Nothing highlights the scumbag subservience to corporate interests by ACT and National better than their bullshit response to Helen White’s remarkable private members bill that will stop corporations from enslaving their workers…
Put simply, the clauses, which are increasingly common, restrict an employee who quits a job from working in the same or a similar role for a competitor.
Traditionally, they have been used where an employee holds trade secrets or knowledge of clients that it would be unfair for a rival business to obtain.
As such – as noted in the United States – you might expect to see them imposed on senior executives or workers in high-tech industries. However, they are increasingly popping up among doggy-daycare workers, hairdressers and yoga instructors.
In New Zealand you can add baristas at Starbucks to the list.
They are particularly prevalent in individual employment agreements. We do not keep records of individual agreements, but in the US and Australia they appear in about one in five agreements.
White, who was an employment lawyer for 25 years, has prosed some key restrictions in her bill.
It would ban NCCs from applying to those earning less than three times the minimum wage. Currently that would be $141,648 a year.
Above that figure they would be allowed, but the employer must have a definite proprietary interest to protect. The employer would have to pay half the former worker’s salary for the duration of the restraint, which could be no more than six months.
It would not limit or change the existing common law duties of confidentiality or fidelity, so it would not mandate open slather on taking information to a rival business.
At the moment many NCCs are unenforceable, but it is expensive for individual workers to challenge them in court. They have a chilling effect on anyone planning to move to a new job with better wages or conditions, as well as on anyone looking to recruit new staff. Not being able to work in your area of expertise for perhaps six months is too high a hurdle for many.
Beyond the limited roles where they are clearly justified, they are bad for current employees, future employers, the economy and the flexibility of the labour market. NCCs widely used would stifle job mobility and competition, curb wage rises, and limit employers’ access to the job market.
In the US, 40% report turning down a job offer from a competitor because of one.
On the weight of all that, you might expect National and ACT would take a nuanced stance towards White’s bill with a view to improving it – especially lowering the very high $141,000 threshold.
Wrong.
National’s Paul Goldsmith did concede there was a kernel of an issue around excessive restraints and said National might consider a better bill, but not this one.
ACT’s Chris Baillie went full-naive, ignoring the inherent power imbalances in employment relations, ignoring the limits NCCs place on labour market mobility, and tuning a blind eye to the fact that most individual agreements are written by an employer’s lawyer.
“What happens now when a business needs a worker and a worker needs a job is they have a meeting, they work out what’s fair, agree to the terms of employment and sign a contract. Then they shake hands and they start work,” he said.
…what fucking planet does Nation and ACT live on?
Fantasy Island?
That’s not how it goes in the real world when you are desperate for a job, the Bossman has all the power and locking you into trade deals that screw your ability to advance is one step away from indentured slavery!
Why the fuck should Starbucks or McDonalds be able to chain you to them forever?
That National and ACTs immediate position is to defend the Corporations right to enslave you highlights the kind of Government they will champion!
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Sounds bad.
But less bad than apartheid.
Said the chief turd polisher for NatAct. Were you screaming apartheid when National oversaw co governance initiatives?
But OK if its brown at the back of the bus.
We’ve never needed apartheid in NZ because we have used town planning to price the ‘brown’ (your term) out of the white neighborhoods. And their schools.
Yes Ada white flight
The crime of apartheid is defined by the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as inhumane acts of a character similar to other crimes against humanity “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime”.
Yep, yep that’s what it is.
great! you understand, now tell us of all the heinous crimes that have been committed against you, due to the hue of your skin?
Martyn – Correct…but, Labour is just a bit sneaky in the way they engage with corporates
I just watched our bullshitting future PM address the funding for infrastructure. Good chance it will be owned by the Chinese. It is f’ing laughable that these a’holes freak out about any debt for the future but no problem that you are owned by someone else, and have a massive influx of cheap foreign labour that will want to settle here ( though he denied that of course). He then in his typical right wing, supposedly not woke approach, screamed xenophobia when that fact is pointed out. Tosser.
I suspect that you are correct regarding the future PM although his honeymoon in the job won’t last very long when he has to handle the increased problems, while there is division now I can only see an increased divide with their control.
Er why would the roads be owned by the Chinese. They might part finance it and bring in the expertise to build it. We can’t seem to build a decent road. The roads likely to be tolled. ??..
Probably not just Chinese to be fair. Sovereign Wealth Funds could also invest in whatever entity owns the asset/road apparently.
So what I don’t understand is why we are so anti government debt. I assume that’s because tax payers have to ultimately pay for that debt? However if we start tolling everyone to pay a return to foreign wealth funds or effectively paying a Chinese company to build our road which we then pay through tolls, what would have been cheaper for the tax payers? Government borrowing or users pays from entities that are there to make margins on their investment? Would our government expect to make same level of return? You can’t vote out a foreign wealth fund.
Wheel. I guess analysis of any contract is where it’s at. If Chinese road builders will be used and that gives us a better finance rate it may be worth it. As for tolls, not great but our roads are a shambles so user paying to get good highways is acceptable to me.
New, you seriously think the Chinese will do this for nothing. Have a look around the Pacific, if the Chinese get a foothold in NZ through this roading method then the hold on the pacific is complete. While we are at it how will NACT explain to our partners that China will have carte blanch in NZ. This is serious money by any ones standards . They will be able to buy all our dairy farms, so goodbye Fontera. The Chinese president must be laughing his way to world domination.
