24 Comments

1. The Smiling Assassin is doing his job well. People continue to vote for their own impoverishment in the short term and an uninhabitable planet a little further down the track..

   1. https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocrats/videos/1071062736320113/?video_source=pages_finch_thumbnail_video

2. Great letter to the Southland Times, Frank. They don’t like it up ’em Cap’n Mannerin’!

   1. Thanks, Steve!

3. +100 – welcome to global control by faceless paper companies.

   One day you have a job, next day nobody knows what happened. Might take a while to find out too. Meanwhile what do 130 families do?

   I’m sure the banks won’t be out of pocket, the firm winding up the company, but the workers will and the taxpayers!

4. “Fortyone years later, we are still paying for National’s short-sightedness and fiscal imprudence.”

   And 41 years later the same sort of arseholes with the same sort of shortsightedness are tell me what’s best for the country.

   And telling me we don’t have the finances for infrastructural development.

   Those like Hosking and Henry operating on the “Key is God” level are the same as the “Muldoon is God” mob. They shat in their nest and our nest yet are moaning that we are in the crap.

   1. … and Henry and Hoskins are on $400k plus a year?

5. I mean Bill English is making a really really really good argument for why working for a company is a bad idea and that the future of work is best described as self employed

   1. More like why working for a Foreign (Chinese) company is a bad idea.

      1. No. Just working for any company is overwhelmingly a bad idea at the moment.

6. Tim Shadbolt should do more than live off the dying embers of his radical youth and take back the plant under council ownership and let the workers run it as a cooperative. Whenever a plant shuts down local bodies should claim back any subsidies used up over the years as equity. There is bound to be some rates rebate or other inducement to set up shop for the sake of employing people. Take Rio Tinto. When this plan fails we want more than our wages we want our ‘backwages’ as ARD Fairburn once put it. We want the plant and machinery as compensation for the value that we produced that went into the owners pockets before they pissed off. This would include no compensation to the company shareholders nor to any bank owed money by the company. This would be a quid pro quo for the 2008 govt guarantee that allowed the Aussie banks to ride out the GFC and pump money out of workers pockets ever since.

7. Muldoon was a clown and history proves it?

8. The Greece of the South Pacific?

   1. Full of “Mexicans with cell phones”, I note.

9. You could add to that list the former Taranaki Abattoir,and then >> http://www.goldinternational.co.nz/
   Once a farmers co-op,then bought out by chinese interests, and now into receivership ..
   40 jobs

10. “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
    – Mark Twain

    “Lies, Damn Lies, and Opinion Polls!” Huffington Post
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-sten-odenwald/lies-damn-lies-and-opinio_b_5496198.html

    Maybe real political journalists (not political commentators nor “pundits”) might like to research the efficacy and validity of polls? Maybe Paul Henry and Mike Hosking will “investigate” the validity of polls?

    1. Couldn’t agree more!

       But the investigation needs to be done by competent people. I have no illusions that Hosking and Henry would know what investigate means.

       I put the idea that our universities could do polling. Combine Statistics departments with Politics, Social Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology Education departments … and so on. They could do a range of social research as well political surveys. Use their students up and down the country to do the polling, analyse and publish results. Make it transparent and open and have the data available for everyone to see and use.

       Independent, peer reviewed, publicly reviewed and open to scrutiny. A really valuable public resource. Also have a system where the public could submit questions for survey. Lots of options!

       Maybe then we might trust the results.

11. The NZ meatworks, they do all seem to have a bad reputation now, whether it comes to AFFCO, this one Frank writes about, or Alliance. Here is an article showing how they operate, or try to operate, cutting costs where they can, which includes contractors and workers:

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/southland-times/72116001/Alliances-new-payment-terms-unacceptable

    They may be collectives, some of them, others in private or overseas ownership, they are all trying to get away with practices that have nothing to do with good faith and decent working conditions.

    This incident about a Chinese owned company is just one incident, the New Zealand operators are also no angels, as we know.

12. It does not matter whether a plant or company is owned by a foreign investor, bound by local law when it comes to employment, or whether it is New Zealand owned. The problem is that we face the global market, which is ruthless, and the more FTAs we sign, the more ruthless it becomes, as it means workers will be forced to compete with lower working and environmental conditions in other competitor countries. That is why we should be concerned about the TPPA.

    We will have workers forced to compete with Mexicans, with Malaysians, Vietnamese, Peruvians, Chileans and where else they come from, as they will be in one major market and operating under similar free trade conditions.

    Local meat works are forced to compete, otherwise they will not make a profit or even break even. We have simply more proof as to how the international working environment is forced to adjust to the lowest common denominator.

    And we have a planet full of desperately willing workers, they are streaming into the US, Europe, the better off places in South East Asia and also Australia and eventually here.

    There is no shortage of workers, and hence local workers should be damned worried about their future. Why do farmers bring in farm workers from the Philippines and now Indonesia, and fruit pickers from the islands and so, I ask?

    The reason is clear, and we can see in suburban Auckland, the middle class does not give much of a shit, whether their shopping bags are filled by low waged workers, whether their meals are prepared by underpaid restaurant workers, they think it is ok, as they do well under such conditions. They vote Key, and he is the one leading us further down the garden path, where the country will become ever more divided, and the rural workers will compete with slave labour.

13. Excellent, Frank. Well written. It’ll be interesting if your letter is published.

14. Pingback: Letter to the editor – So this is ‘job creation’ by foreign ownership? | Frankly Speaking...

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