wages

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Goff attacks govt on wages

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 11:20 am, December 10th, 2009 - 39 comments

Check out Phil Goff’s general debate speech yesterday on In The House, a handy new site paid for by the Office of the Clerk (can’t work out how to embed from it yet). The speech is excellent and it focuses where Labour should be focusing: National’s complete unwillingness and inability to do anything for hardworking […]

Zero percent won’t pay the rent

Written By: notices and features - Date published: 11:04 am, November 24th, 2009 - 2 comments

If you can, get along to support the hospital support staff, the school support staff, and all the other low-paid public sector workers this Friday. (full size image here)

Wages fall, except for union members

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 8:05 am, November 12th, 2009 - 42 comments

The Labour Cost Index tells us that most workers this year failed to get pay rises to match inflation in the past year. 52% got no increase. 4% got less than inflation (2%, represented by the green line on the graph). 1% even got pay cuts. That’s a dramatic change on a year ago. Well, so […]

The horror of low wages

Written By: notices and features - Date published: 6:27 pm, October 31st, 2009 - 24 comments

The Unite Halloween-themed $15 minimum wage march went well yesterday. Looks like there were a fair number of people there. Pity there’s no single good shot of the whole crowd (hint for protest photographers) but John Darroch managed to get some pretty cool snaps. Here are a few:

$15 minimum wage, it’s only fair

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 1:00 pm, October 29th, 2009 - 4 comments

The campaign for a $15 an hour minimum wage is gathering pace. Initially, Unite kind of set out on their own on this one but I understand they’ve got other unions on boards now. They need a bit over 300,000 signatures to force the government to hold a referendum. They’ve got until May 7, just […]

Management: clueless

Written By: Zetetic - Date published: 10:30 am, October 23rd, 2009 - 5 comments

Saw this article on Stuff yesterday: Employers and employees have dramatically different opinions of why workers remain in their jobs, says research released on Tuesday showing US companies may struggle to retain employees in an improved job market. Employees cite benefits, financial compensation, and their career growth and earnings potential as the top three reasons […]

Key’s divide and rule to cut wages

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 8:28 am, October 22nd, 2009 - 20 comments

John Key says that if school support staff want pay-rises then teachers should sacrifice the ones they bargained for. Tell him to get stuffed. I don’t see him and his rich mates handing back the hundreds of dollars a week each in tax-cuts that National gave. I don’t see Key or his buddies Mark Weldon and Rob Fyfe […]

Parliament pay dispute just the start

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 9:21 am, October 15th, 2009 - 9 comments

Non-political staff Parliamentary Service are in industrial action. They want to keep their redundancy provisions that were bargained for years ago and get pay into the collective. Right now HR decides their wages. They’re meant use this performance pay system but now they’re saying there’s no money and no cost of living adjustments. The pay […]

Labour needs to get beside the workers

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 11:00 am, October 8th, 2009 - 37 comments

You know, if you look back to all the elections since 1957, there’s only three you would say the Left lost outright – 1975, 1990, and 2008. In the Holyoake years, too much of the vote was being wasted on Left-leaning Social Credit, Muldoon lost 1978 and 1981 but got more seats, the country voted […]

Pay freeze would cause long-term damage

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 5:38 am, September 28th, 2009 - 27 comments

While filling his own pockets with our money, Bill ‘Double Dipton’ English is threatening public sevants with a five-year pay freeze – with inflation, that’s a 10% pay cut. The government can afford to give its workers small cost of living adjustments – the cost is relatively trivial. Parliament workers recently rejected an offer that […]

Are you worth less this year?

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 10:40 am, September 21st, 2009 - 42 comments

Right now, spurred on by the hypocritical words of Bill English and John Key, employers in the public and private sectors are saying they can only offer a 0% pay increase this year – and many are trying to cut conditions like redundancy and overtime. 0% is a pay cut. The cost of living went up 1.9% […]

A hollow gesture

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 10:45 am, September 15th, 2009 - 7 comments

Some good comments from CTU president Helen Kelly in the Dom today on the Government’s posturing over MP pay increases. “The Government is trying to make a hero out of anybody who doesn’t get a pay increase, and I’m worried about that because there are a lot of workers out there they’re putting pressure on […]

Capitalism, it’s not a love-in

Written By: Zetetic - Date published: 5:10 am, September 2nd, 2009 - 38 comments

I find the Right’s assumption that the bosses are acting in some greater interest fascinating. There’s this unwillingness to believe that the bosses would be acting in their own interests and that what’s in their interests are often not in the interests of the rest of us. Look at the comments yesterday on the Telecom […]

Victory for Zeal320 workers

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 10:00 am, September 1st, 2009 - 7 comments

A good outcome from the Zeal320 dispute. The deal doesn’t quite close the gap between Zeal320 workers and other AirNZ flight attendants but gets a long way there. It’s scary going out on strike, not knowing when you’ll be back to normal work and pay. AirNZ played very dirty. Zeal320 workers’ rosters were purposely organised […]

Telecom’s profits first, NZ second

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:07 pm, August 20th, 2009 - 37 comments

You’ve heard about the Telecom dispute. But while a lot of the focus has been on what it means for the lines engineers involved, an equally important issue is what it means for the future of our country’s infrastructure. Because basically, this whole dispute is a sympton of Telecom’s attempts to increase its profits at […]

Recreating the reserve army of labour

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 5:48 am, August 13th, 2009 - 56 comments

Unemployment has shot up to 133,500, nearly doubling in 18 months. But that’s not the whole story. The official ‘unemployed’ are only the people without work who looking for work and able to start now. Add to that the ‘jobless’, people who want work but are not actively looking (because they’re discouraged or there’s none […]

