Charter Consulates...

I see our government has just announced another round of cuts to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, this time targeting 305 staff and a projected fiscal saving of $20-25 million. We're also closing a number of European embassies (y'know, those in one of our major trading areas), and replacing consular assistance for overseas Kiwis with a call-center.
The next logical step is to follow in the footsteps of Empire by privatizing and outsourcing our foreign representation in a manner akin to the British East India Company. ACT's already proposed "Charter Schools" ... why not Charter Consulates.

These cuts are intended to save something like $20 million per annum. The question I'm asking myself is how much it's actually going to cost us fiscally or otherwise over the next few decades for these small-scale savings.
MFAT exists in part to do things like negotiating the trade contracts that help us add value to the Kiwi economy. That's why there's an "and Trade" in its name. Surely reducing the ministry's staff by about 22% is not going to make it more efficient at "bringing home the bacon".


Right-wing propagandist David Farrar is calling these cuts "arguably the most significant restructuring of a major public sector agency since the revolutionary reforms of the 1980s". With such vehement praise flowing from the hard right, I'm thus instinctively inclined to question why anyone would think them to be such a good idea.

A Casual Approach To Employment "Reform"

Q: What do actors, stevedores and longshoremen at the Ports of Auckland, and a whole host of other Kiwi workers have in common?

A: We're being subjected to something called "Casualisation".

What does this mean in practice? Well, it means we're not "employed" as such. We're no longer employees.
We're now contractors and we contract our services out to our former "employers".
"Big deal!" some on the Right are saying. "You're still working and still getting an hourly rate for doing so!"

Well, think about it like this. Using the film industry as an example, Frank Macskasy has characterised what happened thus: "Just imagine, you are an employee on Friday, with four weeks annual leave; sick pay; the right to join a Union if you so wish; and job security. Then you arrive at work on Monday and, by Government decree, you are now classed as an independent contractor. No more annual leave; no more sick pay; no more job security. And because you’re an independent contractor, the law forbids you the choice of belonging to a Union." Admittedly he's referring to National's passage of the "Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Act" under Urgency back in 2010 in specia, and emphasizing the deleterious effects upon these particular workers of suddenly having a good chunk of  their workers' rights taken away at the stroke of a pen ... but the argument applies to all affected industries.

If you abruptly find yourself self-employed (despite doing exactly the same work as you were previously), you're suddenly saddled with a whole host of costs you didn't have beforehand. As I recently found out much to my shock and annoyance, being "self-employed" means I'm now responsible for paying my own ACC levies which had previously been met by my employers. I'm now ineligible for sick leave, annual leave, or even guaranteed hours in most of my sources of income (here I'm talking chiefly about the education rather than entertainment sector), and have had to suspend my membership of Kiwisaver in part because my employers are no longer obliged to make contributions alongside my own.

The counter-argument from the Right is that I should theoretically be able to parlay the lower costs of employing me (i.e. things my employers no longer have to do) into increased wages and increased employment.
I'm not quite sure why they assume I'm in a strong enough negotiating position (i.e. completely and utterly indispensable to my employers) to negotiate a bigger and better pay packet, given that 83% of Kiwi workers will see their wages fall this year; while our workforce participation rate and actual number of hours worked both take a nosedive. All this would appear to indicate I'm actually in a far weaker bargaining position, even before we take into account the fact that I have not actually had the ability to say to my employer "I'm prepared to sacrifice these benefits/entitlements for a small pay increase". The government has, I suppose, pre-empted this and done that for me; for little apparent gain in either real renumeration or employment opportunities.


Thanks John Key.

ACC. Angry at Casualisation Chicanery

This afternoon I received a letter from ACC invoicing me for nearly a grand worth of unpaid levies.

I was surprised and confused by this as I haven't suffered any personal injuries or made any claims for a good half-decade, and thought that my contributions were (as the scheme was supposed to work) being paid by my various employers (I work several jobs in the education and service industries, as well as the occasional acting and commercial gig).

Not so, apparently. When John Key changed our labour laws at the behest of Warner Bros and shifted the employment status of many people involved in our growing film and associated industries to that of "self-employed contractors", he did so to introduce more flexibility into that part of the labour market.

Or, in layman's terms, to make it easier to hire-and-fire workers, and to cut the rights (and therefore costs) we, as with all other Kiwi workers have historically been entitled to.

I'm genuinely annoyed by all of this, and not just because it's all coming out of my pocket.
It's just like the Kiwisaver "employer contributions" that now seem to be coming out of employees wages.
This is something which is supposed to be paid by the employer as it has been for several decades - not another excuse to reduce my pay packet and quite literally pass the buck so a foreign film-maker can increase their profit margins.

I can't wait till National tries to introduce "Competition" into ACC's Work Account. No doubt we'll see much more of this sort of thing.