Dita de Boni on zero-hour contracts

Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, March 6th, 2015 - 7 comments
Categories: employment, workers' rights - Tags: , , ,

Employment Minister Michael Woodhouse has employed the term [“flexibility”] liberally already, and no doubt he’ll wheel it out on several more occasions. Wait to hear it too, again and again, from anyone defending the right of companies to operate according to the intent of the Employment Relations Amendment Act passed last year, where they were granted almost complete carte blanche to dictate the working relationship.

Not only does the increase in the use of zero-hour contracts allow companies complete flexibility; they also have the advantage of roping the taxpayer into subsidising the shortfall when workers can’t pay their bills.

These contracts also help by making our job market appear to be booming, which may cast a little light and shade on the rosy labour force participation figures we were treated to in February, with a leap in the number of jobs.

It is the true quality of those jobs that the data didn’t address – and it should, given the strange situation that someone working as little as one hour a week can be treated, by statistics, as someone with a fulltime job.

Read the whole thing on the Herald website, then join the 25,000 people who have already signed Labour’s petition against zero-hour contracts.

7 comments on “Dita de Boni on zero-hour contracts ”

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  1. aerobubble 1
    6 March 2015 at 3:08 pm

    MSD pay fast food outlets to train benefitaries. So the circle is complete. Those employers lower benefit numbers by taking on benefitaries who are nolongere counted as benefitaries, and then push other employees into zero hour work who cannot get a benefit as stand downs apply.

    Magically benefit numbers drop, double downing.

    • David H 1.1
      7 March 2015 at 10:48 am

      I’m just waiting for the MacDonalds Charter School. Take WINZ out of the equation, and go from school to Macca’s with a smile on their lips and their catch cry ringing in their ears. “You want fries with that”

  2. Michael who failed Civics 2
    6 March 2015 at 5:19 pm

    Woodhouse is certainly earning the money he received just before last year’s election after it was laundered through National’s slush funds.

  3. Tracey 3
    6 March 2015 at 6:27 pm

    woodhouse and bennet laughing about 51% of queenstown businesses breaking the law with migrant workers. bennett calls it a success even. disgraceful.

  4. tc 4
    7 March 2015 at 10:29 am

    This stats anomaly is what makes Oz appear rosier than the reality also for a few years now.

    Surveys that ask the question ‘do you have enough work to get by’ were 5-10% above the unemployment rate before circus Abbott took the stage, think its a Roy Morgan phone poll from memory.

  5. Murray Simmonds 5
    7 March 2015 at 11:58 am

    ” . . . . given the strange situation that someone working as little as one hour a week can be treated, by statistics, as someone with a fulltime job . . . ”

    Yep that’s what the Nat spin doctors and PR advisors will be loving about it. No question about that.

    But more importantly, the Pan Pacific “not-about-trade” agreement, as it currently stands, aims to outlaw any possible future government action that might jeopardise the right of the offshore multinationals to exploit our workers to the hilt, and along with this goes the loss of our national sovereignty. The “Agreement’ in its present form, makes it an “offense”, subject to prosecution viaoffshore-driven law suits, for any future government in this country to enact legislation that might impact on the bottom line of the offshore multinationals and their shareholders.

    What on EARTH has this world come to?

  6. Robert Atack 6
    8 March 2015 at 8:28 am

    I don’t shop where ‘zero hour’ contracts are in place. Boycott them all.