New Zealand’s government has struck an exclusive deal with fast food giant McDonalds. Young people receiving the unemployment benefit will be sent to jobs with McDonalds restaurants, and have their training subsidised by the taxpayer. Every beneficiary McDonald’s hires will get the company up to $16,000- the equivalent of about 8 months wages for a McDonalds worker. The government is claiming this scheme will create thousands of new jobs, but Unite leader Matt McCarten has said this is “simply not true”

The Government is either deliberately misleading us or it is stupid. I have been the union advocate for McDonald’s workers for several years and know this scheme is just a rehash of the same deal that McDonald’s and others signed up under Labour.
Frankly it’s somehow insulting that any government feels it’s okay to use taxpayers’ money to subsidise a successful private business. It’s nothing more than shareholder welfare. In fact in the past year McDonald’s and the other fast food companies’ profits have increased and all of them are opening up new outlets.

The value of McDonalds jobs, which are paid close to minimum wage, have terrible working conditions and little job security should also be questioned. While there is plenty of money for McDonalds, Education Minister Anne Tolley says there is no more money to fund extra places in polytechnics during the recession. Between 6000 and 8000 students would be turned away- more people than are expected to get McDonalds jobs over the next three years. Surly funding courses to teach people useful trades makes more economic sense than giving them McJobs?

This is not a job creation scheme, this is the government providing cheap labour and training subsidies to an industry that can’t retain staff (most leave after less than a year of employment) because pay and conditions are abysmal.

Age Concern New Zealand, an advocacy group for people over 65, says moves to cut tertiary education for senior citizens are ageist and counter-productive. “Restrictions that only apply to older people would be morally and economically wrong,” said Age Concern New Zealand President Liz Baxendine in a press release.

The senior population is the fastest growing sector of the workforce. New Zealand relies on them to fill skills gaps – but they need on-going training like everyone else.
Older people outside paid work also have vital roles. Tertiary education institutions act as the critic and conscience of society. That means all sectors of society – not just the ones the minister thinks should be studying.

She said that as superannuation only provides a very basic standard of living older people need support to pay university fees and books. Adding that “To dismiss older people’s study as hobby courses is patronising and ageist.”
‘Hobby courses’ are the way that education minister Anne Tolley described classes run by Adult and Community Education, which received a massive 80% cut in last months budget. As John Minto has pointed out though, these classes are on car maintenance, healthy cooking, quilting, budgeting, ballroom dancing, computing skills, yoga and a hundred and one [other subjects].
The adult education sector is determined to fight the cuts, and has started a petition campaign to stop the cuts before they take effect at the beginning of next year. According to Community Learning Association in Schools (CLASS) President, Maryke Fordyce, over 200,000 adults enroll in Adult and Community Education (ACE) courses every year and these funding cuts “will change the landscape of community learning as we know it”.

After successive governments campaigning on and then implementing “tough on crime” policies, New Zealand has achieved one of the highest per-capita incarceration rates in the developed world, second only to the United States. While crime rates have remained steady, the prison population continues to rise, increasing by 700 so far this year.

Corrections Minister Judith Collins told the Sunday Star Times “We are getting dangerously high in our capacity. We will not have the capacity by the beginning of next year to house all the prisoners that we will have.” with the economy in the state it’s in, the government can not afford to build new prisons in the short term. As well as involving the private sector, Collins’ plan is to keep prisoners in shipping containers, which they will fashion into cells themselves. She called this “a great idea” and said it was “a lot better than being locked up all day in a cell” (which is, presumably, the outcome of building one for yourself)

Kim Workman, the director of alternative justice thinktank Rethinking Crime and Punishment, said the government was going “one step too far” calling the idea of housing prisoners in shipping containers inhumane. According to Workman forcing prisoners to fit out their container cells was asking for serious trouble.

[T]his is a little bit like asking a person who’s been sentenced to hanging to build their own gallows. You can imagine how they would feel, building these atrocities and then being expected to live in them you might get a very negative reaction from prisoners. I think she [the minister] is on the verge of creating a situation where there will be major riots and people will die.

