this can cripple a small town and consign the workers to long-term unemployment. Now, the Greens have revealed that long-term unemployment has quadrupled with John Key at the helm.

Jobs & Manufacturing

Written By: - Date published: 7:01 am, January 31st, 2013 - 75 comments

National is failing to resolve the lack of jobs as they provide a 14-year high in unemployment – even after exporting 180,000 Kiwis to Australia. If we add them in the unemployment rate doubles to 13.8%. More than 40,000 of those job losses have been in manufacturing.  Research says that manufacturing jobs have a multiplier of 2.9, that means about 80,000 other indirect job losses.  Combined that’s 2/3rds of our unemployment rate, just by getting back to where we were when National took office.

Jobs friendly government?

Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, January 30th, 2013 - 9 comments

More work in prisons, fewer mail deliveries, fewer WoF checks. I won’t say these are bad policies – done right there’s some merits. But I will point out this: 2,000 job losses from fewer WoF checks, up to 3,000 jobs gone with three day a week delivery, and the very real risk of prison labour displacing free workers. So much for a relentless focus on jobs.

EPMU: Manufacturing Strategy Needed

Written By: - Date published: 9:08 am, January 30th, 2013 - 14 comments

Because the EPMU put it so well – here’s the summary of their submission to the Manufacturing Inquiry.

There is an alternative

Written By: - Date published: 8:53 am, January 29th, 2013 - 48 comments

Some people who don’t really understand economics think it’s all about confidence – if business would be more confident, they would then invest more and hire more people. In truth, confidence is merely an indicator that the fundamentals for growth are right. So, when Joyce accuses manufacturing bosses of ‘talking down’ the economy, he’s missing the point. Probably intentionally.

Key’s ‘big’ new policy

Written By: - Date published: 8:00 am, January 28th, 2013 - 83 comments

Reboot apprenticeships in context

Sick

Written By: - Date published: 4:21 pm, January 23rd, 2013 - 90 comments

Bill English’s priority in 2013 will be to “bed in” welfare reforms. Because that’s where the big fiscal savings lie. He’s hoping to cut 44,000 beneficiaries and save $1.6 billion by 2016-17.  Which would be fantastic if this was a jobs government focussed on employment growth and those 44,000 were going into decent paying jobs. […]

Jobs(.govt.nz) to Australia

Written By: - Date published: 10:52 am, January 23rd, 2013 - 27 comments

Danyl at Dimpost has discovered that National is so serious about (enhancing) the drain of jobs and Kiwis to Australia that they’ve actually outsourced the Government Jobs website (http://jobs.govt.nz/) to… Australia. While I love irony, surely this says everything about National’s actually commitment to the people of our country.

This time, it’s different

Written By: - Date published: 10:12 am, January 16th, 2013 - 98 comments

For the 5th year running, it’s that time of year, when the economists start promising the recovery is here. (remember ‘green shoots‘ in 2009?) Meanwhile, in the real world, there are twice as many jobless Kiwis as five years ago, and rising. If the pattern holds, later this year the economists will be lamenting the mysterious under-performance of the economy, as petrol hits a record price again.

If you can’t beat ’em, scaremonger about ’em

Written By: - Date published: 10:26 am, January 15th, 2013 - 99 comments

The Herald’s running a pretty intense series about how awful it is to emigrate to Australia. A cynic might think the editor’s daughter is talking about crossing the ditch, such is the passion in the anti-Aussie message. But all the stories follow the same pattern: ‘Aussie is bad because of X, yet Kiwis are flocking there in record numbers’. There’s one number that matters: here it’s 7.3%, in Aussie 5.3%.

So, that’s what Nats mean by creating jobs

Written By: - Date published: 7:35 am, January 15th, 2013 - 111 comments

We all know, because that Nice Man Mr Key told us, the government can’t create jobs. That is, unless it has given away $67m to international bully boys and wants to show a return on investment. Then, it can create 3,000 jobs out of thin air. It turns out, that’s where the claim that the Hobbit films created 3,000 Kiwi jobs came from. But it gets worse.

I know, how about a Jobs Summit

Written By: - Date published: 10:57 am, January 12th, 2013 - 150 comments

Today, Fran O’Sullivan calls Key out on his complete failure on jobs: “If I have one New Year’s wish it is that John Key returns from his Hawaiian summer holiday brimming with enough determination to challenge the nation’s employers – and himself – to tackle youth unemployment.” In fact, she is the latest of the rightwing’s pundits to conclude neoliberalism has failed.

Upcoming talk on Canadian student uprising

Written By: - Date published: 3:44 pm, January 11th, 2013 - 6 comments

This Sunday hip hop artist and political activist Darius Mirshahi will be speaking in Auckland about the political situation in Canada and how the left are organising to resist Neo-Liberalism. Later he will be performing material which has lead to attention from Glen Beck and the Canadian police.

Mr Fail strikes again

Written By: - Date published: 11:35 am, January 10th, 2013 - 7 comments

On Monday, Steven Joyce promised lots of new jobs in the wood manufacturing industry thanks to the wonders of foreign investment and a do nothing government, and called the Left anti-jobs. On Wednesday, wood manufacturer Norske Skog sacked 110 workers. What’s Joyce’s next trick, attend a funeral, tell the departed to ‘wake up’, and blame the rest of the congregation when he doesn’t?