July 12th, 2022 -
Anyone else getting tired of the media presenting the fact that New Zealand essentially has full employment is a very bad thing?
The country is in a situation it has not been in since the 1970s where it is approaching full employment and the repercussions are totally predictable. It is harder for employers to fill jobs and the pressure is meaning that wage rates are increasing.
Sounds great doesn’t it. Everyone has a job and they are earning more.
What could possible be bad about this?
Judging from the extreme positions taken by some in the media lots.
Heather Du Plessis-Allan expressed the thoughts of many small business owners when she said this:
The labour shortage is now so bad that everyone who wants a job has a job. Employers are now stealing workers off each other. For every business that finds a worker, another one loses a worker. It’s a pass the parcel of pain.
It says a lot that ANZ’s CEO Antonia Watson called on the Government to let workers in. She voiced her concern during the PM’s trip to Australia. It apparently went down like a lead balloon with the PM’s office. Watson was supposed to be a cheerleader not a truth talker.
But she’s right. We do “want a more productive economy” but it “will take years and investment” and “in the meantime… people are just crying out for staff”.
The Aussies have realised they need to do both at once: start to invest now in a longer term fix, while importing more crucial skills immediately.
We can’t let this carry on for years while productivity slowly catches up.
We all want Kiwis’ wages to lift. But for them to have wages, they need to have jobs. And for them to have jobs, there need to be thriving businesses creating jobs.
That’s now being prevented by the immigration reset.
Heather’s statement is of course internally contradictory. We have to increase immigration so that businesses can create more jobs and wages can then increase so that we can counter the current situation where … pretty well everyone has a job and wage rates are increasing.
Heather’s solution will increase unemployment and thanks to market forces drive down wages. It is weird that right wingers hate market forces when they improve the plight of ordinary workers but are fine with them when they cause misery.
And Heather’s doom and gloom analysis for the country’s economy? The latest Treasury data where tax revenue is greater and crown spend and debt levels are below what was anticipated would suggest that things are better than Heather is claiming.
This is not an exclusively a New Zealand phenomenon.
And there has been a whole stream of negative comment about how bad it all is.
But here is the thing. There has been no balance in the presentation of the issue and I am looking at you Radio New Zealand.
For every business owner complaining that their business has been adversely affected they should also interview a worker who now has a greater ability to pay their bills or a family whose children now have better living conditions so their ability to benefit from education has improved.
And these businesses are the very same ones who complained about Covid restrictions affecting their bottom line. Now that Covid is wide spread and many workers are taking time off to recuperate they are complaining about not having enough workers. Massive own goal there business owners.
These wall to wall tales of woe without any counter stories of the decency of earning a living wage is class war.
Currently the country is enjoying something that is very good for ordinary people. The media should present both sides of this story not just tales of woe from employers who in the past have benefited from employing cheap imported labour.
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