minimum wage

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Law firm sets out business wish list

Written By: - Date published: 7:09 am, December 1st, 2011 - 97 comments

Law firm Chapman Tripp has taken it upon itself to summarise the business community’s expectations for National’s second term.  Back to youth rates, and that’s just for starters.

Treasury on the minimum wage

Written By: - Date published: 9:16 am, November 11th, 2011 - 35 comments

Labour want to raise the minimum wage to $15.  The Nats say that will cost jobs (they want to lower the minimum wage instead). Documents obtained by 3 News show that Treasury think the Nats are wrong.  A vote for increasing the minimum wage will not cost jobs.

Whose side are you on?

Written By: - Date published: 2:30 pm, October 6th, 2011 - 212 comments

The PM gets paid $400,000 a year. That’s $45 an hour whether he’s in Hawai’i, talking about his cat, or sleeping. His cleaner, Sosefina Masoe, gets $13.50 an hour. Key has rejected calls to lift the minimum wage for workers like her to $15 an hour. Instead, the Right’s attack dogs have been trained on Mascoe for daring to speak out.

Angry Old White Man Party to attack young people

Written By: - Date published: 12:19 pm, August 25th, 2011 - 42 comments

Angry Old White Man Party (ACT) Leader Don Brash is to launch another attack on young people. It’s strange that this once significant and principled party has sent its dying days picking the on the young. The latest stupid idea is to remove the minimum wage for under 20s altogether and cut spending to cut taxes that the rich pay.

Nats refuse to face their record on youth

Written By: - Date published: 6:46 am, August 17th, 2011 - 46 comments

Having decided to beat up on a few thousand of the most hard done by young people in the country, National is now refusing to acknowledge the problem of disconnected youth that has ballooned under their watch. There are enough young people who aren’t in education, training, or work to fill Eden Park, and Key is literally running from the issue.

Nats to slash wages

Written By: - Date published: 6:38 pm, June 16th, 2011 - 155 comments

Patrick Gower has revealed the Nats are poised to announce a policy to reintroduce the youth minimum wage at a rate of about $10 an hour, and potentially make it apply to people in their 20s. Outrageous and a breach of human rights. You should get paid for the work you do. Not your gender. Not your ethnicity. Not your sexuality. Not your age.

Nats plan lower wages for workers

Written By: - Date published: 12:30 pm, June 13th, 2011 - 18 comments

So you support Maori being paid less than Pakeha for the same work? What about men being paid less than women? No, that would be discrimination, eh? Same work, same pay. So, what about paying a 17 year old less than a 18 year old for the same work? That’s what National is planning if we are stupid enough to give them a second term.

$15 per hour unaffordable?

Written By: - Date published: 7:06 am, May 24th, 2011 - 296 comments

I just love seeing fat, rich men who have received massive tax cuts paid for with borrowed money like John Key and Phil O’Reilly saying that a $15 an hour minimum wage is unaffordable (Key also says governments can’t raise wages, yet he claims to have done just that). Lets check out one large minimum wage employer’s ability to pay.

Right still attacking the minimum wage

Written By: - Date published: 7:00 am, May 23rd, 2011 - 194 comments

Labour’s pledge of a $15 hour minimum wage is worth more than any tax cut – $66 a week net to a full-time minimum wage worker. The right is crying it’ll hurt the economy and destroys jobs. That’s rubbish. In particular, the history of changes to the youth minimum wage shows no relation to youth unemployment. The Right are just making excuses for ripping-off workers.

Sick April Fool’s Joke

Written By: - Date published: 7:18 am, April 1st, 2011 - 72 comments

Today National has a terrible April Fools for workers around Aotearoa: 90 day fire-at-will, reduced union access, sick notes after 1 day and minimum wage up a pittance. Workers are doing it tough already, and now National’s turning the screw.

Nats’ wage drop plan progressing well

Written By: - Date published: 2:16 pm, March 24th, 2010 - 11 comments

How’s that brighter future looking? A couple of years back, Steve wrote a piece on how National could reduce pay packs accordance with John Key’s statement that he “would love to see wages drop”. Now, wages are dropping thanks to a combination of government neglect on job creation and policies that are actively designed to suppress wage rises. Let’s see how the plan is playing out:

Arguing with a rightie about youth minimum wages

Written By: - Date published: 11:43 am, March 20th, 2010 - 30 comments

With one eye firmly on the polls and an awareness that cutting wages by stealth is one thing but actually lowering wages is another, National has decided to oppose Roger Douglas’s youth minimum wage reduction bill. That hasn’t stopped the right activists from promoting it though, so I thought it would be worthwhile having a wee post summarising the arguments on both sides

Key laughs off minimum wage earners

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.

The lie behind the Right’s attack on wages

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 […]

Campaign for a living wage

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 […]

Fair share for workers best way to close gap with Aussie

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 […]

Ideology trumps science for the Right

Written By: - Date published: 9:38 am, February 9th, 2010 - 63 comments

Consider these results from opinion surveys of experts different areas of research, I won’t tell you the areas of research just yet: In one, 97% of actively publishing experts agree with a statement (I’ll give you the statement below) concerning their field. In the other field, 46.5% of experts fully agreed with the statement, 27.9% agreed […]

Unemployment: real action, not vague promises needed

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 […]

Minimum wage myths: unemployment

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 […]

Anonymous Dom editor has a cry

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 […]

Turei pushing me back to RAM

Written By: - Date published: 10:23 am, January 29th, 2010 - 62 comments

Check out this exchange between Trevor Mallard and Metiria Turei on his Facebook page (great how the new media allows these spur of the moment debates): Trevor Mallard: 25c/hour. $10 week for 40 hours then minus tax, extra acc, ets charges. Not fair John Key. It should be $15 Metiria Turei: Trevor, with genuine respect, […]

The moral case for a decent minimum wage

Written By: - Date published: 2:10 pm, January 19th, 2010 - 68 comments

There was quite an interesting discussion on the minimum wage yesterday after a poll showed 61% of Kiwis back a $15 an hour minimum wage, and I thought it would be good to lay out my thoughts. First, increasing the minimum wage changes the division of wealth between labour and capital. It gives more wealth […]

Minimum wage increase, what will it be?

Written By: - Date published: 8:21 am, January 19th, 2010 - 22 comments

John Key has ruled out a $2.50 an hour pay increase for New Zealand’s lowest paid workers but won’t give any indication of what increase he does think is right. He claims that an increase to $15 an hour would cost jobs. I would love to see the advice he got on that. Anyhow, Employers […]

Kiwis back fairer minimum wage

Written By: - Date published: 11:35 am, January 18th, 2010 - 132 comments

Traditionally, the minimum wage was set at around 60-67% of the average wage. During the Muldoon era and the 1990s, National let the minimum wage stagnate, with inflation eating away at its value. It declined to as low as 34% of the average wage under Muldoon and 41% under Bolger. Both the 4th and 5th Labour […]