Wednesday, August 13, 2014



Wages and productivity

When confronted with evidence about our low-wage economy, business claims that wage increases have to be justified by increases in productivity. But as the graph below shows, productivity has increased massively, but employers have welched on their end of the deal:

productivity-wages

(Graph stolen from @publicpurpose)

How have they been able to get away with this? Because the Employment Contracts Act tilted the balance towards bosses and enabled them to artificially suppress wages. And even Labour's reforms under the Employment Relations Act didn't do much to change the trend.

This is nothing more than social pillage. We need to end it.