Queeny. The Chinese wouldn’t do it for nothing would they. Read my comment again. Don’t let your paranoia challenge your logic.
Name anyone who would do it for nothing?
Everyone, yourself included, will grab their pound of flesh given the chance. One would hope the NZ negotiators walked out with the same sized pound of flesh as the other side did so it was a win-win outcome.
The key would be have the negotiators tasked with getting a genuine win-win or just something good enough to be able to bounce through a few news cycles if the public go a bit feral on them.
Both the Labs and Nats have a history that has dark moments but also many bright ones in negotiations. Both also have exhibited balls, and bloody huge ones, of arroganctanium in being able to ignore. But then the dumbarse public let them get away with this shit so who are the real fools?
Chris Baillie is talking total crap. He has clearly never had to sit down and negotiate for a job. Job seekers will agree to almost anything when they need jobs. If they have to bring in lawyers, which few can afford to do, they’re already starting off on an adverse foot. Goldsmith was always a simplistic fool.
Hats off to Helen White. This is an issue where a decent Human Rights Commissioner could be invaluable, if we had one.
Someone needs to start a trade union faction that isn’t just a lapdog of the liberal political machine, and start electing some proper union leaders.
isreal,is a race based state for good or ill…end of discussion
When you support ACT, like Anker does. This is the shit that you sign up with.
Does Anker really feel comfortable with slapping NCC’s on bar workers, shelf stackers and call centre operators.
Obviously she does. No right wing policy is too evil for her, as she is determined to crush those LGBT’s once and for all.
What utter crap. How can National fuck up this country ane more than Jacinda, chippy and this bunch of fuctards.
Labour are destroying your country and you fuckwits want more of it..
Fill ya boots!… I’m off!
Well make it quick Dude, nurses now teachers have got the biggest pay rises in history. The most important people are being looked after, after years of National fucking our country. Labour are finally starting to get us on track so fuckwits like you leaving will make NZ a better place and take Bob with you, he’s one less liar to have to put up with.
6 Years of waiting and strikes a drop in their polling dragged Labour to commit to pay roses .Labour have not made any friends on the way especially the way the nurses were treated by Andrew Little.
While the increases are good they are still short of what is needed to keep nurses and teachers from going to Australia or promoting their jobs to friends as worth joining their ranks
bye Felecia!
with ease dude with ease…check history rightwing govts always leave a higher national debt
“Non-Compete Clauses” to use the full term, are already rampant in NZ.
I know from family members that work in graphic design production work, and the “companion animal” industry, one at Animates and a friend who is actually a dog groomer, that their contracts (not union agreements) state they agree that they cannot work for a competitor, or start a business in the industry for X months to 2 years.
The clients of a dog groomer are customers of the business. They likely found that business through advertising not the specific groomer. So if that person leaves that business it is entirely reasonable to attempt to stop their customers following that groomer out the door. While I don’t agree that should be in the form of a total ban it is reasonable to impose a distance limit temporally to stop that. IMO
Dog groomers add no value to the economy. Much like mortgage brokers, financial advisors, wedding planners and interior decorators (except actual painters and wallpaperers)
or are they kim? what if the person in question is a particularly good groomer and you want the best for fido? from a specific person
Go to Aus dude hope you don’t get sick you will have to come running back and join our que for health treatyment.
” Put simply, the clauses, which are increasingly common, restrict an employee who quits a job from working in the same or a similar role for a competitor.
Yet a former MP and elected government minister like Fafoi can go on to accept a lobbyist role.
We have not surprisingly no regulation around this that many other countries do. Its once again a free for all for many MP’s and public servants that neo liberalism provides them while the former MP for Mana has turned his back on his constituents who cant even afford a basic human right to have a light on or heated hot water due to the power companies and their vicious behaviour towards our struggling wage slave underclass.
” Poverty stricken underclass penalised. ”
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/494961/poverty-stricken-households-penalised-with-extra-fees-after-their-power-is-cut-off
They “all” serve corporate and financial interests over the interests of the people. If there is one difference, it is that the Left may have to hold their nose to some of the crap they end up doing, but they end up doing it nonetheless. Politics is broken, suggesting that only one side has coursed this damage irresponsibly lets the other side off the hook.
On and off shore corporations and their management and share-holder spiders own and manage our country and our politics and they’ll say and do what ever it takes to maintain control over us to enable them to move ever closer to totalitarian control of us because everywhere else is over populated and on fire so they’ll need to know what’s what on an on-going basis.
It’s become especially urgent for Them now that the climate’s heading to an end-stage collapse and no one escapes that uncomfortable fact. Rather than hide up in a space-cock-rocket it’s better to come to AO/NZ, the country voted most likely to survive the first wave of the mass die-off’s of the plant, animal and human species.
The only thing that’s never debated is of how vital our Aotearoa / New Zealand land mass and oceans will be when heavily populated northern hemisphere areas exceed 50c. Now? Today? Florida ocean temps @ 38.3 and Furnace Creek, California air temps @ 56.67c so yeah/nah. Funny that.
I was predominantly worried about how the now grotesquely rich, crooked, exploitative urban scum north of the whore houses and the churches on K Road would get away with exploiting we farmers. Now, I’m worried that when their oily flanks start to sizzle I’ll be late with the barbecue sauce because my John Deere over-heated going up the Bombay Hills. Yes, I’m here to add poetry to the justice.
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