Collins claimed the shipping containers would provide a better standard of housing than some of the country’s older prisons, whch says more about the state of New Zealand’s prisons than it does about the comfort of shipping containers.

New Zeakand and Australian trade ministers met with their Pacific counterparts in Samoa yesterday to negotiate an “enhanced version” of the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations (PACER) dubed “PACER Plus”. The negotiations have been controversial for two reasons, one is the exclusion of Fiji, which New Zealand and Australia currently have sanctions against. Fiji has been officially suspended from the Pacific Forum but not from PACER, which is a separate treaty.
The other reason is the likely possibility of increased exploitation of the Pacific by the regional powers. As Soloman Islands opposition leader Manasseh Sogavare told the Soloman Star News;

As far as Solomon Islands is concerned, the arrangement would amount to opening up one-way traffic of trade benefits from here to Australia and New Zealand, which in any case is already in favour of these countries without the PLACER-PLUS arrangement,

At the 2008 Pacific Islands Forum Leader’s Meeting, Pacific trade officials were mandated to prepare a roadmap for possible trade negotiations. The draft roadmap, prepared earlier this year, had actual negotiations beginning in 2013. Australia and New Zealand however have been pushing for agreement to begin negotiations much earlier. Trade ministers from 13 Pacific countries were invited to a meeting in Auckland in May to convince them to press ahead with negotiations. Notably absent from this meeting was lead spokesperson for the Pacific islands on PACER-Plus discussions, Solomon Islands Minister for Foreign Affairs and External Trade William Haomae, and Trade Ministers from the Pacific’s biggest economies Papua New Guinea and, of course, Fiji.
According to Maureen Penjueli, Coordinator of the Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG), the proposed timetable “is all about the political priorities of the Australian government in particular. It certainly has nothing to do with the development needs of the Pacific”

Pacific NGO’s including trade unions support the delaying of PACER Plus. Mele Amanaki, Chairperson of the South Pacific and Oceanic Council of Trade Unions told a public meeting in Sydney that not only should formal negotiations for PACER Plus not start before 2013, but due to the global financial crisis, they may need to be pushed out even further. A recent AusAid commissioned report published by the Institute for International Trade at the University of Adelaide suggested PACER Plus would result in a 30 per cent increase in trade in the region. The report failed to indicate however that the vast majority of that increase will be in favour of Australian and NZ exporters. In contrast, Waden Narsey from the University of the South Pacific is predicting that 80 per cent of Pacific manufacturing could close down under PACER Plus, leading to unemployment for thousands of workers, including in countries which lack state welfare to assist the unemployed.
These facts made the comments made by New Zealand trade minister Tim Groser to Radio New Zealand International quite ironic;

We actually want to then provide them with economic development assistance to take advantage of a common market if we can establish that and actually start to create some export jobs in these countries.

Writing in Matangi Tonga Adam Wolfenden commented that PACER Plus was less about economic development and “more about getting Australian and New Zealand services to invest in the Pacific.” Wolfenden goes on to say;

If the development interest of the Pacific is at the heart of the intentions of Australia and New Zealand, like they continually say it is, why must it look like a free trade agreement? The global economic crisis as well as others like the food and climate crisis have shown the failure of the free market. The Pacific so far has been somewhat slow to embrace the neo-liberal ideology and given the global crises it would seem like the time to start exploring other options.

Research at Massey University has shown that agricultural workers have the highest incidence of leukaemia of all New Zealand occupation groups. The cause is expected to be exposure to pesticides. The Centre for Public Health Research has just released analysis of a study started in 2003-04, when researchers interviewed 225 cancer patients aged 25-75 and 471 randomly selected participants from the general population. They found elevated leukaemia risk four or five times greater among market gardeners and nursery growers compared to the general population. Market farmers and crop growers, and field crop and vegetable growers, also all experienced varying degrees of elevated risk. Female workers were shown to be at greater risk than males. According to Dr Dave McLean;

It is not clear why this gender difference exists, but it has been hypothesised that it may be due either to the different tasks (and therefore potential for exposure) traditionally performed by men and women in horticultural occupations, or to the fact that some of the chemicals are endocrine disruptors that affect women in a different way than they do men.

