Labour / NZ First Government

[justakiwi]

Ah ... exactly the response I was expecting. The cost of education and business set up, is always touted as justification for the high salary, but I have never heard of an accountant or lawyer, or dentist, dropping their rate down the track, once they have an established business and have recouped those costs. So once they have recovered those initial costs, what then is their justification for high salaries?

I am not saying I should be paid the same as an accountant. I am saying I am providing an equally as essential and important job as they are. They are responsible for their client’s financial affairs. I am responsible for my residents lives. They are fully dependent on me to ensure their well-being. If I do not do my job well, it has the potential to affect their health. If I administer the wrong medication, I could be responsible for someone’s death.

Why do I not deserve to be paid better? Why is it, that the moment we start talking about increasing minimum wages, for the people at the bottom of the heap, it’s considered not viable? Why is it worth it to you to pay a high rate for your accountant to look after your finances, but it’s not acceptable to pay me a decent wage to care for your mother, father or wife? Why is it ok for me to do my job for less than I am worth, out of passion for what I do, but people doing “more important jobs” are able to set their own financial value?

It’s all BS.

I love your passion but your not seeing the whole picture re why an Accountant for example should be paid more than yourself, think about how many full time yrs it took to become one, add to that all the business expenses like office rental, receptionist wages etc etc you need to cover before you even get off first base, someone like a self employed Dentist would have even more yrs of full-time study and a whole heap more expenses to cover, at the end of the day the market decides what an occupation is worth just like the sharemarket decides what your chosen share is worth whether you agree with it or not(I've learnt that one the very hard way a few times)

[SBQ]

Ah ... exactly the response I was expecting. The cost of education and business set up, is always touted as justification for the high salary, but I have never heard of an accountant or lawyer, or dentist, dropping their rate down the track, once they have an established business and have recouped those costs. So once they have recovered those initial costs, what then is their justification for high salaries?

I am not saying I should be paid the same as an accountant. I am saying I am providing an equally as essential and important job as they are. They are responsible for their client’s financial affairs. I am responsible for my residents lives. They are fully dependent on me to ensure their well-being. If I do not do my job well, it has the potential to affect their health. If I administer the wrong medication, I could be responsible for someone’s death.

Why do I not deserve to be paid better? Why is it, that the moment we start talking about increasing minimum wages, for the people at the bottom of the heap, it’s considered not viable? Why is it worth it to you to pay a high rate for your accountant to look after your finances, but it’s not acceptable to pay me a decent wage to care for your mother, father or wife? Why is it ok for me to do my job for less than I am worth, out of passion for what I do, but people doing “more important jobs” are able to set their own financial value?

It’s all BS.

It's all about supply and demand. Minimum wage jobs have a high supply and generally, low skilled. Higher paying jobs have a limited supply and require more training, include a high capital cost for the trade, etc.

[artemis]

It's all about supply and demand. Minimum wage jobs have a high supply and generally, low skilled. Higher paying jobs have a limited supply and require more training, include a high capital cost for the trade, etc.

Correct, and to add to that it is easy enough to give notice and change jobs for higher pay if skills are sufficiently in demand, or if willing to work extra hours.

[Bjauck]

(8) Switch to lower labour requirements. My cuz turned his dairy farm into growing spuds for a contracted client, for example. Get government funding, plant trees where the grazing or apple trees were, wait a couple of decades.
(9) Automation / robotics. Already here, quietly expanding, even being exported.

Good additional possible consequences. The reduced supply of foreign seasonal workers from poor countries may encourage capital to be invested into automation to boost the productivity and higher paid NZ staff. More companies like Scott Technology may prosper and remain based in NZ.

That would be great. I suspect however that NZ will start making exceptions to heath regulations and import cheap labour and productivity will remain static. Investment will continue to mostly be channelled into maintaining and boosting land prices.

Disc: SCT shareholder

[tim23]

You do realise that that is a whole lot of nonsense. It may be $22.10 per hour in some places, but if you want to be equitable you really have to adjust it for regional differences and costs. I would wager that a wage of $15 per hour is better for a person living in Southland than a $25 per hour wage for someone living in Auckland. But this whole "living wage" movement is BS predicated on nothing. If you do bring in a "Living wage", all it will do is raise all other wages relative, costs will increase, and no one will be better off. It will also just expedite the automation of low skilled jobs such that they rapidly disappear.

