Cutting fair pay agreements will disproportionately impact women, Māori and Pasifika and young people

Written By: - Date published: 9:49 pm, December 4th, 2023 - 15 comments
Categories: act, national, nz first, same old national, Unions, wages, workers' rights - Tags:

Just over one week in and the first major leak has occurred.  The Cabinet Paper dealing with the Government’s proposal to do away with fair pay agreements has hit the media.  And the advice suggests that Cabinet is completely disinterested in the on the ground reality of what their shitty policy will do to ordinary Kiwis.

From Amelia Wade at Newshub:

Newshub has obtained a leaked Cabinet paper about the Coalition Government’s plans to repeal Fair Pay Agreements.

It reveals the move would disproportionately impact women, Māori and Pasifika and young people and shows the Workplace Relations Minister is at odds with official advice.

The two papers show the Workplace Relations Minister – Brooke van Velden – is ignoring official advice.

Treasury told the minister that women, young people, Māori and Pasifika people could have disproportionately benefited from FPAs.

But van Velden told Cabinet that she did not believe a blunt tool like FPAs would have been successful.

The experts as well as Treasury disagree with Brooke’s statement.  It is rare that Treasury and the Trade Union movement agree but this is one of those times.

Again from Newshub:

Bus drivers, hospitality workers, security guards, cleaners, early childhood workers and supermarket staff have all had FPAs already approved and on the whole, FPAs were expected to boost wages by up to $600 million a year.

“There’s hundreds of thousands of workers and the official advice we’re talking about is hundreds of millions of dollars would have been lost from them,” said Council of Trade Unions president Richard Wagstaff.

The leaked Treasury advice did say some employers stand to benefit from repealing FPAs as they now face “lower wage costs”.

Lowering wages and increasing profits makes a mockery of National’s claimed concern for the effects of inflation on ordinary people.

And Van Velden must have created a record for the shortest time that a new Cabinet Minister got caught telling a porkie.  Again from Newshub:

Van Velden also told her Cabinet colleagues there had been consultation with the Council of Trade Unions and Business NZ, while Treasury said there had been “no consultation”.

But while Newshub’s confirmed Business NZ was consulted, the unions weren’t.

Can anyone sense a pattern?

A change to health policies that will cost thousands their lives but give the Government head space to give tax cuts to landlords does not present a problem to this Government.  Advice that there will be 35 tobacco outlets in Northland and not one can be ignored and misrepresented.  Until it is pointed out to you twice, the second time on National TV.

And doctors pleading with you not to make the changes to Smokefree because it will cause thousands of needless deaths, what do they know?  Talk about other points of view, no doubt funded by British Tobacco, Chris Bishop’s former employer.

National’s disdain for health advice is on a par with its disdain for advice on how important fair pay agreements will be for ordinary Kiwis.

The Government must be worried that the Fair Pay paper leak occurred.  Maybe it was an overly enthusiastic public servant although this early on I am not sure.

More likely it was a political leak.  The NZ First-Act relationship may not be as sound as Christopher Luxon hoped for.

But this shows a worrying trend.  Ignore official advice and claim something else.  And meanwhile ordinary Kiwis will find themselves in a worse position.

Despite National’s promises to the contrary.

15 comments on “Cutting fair pay agreements will disproportionately impact women, Māori and Pasifika and young people ”

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  1. Kat 1
    4 December 2023 at 10:25 pm

    "And meanwhile ordinary Kiwis will find themselves in a worse position…………"

    Meanwhile sir Ian Taylor has never felt buyers remorse so early, so painful, so brutally embarrassingly painful………

    • AB 1.1
      5 December 2023 at 10:58 am

      Taylor seems to be a spectacularly silly man. In this piece he appears to think that deep-seated social and economic problems can be solved only by a stellar convergence of brilliant and innovative individuals (such as himself). There is nothing fundamentally wrong with how the economy works, it just needs cooler guys with a better fashion sense pulling the levers. He'll change his mind again in a month or two.

  2. Muttonbird 2
    4 December 2023 at 10:37 pm

    I can't believe Van Vampire, a robotic product not long out of St Cuthbert's College, is minister for workplace relations.

    What a depressing world we live in.

    • AB 2.1
      5 December 2023 at 11:12 am

      I guess we should avoid criticising her for her youth alone – and it's something easily used against the left too. She seems to me to be a textbook example of University Business Schools working as intended – taking in thoughtful young people and spitting out libertarian monsters.

  3. DS 3
    5 December 2023 at 12:49 am

    National and ACT are supremely effective representatives of class interest (New Zealand First doesn't care). Of course they'd repeal the FPAs ASAP.

    If Labour were as effective at representing class interest, they wouldn't have waited until the last year of a majority government to actually enact this sort of measure. But let's face it: modern Labour has vanishingly little interest in economic class.

  4. Tiger Mountain 4
    5 December 2023 at 6:24 am

    As per the 1991 Richardson MOAB-“mother of all budgets” when the Natzos proceeded to slash benefits to below adequate nutritional levels, despite offical advice…ditching of FPAs will also likely happen despite the negative consequences.

    Working class people need to take TPM’s lead and organise collectively to protect themselves. It is not just about public protest action, it is practical support in neighbourhoods and communities when a whole lot of state services are going to be withdrawn or downgraded.

    Baldrick and Nicorette work primarily for capital and finance capital just as Sirkey did.

    • ianmac 4.1
      5 December 2023 at 9:49 am

      Never in the history of man has so much harm done to so many vulnerable people, so quickly, and with such arrogance.

      Well done Mr Luxon. History making.

  5. Muttonbird 5
    5 December 2023 at 10:09 am

    The inference by Buxton and Van Vampire is that inflation is the fault of low income workers, and they alone shall be made to pay to fix it.

  6. Rolling-on-Gravel 6
    5 December 2023 at 8:02 pm

    This is another form of austerity. It's one of the oldest forms of austerity there is, coming from the very first anti-union & anti-worker & anti-community bashing & smashing.

    We should be prepared to resist this attack too. We should all benefit from the wealth that we all share in and that we have created. We are all part of this society, which is for all of us and created by us. What this government is doing is to continue the shameful work that the 1%, the most tyrannical people who have benefitted from our society and have now used it against like a cudgel against us. We helped clothe, feed, looked after, educated them yet they have thrown it in our faces by cutting what we have left to help each other to suck out of us our wealth to be even more of an unjustified lord.

    Shame on this government. Shame on Luxon, Seymour and Peters along with Willis & Bishop. They are angling to hurt us and for what? To feather their mates' nests at the expense of us and our common wealth?

    For shame.

    • Patricia Bremner 6.1
      5 December 2023 at 9:30 pm

      In a nut shell. Are you impacted as yet? I just feel so angry for those fooled by "tax cuts". Keep well RoG.

  7. John 7
    12 December 2023 at 9:03 am

    Who determines “fair pay?”

  8. John 8
    12 December 2023 at 3:18 pm

    Productivity in Australia is very high given the high value of the products they dig up.

    Conversely in New Zealand due a “Captains call” we banned such activities.

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