Studies done in Italy and the United States showed similar trends. The study also suggested an increased risk of contracting leukaemia for other occupations including electricians, blacksmiths and toolmakers, slaughterers and people working in textile bleaching, dyeing or operating dyeing and with cleaning machines. Occupational cancers account for more than 300 deaths in New Zealand each year, with the National Occupational Health and Safety Advisory Committee estimating that 30 deaths annually from leukaemia are attributable to occupational exposures.
The government has recently made it compulsory for temporary migrant workers in the horticulture and viticulture industries to have health insurance.

The National government has made changes to the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme which allows overseas workers, mainly from the Pacific, to work in New Zealand temporarily in the horticulture and viticulture industries. Included is a change that will allow employers using the scheme to make deductions from pay, mostly for compulsory health insurance.

The workers already need to pay for their accommodation, visas, and even flights to New Zealand. Deductions will reduce pay rates below the minimum wage of $12.50 per hour. Richard Wagstaff of the Council of Trade Unions stated that the changes will “result in more blatant exploitation” of workers.

These workers are not in the same situation as any other New Zealand worker. They do not have any choice about who they work for once in the country. They often have little or no understanding of what their rights are or whether deductions from their wages might be reasonable, and they often feel obliged to accept deductions if they want to keep the job.

Wagstaff also said that already under the existing regulations there were examples of unauthorised and unfair deductions from workers pay. A Samoan contractor who has traveled to New Zealand three times with groups of RSE workers spoke to the Samoa Observer on condition of anonymity and told the newspaper she would not take any more workers to New Zealand. “We are not stupid Samoan people who do not know the rules and regulations of the programme” she said in response to comments from New Zealand Labour MP Darian Fenton who opposed the policy changes and made comments in the media that these workers need protection as they are “very vulnerable”.

The rights of workers are indeed under attack, but what they need is solidarity rather than sympathy.

ACT Party leader and Local Government Minister Rodney Hide has gained Cabinet approval to look into law changes that will strip city and district council spending back to ‘core services’ at the expense of cultural, environmental and social spending. Core services have been defined by Hide as transport and water services and public health and safety, such as sanitation.

The Public Service Association, which represents workers employed by local as well as central government, has stated that this review will open up council services to privatisation. Its no secret that Hide would like that to happen, after he was granted the local government portfolio in a confidence and supply agreement with the National Party, David Lewis described ACT’s local government policy as “pure orthodox neo-liberalism” the policy goes so far as to say even roads and piped water (core services by Hides own definition) should be supplied on a fully commercial basis.

What services could be lost if council spending is cut back? one example is Canterbury’s Clean Heat Project, which provides financial assistance to homeowners and landlords to switch to cleaner heating. Surely insulating homes is an important social good when 1600 New Zealander’s die every winter due to cold damp homes, and a central government insulation scheme can’t keep up with demand. By taking inefficient wood burning fires out of operation the project has also improved air quality in the city of Christchurch. Another example would be Waitakere City Council’s “Plus Four Redundancy Relief” program, which is currently giving four weeks employment to 23 redundant workers.

Cadet schemes helping the unemployed into permanent work are operating in Whangarei, Kaipara, Manukau, Rangitikei and Northland. These kind of services are increasingly important as unemployment continues to increase. If councils are limited to roads rubbish and water, even the public libraries could be at risk. Cut backs to public services should be opposed.

