workers’ rights

Child offending up with higher unemployment

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 10:55 am, March 15th, 2010 - 8 comments

The Herald has a little shock piece on child offending: “5-year-old sex offender on crime list“. Of course, what the offence was isn’t mentioned and there’s good reasons why children aren’t held legally responsible for their actions. There is an interesting sentence though: “Although the numbers are slightly up on the previous year, they are […]

High unemployment helps Nats keep wages down

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 9:12 am, March 11th, 2010 - 21 comments

While other countries have used their strong public sectors to steady the private sector and keep unemployment down during the economic downturn, our government is compounding unemployment by cutting the public sector, throwing people out of jobs and feeding worker insecurity.

Aussie wages outstripping NZ

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 7:40 am, March 9th, 2010 - 19 comments

In NZ, the average FTE wage rose 2.86% after inflation – $891 to $934 – over the past year. In Aussie, it was 3.6% above inflation – $1159 to $1226. When will John Key admit that he sold us a lie? When will the media call on him to resign if no progress is made on the one substantial promise of a ‘brighter future’ at he made?

The minister who cried ‘recovery’

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:33 pm, March 7th, 2010 - 43 comments

Can someone at MSD please explain to Paula Bennett a season is? Our lazy minister is once again claiming victory over rising unemployment because of the seasonal drop in unemployment numbers. Worryingly, the decline between January and February was less than the average in recent years.

Unemployment even more widespread than numbers suggest

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 10:20 am, March 2nd, 2010 - 12 comments

276,000 jobless, of which 168,000 officially unemployed. 115,000 more underemployed.

Big numbers, but remember that the unemployed aren’t a static group being added to every day as the Key Government sits on its hands. In fact there’s a continual churn of people into unemployment and into work much larger than the net increase.

Re:Cycle (re-run)

Written By: Guest post - Date published: 7:03 am, February 27th, 2010 - 18 comments

We received this guest post about half an hour after John Key announced his cycleway. At the time, the very sensible criticisms it raises were ignored by an enamoured media.

How prescient it looks now, on the anniversary of the Prime Minister’s Jobs Summit.

Punishing unemployed won’t help

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 9:11 am, February 25th, 2010 - 22 comments

Another day, another anti-beneficiary story beaten up by Paula Bennett to justify her bennie-bashing policies. Punitive measures against people who genuinely want to find work will not help them. All it does is waste WINZ’s resources re-approving genuinely unemployed workers leaving fewer resources for helping people into work.

Two IR bills from the Right

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 6:58 pm, February 23rd, 2010 - 14 comments

Two industrial relations bills from the Right were pulled from the ballot today.

The first, Roger Douglas’ bill to restore youth rates, is just the usual ACT Party kick the poor stuff.

But Tau Henare’s bill on strike ballots is just plain stupid.

Pansy Wong bids for worst minister award

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:22 am, February 19th, 2010 - 11 comments

When you’ve got a Finance Minister who can’t get stats right, a Social Welfare Minister who can’t define her flagship policy, and an Education Minister who can’t explain her flagship policy, it’s easy for an incompetent Women’s Affairs Minister to slip through.

National-style standards and Key’s teacher trap

Written By: Mike Smith - Date published: 1:00 pm, February 15th, 2010 - 38 comments

When the Government came under fire over National Standards John Key was quick to raise the anti-union bogey. The old stereotypes are certainly still strong in National, but they have led Key into a trap. What might have worked for Muldoon or Maggie in the past won’t work now for a number of reasons.

No help for the invisible

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:10 pm, February 12th, 2010 - 5 comments

Relating to what I wrote yesterday about the Right and much of the media being largely blind to the existence of those of us on low and middle incomes, here’s an interesting piece from the New York Times: The folks in the upper-income group are not suffering much, if at all, from the profound reversals […]

The lie behind the Right’s attack on wages

Written By: Marty G - 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 […]

Nats eyeing up youth minimum wage?

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 4:29 pm, February 11th, 2010 - 38 comments

Over the last month or so National’s pollster David Farrar has been running a series of posts desperately trying to pin the spike in youth unemployment under National to Labour’s decision to abolish youth rates. I’d been wondering why the obsession with youth rates until I saw this exchange between Roger Douglas and Kate Wilkinson […]

Fair share for workers best way to close gap with Aussie

Written By: Marty G - 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 […]