We never had that many people on Jobseeker – even during Covid.
And don’t tell me it’s because people don’t want to work.
A couple of years ago, we had the lowest unemployment rate in a generation.
What’s changed is there are 40,000 fewer jobs today than there were 18 months ago. Another 2000 lost in April alone.
The Government has a target for Jobseeker numbers to fall to 140,000. But there’s simply not the jobs.
The Treasury forecasts say the number will still be 194,000 in 2029 on current policies, and the unemployment rate will still be higher than when the Government came to power.
You would think that a set of numbers like this would spark a national conversation – an emergency meeting akin to that of John Key’s Job Summit in 2009.
Instead, we have not heard a word of a jobs plan from the Government.
Increased sanctions for beneficiaries, tick. Turfing people out of emergency housing without support, tick. Actual real help … crickets.
Instead of focusing on the crisis over the lack of jobs, the Government seems intent on giving the boot to people who still have jobs.
The 129,000 minimum wage workers got their second below-inflation pay increase in successive years. Meaning they’re effectively working for less.
There’s the 200,000 working people, mostly women, who have just had their prospects of pay equity ripped up so that the Government could fill the Budget hole left by last year’s tax cuts.
And there’s thousands of people working for companies that contract to the Government providing services like cleaning, security, and catering. The Government plans to remove the rule that they have to be paid the Living Wage.
This isn’t pocket change. The workers missing out on their right to pay equity are each down hundreds of dollars a week.
It’s mean-hearted and it’s classist, but it’s also dumb management.
Giving workers the message that they aren’t valued and they’re better off going across the Tasman isn’t going to boost productivity here in Aotearoa.
On top of that, the Government has canned infrastructure projects that would have enabled the economy to grow – the ferries, the government house building programme, light rail, school upgrades.
Undermining wages and running a high unemployment policy leads to weak economic growth (forecasts just got downgraded again by the Reserve Bank), reduces the tax take, and increases benefit costs.
Only this Minister of Finance could think that this is a good deal. A Government that really wants to get debt to GDP under control doesn’t just cut; it invests in our infrastructure and in our people.
No wonder Nicola Willis keeps on posting record deficits and is watching debt climb as a percentage of GDP.
As CTU President Richard Wagstaff said recently: “During a cost-of-living crisis, government should be lifting people’s wages and ensuring everyone has good jobs, but instead they are reducing the quality of life for thousands of New Zealand workers”.
If you think that a weak economy at least means prices will come down, I have a bridge to sell you.
We all know that the driving force of inflation was international prices. You can’t bring down the price of oil by denying care workers pay equity or laying off a bunch of construction workers.
The moral and business cases for attacking workers’ pay don’t stack up and neither does the politics.
We’ve all seen the huge protests over pay equity. A recent poll found that 62% of people were against removing Living Wage requirements.
The hundreds of thousands of families who have felt the sharp end of the Government’s decisions to cut their pay aren’t going to forgive and forget. There’s a lot more working people than there are landlords.
Growth might limp along in GDP terms, but it won’t be felt in working communities across Aotearoa anytime soon.
A government with its eye on the election would be well advised to work harder to improve the lives of workers, rather than making them more difficult.