On June 5, World Environment Day, hundreds of people “froze” across New Zealand, together at 1pm in public places people stopped moving and became human statues “stopping and standing for united action on climate change.” the flashmob type action was was led by “Mr Freeze” who is only known to the public through his page on Facebook. Mr Freeze expressed his enthusiasm for the day by stating “I’m melting with joy.” Adding that;

It takes courage to freeze in a public place. Freezing on your own is freaky. Freezing with five people is sneaky. Freezing with lots of people is easy. It’s the same with action on climate change. It’s much easier for us to play our part, and it’s a lot more effective, when we come together.

At the same time as this creative action however many people in New Zealand were freezing in a more literal sense. New Zealand death rates soar in the winter months and the Herald is reporting that researchers believe cold, damp and poorly maintained homes are at least partly to blame. Otago University researchers analysed deaths over a 20-year period and found 1600 more people died during the four winter months, putting New Zealand’s winter death rate amoung the highest in the developed world. This study found that Infants and elderly people accounted for many of those deaths, and almost 10 percent more women died than men. “Excess winter mortality is a huge problem,” said researcher Michael Baker.

A government scheme to insulate homes has been introduced but demand is so high that many people will not get insulation this winter. Thirty-three companies are approved to install insulation but are already booked up. New companies will be not be approved until September, just in time for the spring.

Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand, a Catholic aid, development and social justice agency, says it has both reservations and relief over the government’s 2009 Budget. The agency welcomed the the government maintaining benefits and family support at the same levels despite the recession, but says more needs to be done.

[W]e need to also remember that many of New Zealand’s poorest citizens were already experiencing very low living standards even during the recent years of prosperity. That hardship is about to be experienced by at least 80,000 more workers and their families, as many more people face job losses over the next 12 months.

Despite unemployment increasing the latest government budget also ended a subsidy scheme that has financed more than 200 projects to create local jobs around the country. The Ministry of Social Development’s Enterprising Communities scheme, previously budgeted at $10.5 million a year by the former Labour Government, was axed as part of a spending “reprioritisation” according to the New Zealand Herald. While all 80 current projects will keep their funding under existing contracts, no further money will be approved. Adrienne Dalton of Te Whangai Trust, an organisation funded by the scheme which provides employment growing native plants to people referred from social welfare, said that without government assistance the trust could not continue doing the work it does in Maramarua, south of Auckland.

[W]e saw so much unemployment in our area and fourth-generation people on benefits and young kids having children and massive drug and alcohol issues and no public transport, so it was a black area for unemployment.

Caritas also expressed disappointment in the Government abandoning a commitment to work towards reaching 0.35 percent of Gross National Income (GNI) spent on overseas aid and development assistance.

Westpac, the bank that has put clothing manufacturer Lane Walker Rudkin into receivership is saying there is no money to cover the redundancy entitlements or unpaid holiday pay of workers who have lost their jobs in the process, and ’someone else’ will have to be held accountable. The Westpac Union Council has written to the bank asking them to meet with the National Distribution Union, which represents LWR workers, and to try to protect jobs, but to no avail. NDU southern region secretary Paul Watson told Stuff.co.nz that a worker who had worked at LWR for 18 years would probably have built up redundancy entitlements of about $16,000, while someone there for 30 years would be owed closer to $30,000.

The NDU has been holding cake stalls outside Westpac branches to raise money for the redundant workers and highlight Westpac’s role in the redundancies. So far stalls have raised over $1,300. NDU secretary Laila Harre says that if this amount can be raised by a modest cake stall then Westpac and the government could be doing more.

We are hopeful that the government will come through with the funds needed for a resource centre that has been set up by the workers to help them with job search and other needs over the next few months. So far Westpac have offered nothing. If LWR in receivership cannot guarantee the holiday and redundancy pay owing to these workers, then Westpac and the Government need to do something more concrete to help the workers affected.

The unions approach has come under criticism, one blogger stated that “Harre is in cloudcuckooland if she really thinks this is going to happen.” adding that the solution would be for Lane Walker Rudkin to be taken into public ownership. Nearly 300 jobs are still at risk in the company.