Government appears leaderless in jobs crisis

The Mari­time Uni­on says imme­di­ate action is needed to stop the unfold­ing jobs crisis in New Zea­l­and.

Mari­time Uni­on Gen­er­al Sec­ret­ary Tre­vor Han­son says he is con­cerned that the Gov­ern­ment appears to be “sail­ing in circles” as New Zea­l­and drifts fur­ther into reces­sion.

Mr Han­son says the Prime Min­is­ter should be tak­ing charge of employ­ment, rather than leav­ing it to an inex­per­i­enced Min­is­ter like Paula Ben­nett.

“Mr Key’s jobs strategy appears to be based around avoid­ing being asso­ci­ated with any bad news. Since we are hav­ing a lot of bad news at the moment, this means the Prime Min­is­ter has become vir­tu­ally invis­ible.”

Mr Han­son says the cause and the worsen­ing effects of the glob­al reces­sion are due to the dereg­u­lated free mar­ket policies that Nation­al has pro­moted, and as a res­ult they had a “pass­ive approach” when an “act­ive approach” was required.

Pos­sible solu­tions the Uni­on was pro­mot­ing included a reduc­tion in work­ing hours with no loss in pay, extend­ing pro­tec­tions for cas­u­al work­ers, requir­ing that the pub­lic sec­tor pur­chased goods and ser­vices from loc­al busi­nesses, and pub­lic invest­ment in pro­duct­ive enter­prises that were exper­i­en­cing prob­lems due to the reces­sion.

Mr Han­son says that talk­ing about retrain­ing was fine, but on its own such a policy was like a “three legged dog”, miss­ing the essen­tial require­ment for viable indus­tries that would employ the retrained work­ers.

“In recent weeks we have seen the dev­ast­a­tion of areas of man­u­fac­tur­ing as well as jobs evap­or­at­ing due to tech­no­lo­gic­al advances and out­sourcing to over­seas. The guts is being ripped out of the New Zea­l­and eco­nomy as we watch.”

He says mass lay­offs from the pub­lic sec­tor were com­pound­ing the prob­lem and cre­at­ing unne­ces­sary dis­rup­tion and insec­ur­ity simply because Nation­al were “anti pub­lic sec­tor.”

Mr Han­son says the Mari­time Uni­on is con­cerned the polit­ic­al right-wing and private busi­ness interests will soon launch a major attack on work­ers wages and con­di­tions to prop up profits.

“We already have a sub­stan­tial num­ber of people in New Zea­l­and who are the ‘work­ing poor’, they were strug­gling in the so-called good times, and these people simply have no per­son­al reserves to deal with the fin­an­cial pres­sures of unem­ploy­ment.”

“Work­ers will be expec­ted to pay for the reces­sion caused by irra­tion­al eco­nom­ic policies that have led to inequal­ity and a deeply troubled soci­ety.”

He says suc­cess­ive Gov­ern­ments have pushed free trade ideo­logy as the solu­tion to New Zeal­and’s prob­lems, and now New Zea­l­and was find­ing that rely­ing on one or two com­mod­it­ies with volat­ile inter­na­tion­al mar­kets was dan­ger­ously naive.

Mr Han­son says that well paid, secure jobs could be cre­ated in the mari­time and fish­ing industry, rather than dead-end schemes like the plan to fun­nel unem­ployed young people towards unskilled jobs such as the infam­ous “McDon­alds” scheme from WINZ.

ENDS

For more inform­a­tion con­tact Mari­time Uni­on Gen­er­al Sec­ret­ary Tre­vor Han­son on 021390585