unemployment

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Doing nothing as dole numbers rise

Written By: - Date published: 9:15 am, October 13th, 2010 - 17 comments

It was a year ago that Paula Bennett first declared victory over rising unemployment. Since then, John Key has been working his economic strategy hard: high-fiving every schoolgirl he can find, playing with spiders, announcing and re-annoucing literally tens of kilometres of cycleway, smiling and waving till it hurts. But dole numbers are rising.

Tax cuts for the rich no use if you’ve lost your job

Written By: - Date published: 6:45 am, September 30th, 2010 - 66 comments

Despite Bill English’s firm statement that “unemployment has peaked”, jobs are still being lost in large numbers. 1500 council workers in Auckland. 150 mushroom workers in Morrinsville. 500 workers whose quake hit employers are closing down in Christchurch. From John Key’s Hawaiian beach chair these worries must seem very far away.

Nats fail to save jobs in quake zone

Written By: - Date published: 10:16 pm, September 9th, 2010 - 70 comments

86 workers have been fired from Kaiapoi New World, which will be closed for a year due to quake damage. This is exactly why the government should implement the kind of scheme I outlined where the government steps in to supply the full wages of workers who can’t work due to the quake, funded by delaying the tax cuts for the rich.

Paula’s forever blowing bubbles

Written By: - Date published: 11:16 pm, September 6th, 2010 - 15 comments

It’s been nearly two years now of Paula Bennett declaring that the unemployment crisis is over. Yesterday, she put out a press release titled ‘More than 6,000 beneficiaries find jobs in August‘. Wow, 6,000 in a month, pretty good. But Bennett must have been hoping we wouldn’t read beyond the title. The fact is that 900 more people went on the dole than came off it. The total number of beneficiaries just keeps climbing.

A relentless focus on jobs

Written By: - Date published: 12:49 pm, August 31st, 2010 - 13 comments

The government is canning it’s already too-small and ill-directed Community Max programme. $40 million was a pathetic amount that created, at best, just 3,000 temporary jobs when quarter of a million Kiwis are jobless. And, due to lazy policy-making all the Key government probably ended up doing was subsidising jobs that would have been created anyway.

Job queues longer

Written By: - Date published: 2:28 pm, August 24th, 2010 - 17 comments

Contrary to the sunny prognostications of Nice Mr Key, job queues are getting longer. How much more great economic management from John and Bill can the country stand?

Failure by the numbers

Written By: - Date published: 1:19 pm, August 24th, 2010 - 2 comments

Average number of people on the dole in the 21 months before Paula Bennett came to office – 22600
Average number of people on the dole in the 21 months since Paula Bennett came to office – 52200
Fiscal cost of extra people on the dole (welfare payments and lost tax) – approximately $1 billion
Money in this year’s budget for jobs initiatives – $31 million

The cycleway & the coming benefit cuts

Written By: - Date published: 9:24 am, August 12th, 2010 - 42 comments

Attacking beneficiaries won’t solve the real problems. There aren’t enough jobs, the recession is not really over. Rather than dealing with that, this government is carving off an ever large slice of our shrinking national wealth for their rich buddies. The poor and the jobless are turned into figures of public spite by a government of the rich which will cut to their meagre benefits will be pay for tax cuts for the rich.

Welfare working group tries to create a crisis

Written By: - Date published: 11:47 am, August 10th, 2010 - 43 comments

The benefit system is not unaffordable, the best way to lower its cost is to create jobs. But it is clear that is not on the Welfare Workings Group’s agenda. Their job is to paint beneficiaries as bludgers, the welfare system as broken and expensive. Their job is to pave the way for welfare cuts to pay for tax cuts that will leave the poorest Kiwi families more impoverished. They’ve made a good start.

I’m So Dizzy

Written By: - Date published: 8:00 am, August 9th, 2010 - 44 comments

The rate at which National have been spinning of late is giving me nausea. It can’t be long until they get to the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide scenario of declaring black to be white and getting run over on the nearest zebra crossing.

Unemployment rises to 6.8%

Written By: - Date published: 1:00 pm, August 5th, 2010 - 100 comments

Statistics NZ has just released the Household Labour Force Survey for June 2010 and it’s grim reading, with an astonishing increase in the unemployment rate from 6.0% to 6.8%.

Maori unemployment is now up to 16.4%, Pacific unemployment is at 14.1% and there’s been a 70% increase in long-term unemployment to 37,600.

Tide turns, a long way to go

Written By: - Date published: 12:52 pm, May 6th, 2010 - 28 comments

The unexpectedly large fall in unemployment is to be celebrated. It’s great that unemployment has fallen so much but 6% is an appallingly high rate of unemployment. It is not natural or normal – it only became normal under National in the 1990s and in the last year of the current government. We still have a long way to go to the sub-4% unemployment we so recently enjoyed.

