At the moment, Don Brash is worrying about how to close the gap in incomes and living standards between Australia and New Zealand. He shouldn't be - because John Howard is closing it for us. Two months ago, his government rammed through ECA-style industrial relations "reforms". And predictably, this has led to an unprecedented assault on worker's wages and conditions. Every contract signed since the law was enacted has stripped conditions from workers. 64% have cut annual leave provisions below the previous legal minimum, 63% penal rates, 54% shift allowances, and 40% public holidays. 16% of contracts have made cuts to all of these provisions. As the ACTU points out, this is exactly what the law was designed to do, and they are predicting that it will have exactly the same consequences as the ECA did in New Zealand, where some workers saw their take-home pay cut by up to 40%. At this rate, the gap will be closed in no time...
Tools for democracy
Themes:
New Zealand
- Forest & Bird
- Gordon Campbell
- Greater Auckland
- Imagine My Relief
- Imperator Fish
- Kiwipolitico
- Lefthandpalm
- Media Law Journal
- NZ Council for Civil Liberties
- NZ Open Government Blog
- Proactively Open
- Public Address
- Pundit.co.nz
- Reading the Maps
- Republican Movement
- The Apocrypha of Noah
- The Progress Report
Overseas
Friends & Others
Blog Archive:
-
▼
2006
(1477)
-
▼
May
(133)
- Look who's getting herpes
- Closing the gap
- Polluter Pays
- Irony
- A policy of murder
- New Zealand at risk?
- More opposition to the 100 MP Bill
- Paying their bills
- New Fisk
- Restaurant Review: One Red Dog
- Still on the Order Paper
- Indonesian Quake
- Drinking their own urine
- Iraq's My Lai
- "A horror weapon"
- Maybe this time
- The effects of global warming
- A Tui
- Transmission II
- America under the Taleban
- Submit!
- Transmission
- Carnival of the Liberals
- A Lazy Minister
- Another message from Rodney
- Back to Timor?
- Another Abu Ghraib trial
- The Brethren: New Zealand's third largest politcal...
- Aussies don't want tax cuts
- In the ballot XI
- Maliki to Blair: get out
- The Rodney Hide Memo
- Pacific Theocracy
- Pretty vile
- Oj, svijetla majska zoro
- Electoral reform
- More on the Electoral Integrity Bill
- New Fisk
- Where's Rodney?
- Rejecting party tyranny
- Save Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi
- Out with the dead wood?
- Same-sex adoption on the agenda?
- UN to US: "stop torture"
- Support the Organ Donation Bill
- No justice for rendition
- Free speech gives you Herpes
- More on the budget and ODA
- A Nepali Magna Carta
- Not pissing about
- Iraq's war of all against all
- Empiricism versus ideology
- Expectations and reaction
- A return
- Drawn
- Neanderthals
- Taking blogging seriously
- Budget Day
- Defeated
- Italy gets a new Prime Minister
- Maori Party Member's Bills
- Fiji elections
- Plugged II
- The price of inaction
- Not consulted
- In the ballot X
- Strictly targeted
- The human cost of climate change
- For freedom of conscience
- A public service
- Marriage and citizenship
- An inhuman decision
- Reviving lese majeste
- Blair's most urgent policy task
- New Fisk
- Hamilton rejects STV
- The politics of elimination
- Fitzmas is coming?
- Focused. Targeted. Very carefully done.
- Remembering Andijan
- Plugged
- Constitutions
- Climate change: Peter Dunne's line in the sand
- A victory for the Chagosians
- One way of fixing it II
- Immigration Act Review III: Detention
- HLFS out
- Guantanamo: another voice in the chorus
- Submit!
- New Fisk
- Drawn
- Withdrawn
- A quiet revolution
- Australian budget
- The reality behind The Constant Gardener
- A gap that must be closed
- Dangerous knowledge
- Returning America to the dark ages
- Electoral transparency
- I'll believe it when I see it
-
▼
May
(133)
6 comments:
National will simply seamlessly and sahmelessly switch from demanding tax cuts to close the income gap with Australia to demanding tax cuts to offset the growing competitiveness of the Australian economy...
Whatever the question, the answer is tax cuts.
Posted by Sanctuary : 5/31/2006 01:52:00 PM
"Whatever the question, the answer is tax cuts."
maybe. but is that any worse that "whatever the question, the answer is leave tax the same or raise it."?
Posted by Graeme Edgeler : 5/31/2006 02:09:00 PM
"Every contract signed since the law was enacted has stripped conditions from workers."
I/S you say this like the workers were forced to sign the contracts. The workers obviously agreed to the 'stripping' or they wouldn't have signed the contracts!
Posted by Gooner : 5/31/2006 08:36:00 PM
"The workers obviously agreed to the 'stripping' or they wouldn't have signed the contracts!"
It's not quite as simple as that. Not everyone has the luxury to turn down jobs. Considering the 'take this pay cut or loose your job' attitude taken by employers in NZ during the Lange and Bolger years, there will no doubt be cases of blue collar workers in Australia who will be forced to accept eroded employment conditions.
Posted by James : 5/31/2006 10:46:00 PM
Maybe, but not *every* worker under *every* contract.
Posted by Gooner : 6/01/2006 10:08:00 PM
Mmmm, okay, so we should go back to the years where unions ruled, and work only got done when the union bosses said so, and you could never take the Cook Strait ferry during the school holidays because the bastards were on strike again.
I fully believe everyone should be well recompensed for their efforts, and the ECA does give that - maybe not at the start, it needed some tweaking (as will the Aussie one). The only people who don't gain out of the ECA are those with nothing to offer.
Posted by Anonymous : 7/12/2006 11:32:00 PM
Post a Comment
(Anonymous comments are enabled).