There are a bunch of interesting little stories floating around this week that we didn’t get round to writing full posts on or that we wrote drafts for but never finished. So here’s a new, possibly weekly feature – Quick Bites:
NZ Institute: ‘Nats have no plan’
Suicide funding cut
Nats’ interesting donors
Workers’ rights under attack
One foot out of Iraq
Vultures
Party on Garth
NZ Institute: ‘Nats have no plan’
The title of the New Zealand Institute’s new paper, ‘A goal is not a strategy‘ is a slap in the face for John ‘we’ll catch Australia by 2025, promise’ Key. You can promise all you like but with no plan for getting there, it will never happen. Not that it will matter to Key – he will be safely retired in Hawaii long before 2025.
From Stuff: “Dr Boven said the biggest cause of the wealth gap with Australia was labour productivity in the private sector”. Oh, I thought it was all those lazy bureaucrats’ fault. An under-acknowledged fact is that the driver of labour productivity is capital investment and skills (ie education). It’s not a question of people being harder workers in Australia, it’s that they have better equipment to work with and better education.
“Pretty much all the OECD countries have this economic liberalisation rhetoric about leaving the market alone. New Zealand’s the only one that actually believes the rhetoric. Other countries do a great deal to tilt the playing field.” For once, the New Zealand Institute gets it right. The tired old rightwing formula of tax cuts for the rich, privatisation, and weaker work rights/lower wages isn’t the path that richer countries have followed. If we want to catch the richer countries, we need to do what they do, not follow the failed ideology of the Business Roundtable.
Suicide funding cut
The Government’s health cuts have struck again. Now a programme called ‘Postvention’ that helps families of people who commit suicide (and have a 4 times greater than normal chance of committing suicide themselves) has been axed due to lack of money. What a mean bunch of fuckers these rich boy Nats are. Key has voted himself $22,000 a year of tax cuts but there’s nothing in the kitty for this important work.
Nats’ interesting donors
So, the Nats’ money worries are sorted. They’re the party of big business, so they asked some of the rich businessmen they’ve been shoveling tax cuts to for a bit of dosh. Interesting thing is one of the donations comes from people involved in Natural Dairy NZ, formerly called China Jin Hui Mining Corporation – the Chinese company trying to buy the Crafar farms. I wonder how much more relaxed that will make Key about Kiwis becoming tenants in their own country.
Workers’ rights under attack
Unite has another story of the Nats’ Fire at Will law being abused, and they’re fighting back:
A special direct action group called the UTU Squad is picketing the Mission Bay Burger Fuel store on Friday from 12-2pm to protest the sacking of a worker on the 89th day of her employment.
Joanne Bartlett’s dismissal came a few days after she had asked for more than a single 10 minute lunch break each day she had been receiving for an 8 hour shift. Ms Bartlett had consistently received the highest grades in Burger Fuel’s training programme and had culinary school qualifications. She had also worked extra shifts when requested. No reason was given for the dismissal.
Remember, if National has it’s way, your next job – whatever the size of the firm – will probably come with a 90 day fire at will clause as a compulsory condition of employment.
One foot out of Iraq
The last US combat troops have left Iraq. But 50,000 ‘advisers’ remain. That’s more than the US had in Vietnam until 1965. US military deaths are down to one a week but Iraqi forces are dying at one a die, civilians at ten a day at least, and no-one knows about the insurgents. Iraq hasn’t formed a government, still, after elections in March. And make no mistake, there are a lot of well-armed groups who are keeping their powder dry until the Americans are totally gone.
Vultures
From the Herald:
“Journalists covering the arrival of the surviving Oyang 70 crew this morning are angry about they way they were treated.
Reporters were kept well away from the scene at the Port of Lyttelton where the crew were ushered onto a bus.
As the bus headed through the Lyttelton tunnel police moved to block off following media then closed the tunnel for 15 minutes – presumably to prevent journalists from discovering the location of the hotel they’re heading to.
One camera crew did manage to join the convoy of plain clothes police in what a Newstalk ZB reporter at the scene described as a “dangerous manoeuvre” before the tunnel was blocked off.”
Hmm. Sounds like the survivors didn’t want to talk to you, guys. And I can’t see any overriding public interest in footage of them coming ashore or where they’re staying. So how’s about this? Stop being vultures feeding on human misery and start acting like professional reporters.
Party on Garth
I can’t believe it. I agree with nearly everything in Garth George’s latest. I’m just going to quote the whole second half of it:
“our low-wage workers have little power these days to change their conditions because a series of political, economic and corporate decisions over the past 25 years or so have taken away the bargaining power of workers, especially those on lower pay scales.Those decisions included deregulating industries that were once strongly unionised, economic policies focused almost solely on maintaining low inflation and a corporate ideological shift that eliminated the social contract with workers and replaced it with a single-minded emphasis on maximising profits and pleasing shareholders.
As we all know only too well, those decisions have made conditions worse in low-wage jobs and made the gap between rich and poor into a yawning chasm.
Major employers – these days owned mostly by overseas corporations – pay their managers and executives large salaries while their service workers struggle just to exist.
They spend millions on renovating buildings that don’t need it and indulge in a host of other costly, non-essential activities, yet they don’t pay decent wages.
The welfare of workers should be of highest priority in every business and industry.
We hear ad nauseam about the need to increase investment and productivity, yet our biggest employers treat their employees as a bum on a seat, a mind and a pair of hands to be exploited, rather than as a person.
They all have “human resources” rather than personnel departments – redolent of the Marxist definition of workers as “economic units” – and see their employees as a liability rather than an asset.
So I reckon that if we want to increase our productivity hugely and quickly, factories, retailers, banks, restaurant chains, petrol stations and all other businesses that employ low-paid workers should increase the hourly wages of those workers substantially.
It is said that you can’t buy loyalty but it seems obvious to me that if a worker is shown to be valued, both financially and as a human being, he or she will work more willingly, longer and harder and produce more goods and more profits.
And they will give a second boost to the economy by spending more and saving more and creating more jobs.
A third boon to the economy would be to ease the social welfare burden.
Well-paid, well-looked-after workers are unlikely to chuck in their jobs to go on the dole and higher wages would give those on the dole more incentive to find work.”
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