Less work, less pay for Kiwis

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 5:00 am, August 6th, 2009 - 5 comments

Today the Household Labour Force Survey, which includes the official measure of unemployment, will be out. The headline number is expected to be around 5.6%, up from record lows below 4% just nine months ago. The HLFS has a few limitations though. It only measures the percentage of people who are ‘in the work-force’ (ie in work […]

More facts on the table

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:00 pm, July 24th, 2009 - 42 comments

Now, yesterday a couple of righties didn’t want to believe the evidence in front of their eyes that the GDP per person gap between Australia and New Zealand doubled during the neoliberal economic revolution. They got upset at my conclusion that repeating those same policies (which is what Don Brash’s 2025 Taskforce will inevitably recommend) […]

Good jab, now land some punches

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 5:04 am, July 21st, 2009 - 88 comments

It was excellent to see Phil Goff laying down the gauntlet to Key yesterday. He announced Labour’s policy to temporarily relax partner means testing for the dole and promised a recession response package. On the same day, Key’s big achievement was noting the Hillary family had settled their dispute with Auckland museum. Goff is saying […]

The danger of Key’s low wage economy

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 8:24 am, July 14th, 2009 - 47 comments

As you know, things are tough in the job market at the moment. The firm figures won’t be out until later this month but unemployment has grown by probably well over 50,000 so far this year. The number of the dole has shot from 37,000 in March to 50,000 now and is growing at 1200 a […]

The productivity shell-game

Written By: Guest post - Date published: 10:57 am, July 7th, 2009 - 24 comments

Is he named for the great economist John Maynard Keynes or Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan? Either way, he speaks a lot of sense: There was an attack on the â€˜bureaucracy’ during the 2008 election, and the front line was held to be sacrosanct. The rest were bonfire candidates. Now we get an attack on the […]

Bill sez: ‘pay cuts for youse’

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 8:20 am, July 3rd, 2009 - 91 comments

Yesterday in Question Time, Bill English sent a message loud and clear to teachers, police, doctors, nurses, and all other public servants (‘frontline’ or not): under National, you’ll be getting pay-cuts, don’t expect cost of living adjustments, watch as your pay-packet buys less and less. Hon BILL ENGLISH: The Government has stated a number of […]

Poor Melissa, well, not so poor

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 5:38 am, June 12th, 2009 - 13 comments

She’s really trying her best. Even with only one news cycle to go, Melissa Lee is still out there, working hard to get herself into third place. From NZPA: Appearing in a candidate’s debate in front of members of the Unite union, Ms Lee was asked how she would survive on the minimum wage of […]

Mission accomplished

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 6:03 pm, May 28th, 2009 - 20 comments

John Key famously said “we would love to see wages drop“. It sure didn’t take him long in government to see his ambition achieved. Here are the wage hourly wages rates, adjusted for inflation, over the last decade and Treasury’s projections from today’s budget. After peaking this year (wages lag unemployment), wages will drop then stall. […]

Fyfe’s model for the future

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 10:23 am, May 13th, 2009 - 9 comments

Despite four days of strike action and growing public outrage over Air New Zealand’s treatment of its Zeal320 flight attendants, CEO Rob Fyfe is still refusing to even start closing the glaring pay gap between these workers and those employed directly by AirNZ. Why is Fyfe willing to force these workers into even more strike […]

Bosses ‘using recession’ to squeeze staff

Written By: Guest post - Date published: 9:12 am, May 11th, 2009 - 10 comments

Well that didn’t take long. Bosses ‘using recession’ to squeeze staff: Bosses being accused of using the recession to exploit workers by driving down wages, forcing unrealistic productivity targets on staff and creating an environment where stressed staff will leave without waiting to collect redundancy pay. As evidence mounts of increasing employer pressure on staff, […]

Zeal320 strike underway

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 12:51 pm, May 7th, 2009 - 26 comments

Zeal320 workers are on strike for four days from today. Ads in every major newspaper explain what they are fighting for – the same pay for doing the same work as other fligh attendants on Air NZ flights. Check out ZealGirl for stories of how management has tried to break the Zeal320 workers’ resolve and […]

School support staff fighting for a fair deal

Written By: Guest post - Date published: 8:35 am, May 7th, 2009 - 13 comments

Cut public spending then we can have tax cuts! It’s such a nice, appealing slogan when you say it fast without engaging the brain. The reality though is real people who spend their lives working for the greater good are losing their jobs and seeing their incomes fall, and the services they produce will suffer […]

Strike at MIT

Written By: notices and features - Date published: 5:37 am, April 28th, 2009 - 12 comments

Members of the Tertiary Education Union at the Manukau Institute of Technology are striking. A TEU member explains the dispute: Basically lecturers at MIT are going on strike this week over workload pressures. Last year the Institute cut all its admin staff, and surprise, everyone else’s workload increased. Then this year, with the recession, heaps […]

Solution

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 11:31 am, April 23rd, 2009 - 12 comments

Keeping with the topics of the day thus far – Air New Zealand and pay packets – a solution to the Zeal320 dispute occurs to me. There are about 240 flight attendants striking for fairer pay (they want pay parity with flight attendants doing the same job but employed directly by AirNZ eventually but at this […]

High quality government spending

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 8:29 am, April 21st, 2009 - 4 comments

I suppose the Herald means for us to recoil in horror at the headline “$325,000 bill to save 57 jobs” but I’m fine with it. Look at the alternative – 57 families taking a major hit to their incomes, with all the consequences for health, education, crime, and family stability that we know unemployment brings. Think […]