Posts by Keith Ng
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Keith, is there been any comments from the PM about the role of innovation, entrepreneurship and R&D at the job summit?
Like what? That it's O for oarsome? 8-)
Sorry, just mean that innovation and entrepreneurship doesn't come from prime minsterial edict, and that talking about it, or demanding that there be more of it doesn't really do anyone any good.
-
My estimate is based on the concept that if a firm has 10 workers, they need 100 person days of work a fortnight to keep them productively occupied.
If sales only allow for 90 person days, then they would normally need to lose a worker.
If instead they put the whole place on a 9 day fortnight, then everyone is fully occupied again.
This doesn't allow for fixed costs, though.
Oh, of course. That makes sense.
However, it's not quite that responsive. The suggestion is that the government funds the 10th day *in return for a commitment that there be no redundancies for a certain period*. So they get a one-off 10% reduction in labour costs, but then they're stuck with that cost, even if, say, their revenue falls 30%.
-
Which is what happens when you invite only rich business-owners to these sorts of things: complete obliviousness to how it looks from the other end.
The unions were at the conference, too. Out in force, in fact.
-
caycos/stuart:
In relation to the 9 day working week or some other reduction in hours thing - can they guarantee that workers won't be expected to still do the same amount of work in less time?
Isn't there some legal requirement that the hours allocated have to be reasonable for the task?
But my point is that it's not a case of, "Congratulations! You're going to have an opportunity to take the day off!" With the prospect of layoffs looming over them, they're going to be pressured to eat a lot of shit - working more and getting less is just a part of that.
-
Rich still:
- as already pointed out on the Herald, the 3,700 workers on the cycle way would make no more than $2.50 an hour over two years.
- the working population of NZ is around 2.1 million - the cycleway would employ just over 0.1% of that, so it's of no real help.
3,700 jobs isn't something to be pooh-poohed at. You're not really going to find - or want - a single project that will suck up 126,000 jobs.
Hmmm. Conveniently enough, the Manhattan Project employed 130,000 people.
-
Rich:
- the government figure of $40mln per 10,000 workers for the 9 day fortnight is about right. However this only "saves" 1,000 jobs at a cost of $40,000 annually a job.
Is the 1:10 ratio your estimate? It's kinda conservative. But put it this way, the dole will cost around $8,000-16,000 per year per worker ($16k is for couples). Plus accommodation supplement, etc.
Then there's the flow on effects of decreased spending within those families. Then there's the decreased spending from people who still have their jobs, but are too scared to spend because everyone else is getting laid-off.
All I'm saying is that the fiscal cost of mass layoffs are pretty big, too.
And even if, accounting for all of that, it's still cheaper to have people on the dole, *then* you need to consider the long-term social impact of having more families that rely on the dole as their primary source of income.
-
Steve:
I think you take a narrow view. The flexible workforce you talked of earlier is the same workforce that would be absorbed, if not directly, by infrastructure spending.
The workforce isn't an amorphous blob. Not even the flexible workforce. A cleaner is not (necessarily) going to be able to drill concrete, a call centre worker can't suddenly drive a crane, and a receptionist won't turn into a fibre-optics technician overnight.
Sure, plenty of people *will* find work because of the infrastructure spending, and I'm all for infrastructure spending that takes us in a considered strategic direction (see A Green New Deal?). However, I'm really concerned about this amorphous and purely macro approach, which seems to treat every dollar of injection as good as the next, any job as substitute for another, and everybody as equally deserving of help.
-
Not exactly "heaps". Govt. expenditure on infrastructure allows money to filter out into the wider community without costing the country, as a whole, a great deal. This increases the tax tack and in turn gives the Govt. more money for infrastructure. It is a money go round.
No such thing as free money. Your scenario only works if you assume that *everyone* who works on infrastructure would otherwise have been unemployed. If they were employed, they would have been paying taxes anyway, so you can't count their tax take as "new" revenue.
Also, it wouldn't go very far. Let's make a generous estimate, and say that 80% of an infrastructure project's cost is domestic labour. Let's say those labour pay back 20% of it as tax and spend the rest. You're down to 16% of the original. Of the spending, much of it will be spent on imported goods, the rest will be sloshed through the same process. You'll have to be generous to estimate that even 50% of the cost of the project will eventually (over a pretty long period of time) come back as tax revenue.
The projects themselves have a value, of course. But the indirect benefit that a cleaner in Christchurch receives from roads in Auckland is pretty bloody indirect. Sometimes, spending money is just spending money.
-
Gareth:
[The Standard are] playing up that the report saw no loss of jobs if the minimum wage was increased inline with inflation. Of course, we are now in a very different employment market.
As you say, things have changed an awful lot in the past year or so.
In particular, there was little excess capacity in the economy in 2007. That's one of the reasons why the predicted impact of a rise in the minimum wage was so minimal - employers had plenty of orders to fill, business to be done, and not enough people to do them. At times like that, employers would just suck it up and pay more. Now it's the opposite.
giovanni:
Do we have expectations of which sectors will be shedding more jobs? Are we sure it's going to be the people on the lower rungs that will be hit the most?
Industries: Construction, export, etc. Which translates into builders, construction workers, farmhands, seasonal workers, etc. But it's not just limited to industries - the flow on effect will hit other sectors, and the first to go are the flexible staff - who tend to be low-income.
They're the most likely to have flexible contracts, most likely to be direct service providers (e.g. If you have fewer customers, you need fewer call centre staff, but you still need as many marketing managers), have least training, specialist skills and institutional knowledge (and are therefore more replaceable)... and so forth. That's why they're usually the first to go.
-
sagenz:
I disagree about the desirability of more money for families also. The best thing that can be done is to bring forward infrastructure spending.
Yes, but new jobs for fibre-optics technicians won't be terribly useful for poorly educated workers now, nor will, say, new building and road-works job be appropriate for many of those who'll be out of work. Infrastructure is great for creating jobs, of course, but there are heaps of people who won't benefit from it.
Ben:
Not increasing the minimum wage to keep some temporary employees in work and then making up for the non-increase by upping Working for Families payments for those who qualify (which will never happen under National anyway), just seems like an effort in shuffling the misfortune about... Surely we aren't going to survive this recession by having the poor weather the storm for the rest of us.
It's not shuffling the misfortune about - it's shuffling who pays for it. With minimum wage, it's the employer. With WFF, it's the taxpayer. It's businesses who are most fragile right now, and it doesn't make sense to put the pressure on them.