The strange part of Labour and the Greens signing up to tired dogmas from the past is that people actually don’t care about them. Only the ruling elites do. There are not many votes there. That’s Math.
Big business just wants to cut any government expenditure that isn’t going to directly subsidise their profit making activities. This has led to a slashing of the number of people receiving a benefit as a percentage of the working age population from 13% to 8 % when unemployment only fell on average from 8 to 6%.
By reducing the real value of Working for families payments since 2010 the National government has taken a cumulative $2 billion out of the homes of working class families.
The new sanctions involving banning employers temporarily from sponsoring visas to import labour to New Zealand is a useful, but very small step, given the scale of the migrant labour exploitation that exists in New Zealand
A culture of denying people their rights has infected management layers at WINZ. Targets have been imposed on management for benefit denial and prosecuting those who have allegedly been overpaid for some reason.
Armourguard Security have stood down a security guard from a WINZ site because he complained to his union that the company was not taking the guards health and safety seriously.
What is sad is just how hard it is sometimes to get these big, profitable multinationals to even obey the law!
Racism, chauvinism, bigotry, anti-immigrant demagogy, all remain tools to be used by some people – especially those on the right or far right of the political spectrum – to deflect people away from the real cause of the social ills that exist in society.
There are widespread and unacceptable levels of poverty in this country and inequality is getting out of control. One way to address those issues in a meaningful way is to progressively increase the minimum wage in real terms.
Many unions seemed to turn the groups inside the unions which had been formed to empower workers from oppressed groups into inwardly focussed talking shops rather than organising centres.