Nats show their contempt for working Kiwis

Written By: - Date published: 10:04 am, May 6th, 2010 - 6 comments

Yesterday, Darien Fenton’s Redundancy Protection Bill was voted down by the Government. Disgraceful. The Nats added a kick in the teeth by having David Bennett lead their side of debate with a mad, disrespectful speech. Congratulations to Darien, Labour, the Greens, Progressives, the Maori Party, and the groups representing 350,000 Kiwi workers who fought for this. We’ll win next time.

Please, let this be the peak

Written By: - Date published: 8:52 am, May 6th, 2010 - 60 comments

The March quarter unemployment rate is out today. It should be back down below 7% from the appalling 7.3% that National let it rise to. My hope is to see it fall to at most 6.8%, that’ll represent 10,000 Kiwis back into work. But Bill English has hinted it won’t fall. If there is not a serious reduction in unemployment, we will know who to blame.

From bad to worse for workers

Written By: - Date published: 2:18 pm, May 4th, 2010 - 11 comments

While John’s off playing soldiers, things are getting worse and worse for Kiwi workers. Wages are falling for the first time in a decade. The average hourly wage was $25.80 when National came to power. Now, it’s $25.30. I had hoped unemployment would start falling about now but the signs are discouraging. Only unionised workers able to protect themselves from the storm.

Protection for workers in hard times

Written By: - Date published: 9:00 am, May 3rd, 2010 - 32 comments

Darien Fenton’s Redundancy Protection Bill is before the House this week (provided National doesn’t cancel Private Members’ Day again). The Bill will give all working Kiwis some income protection if they lose their jobs, like people get in other developed countries. You can help make it happen.

Paula Bennett prematurely opens the champagne, again

Written By: - Date published: 10:31 am, April 20th, 2010 - 8 comments

Paula Bennett is celebrating the fact that job ads are on the rise. The bad news is the numbers indicate like we are still, a year after the official end of the recession, not at the point where the economy is creating enough jobs to keep unemployment in check, let alone bring it down. Time to put away to bubbly, Paula, and get to work getting Kiwis back into jobs.

Nats fail on crime

Written By: - Date published: 2:07 am, April 4th, 2010 - 45 comments

Regular readers of The Standard will know that a primary driver of crime is joblessness. It’s no surprise, therefore, to see that crime went up in the last year. Fewer jobs to go around = more crime. Crime is a symptom of socio-economic distress. It is not, primarily, ‘bad’ people behaving badly because they are […]

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:

Jobs only real benefit reduction policy

Written By: - Date published: 9:02 am, March 24th, 2010 - 18 comments

You can’t ‘force beneficiaries back into work’ by ‘giving them a kick in the pants’ if there’s no jobs for them to go into. This supposed ‘get tough’ approach won’t get people off the benefit. It’s a cynical exercise in political marketing to make the government look active and distract from the real issues. It is no coincidence that this policy was released a day after the mining policy.

Child offending up with higher unemployment

Written By: - 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: - 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.

Glorified holiday for Bennett

Written By: - Date published: 10:23 am, March 9th, 2010 - 45 comments

There are 276,000 jobless Kiwis. The seasonally-adjusted trend on dole numbers is still on the rise. Many other people fall through the gaps and are unable to get public assistance in their time of need.
What better time for the Minister for Social Development to bugger off for five weeks?

The minister who cried ‘recovery’

Written By: - 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: - 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.

Aussie pay gap widening, Key does nothing

Written By: - Date published: 12:32 am, March 2nd, 2010 - 28 comments

The total pay packet fell for Kiwi workers last year and it will get worse in coming years. Aussie wages continue to rise, their unemployment is falling. If Key is serious about catching Australia he needs a full employment policy. Instead, he will keep doing nothing.

Re:Cycle (re-run)

Written By: - 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: - 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.

Why not a Maori minimum wage too?

Written By: - Date published: 12:59 pm, February 24th, 2010 - 58 comments

The faulty logic behind Roger Douglas’ bill to cut the wages of young workers could just as easily be applied to any number of groups hit hard by the recession – Maori, students, men, dropouts, singles, people in Northland. What if we were to change a couple of key words in his bill?

No help for the invisible

Written By: - 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 […]

GST is not a tax – suck it up

Written By: - Date published: 10:03 am, February 12th, 2010 - 24 comments

The best political commentary these days doesn’t come from the political journalists. As Zetetic shows, they have turned themselves into government minders. But there are others who tell it like it is. Such as Karlo Mila in today’s DomPost. The article was headed up “If you could just suck it up, that would be nice.” […]