Well I guess you would say the old award system was flawed too? Regional pay rates are tricky to implement.

[moka]

1. You are making a huge assumption yourself about how some of us view Cindy as indicative of how we view women as a whole.

We view Cindy for who she is - all style and no substance (all talk and no delivery) and that does not mean that we view women all the same way. Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Angela Merkel, Tsai Ing-wen and Margaret Thatcher are but some examples of real leaders who are/were all substance rather than style. Take a step back and differentiate between real leaders and popular leaders - Chavez was hell of a popular and he completely ruined a wealthy country with his populist policies.

Jacinda did deliver with NZ’s covid response. She has plenty of substance as well as style. Just look how Jacinda transformed NZ in a few weeks when Covid hit, with closed borders, lockdowns, wage subsidies etc. That was a huge transformation which the team of five million with a few exceptions willingly accepted and complied with. NZ had a very successful outcome. If you don’t think that was transformational have a look at other goverments e.g. Premier Daniel Andrews in Victoria. Jacinda delivered a great outcome for New Zealand with her government’s response to Covid, which was recognised internationally but it is not recognised by a few here on sharetrader.

[moka]

It depends on your definition of "works".

Trickledown works in an overall sense. The human race has never enjoyed such a high standard of living and life expectancy. In fact in first world countries this has resulted in a number of self inflicted health problems around dietary choices etc (I realise that invites another discussion).

What Trickledown doesn't do is diminish the "gap" between rich and poor, in fact it can exacerbate it. That is where the tension arises. I'm not saying it is fair, but it is more nuanced than just saying it doesn't work.

When trickle-down works what is it supposed to do? Increase GDP, increase growth and over time this growth will generate enough government revenue to offset tax losses. But it works best according to the Laffer curve when taxes are high 50% – 100%. So what trickles down to the workers and how? The articles I read are silent on this point.
“All of this expansion will trickle down to workers”
“According to the theory, this boost in growth will ultimately help those in lower income brackets as well.”
Giving tax breaks to the wealthy stands as a policy meant to improve the overall health of the economy.
John F. Kennedy showed his support of the trickle-down economic theory when he said, "a rising tide lifts all boats" -- meaning that a growing economy benefits you whether you're rich or poor [source: Nugent].

https://www.thebalance.com/trickle-down-economics-theory-effect-does-it-work-3305572

The International Monetary Fund rejects the trickle-down theory.
…increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth — that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down.” The IMF’s fight against income inequality revolves around the fact that expenditures of middle- to low-income sectors are the drivers of the economy. Even a mere 1% increase in wealth for 20% of low-income earners yields a 0.38% growth in gross domestic product. On the other hand, increasing the income of the top 20% high-income earners results in a negative 0.08% growth in GDP.

Trickle-down economics generally does not work because:

• Cutting taxes for the wealthy often do not translate to increased rates of employment, consumer spending, and government revenues in the long-term.
• Instead, cutting taxes for middle-and lower-income earners will drive the economy through the trickle-up phenomenon.
• The added income for the wealthy, resulting from tax cuts, will simply increase the growing income inequality in the United States.
  

[moka]

Thanks to that evil capitalism, globally ONLY 2 Billion people have been lifted out of poverty the last 30 years. Why are we even talking about inequality in that context.

You would be talking about inequality if you were living in poverty in New Zealand.
Global population 7.8 billion as of October 2020 so 25% have been lifted out of poverty. Or to put it another way 75% of people still live in poverty in a world of plenty.

https://borgenproject.org/how-much-does-it-cost-to-end-poverty/

How Much Does it Cost to End Poverty?
Today the world produces enough food for everyone on the planet. So why are more than a billion people still dying of hunger? Why is life itself tenuous for so many families while the eight richest people in the world have as much wealth as the poorest 50 percent of people in the world?
The answer is poverty. But poverty can be stopped, and this raises the question, “how much does it cost to end poverty?”
But poverty is more than just very low incomes. It is hunger, high mortality rates, conflicts, a lack of education or health services and a lack of a future for hundreds of thousands of women, men and children.

Jeffrey Sachs, as one of the world’s leading experts on economic development and the fight against poverty, stated that the cost to end poverty is $175 billion per year for 20 years. This yearly amount is less than 1 percent of the combined income of the richest countries in the world, and only four times the United States’ military budget for one year.
Ending poverty is possible and at a low cost. Now we just need ordinary citizens as well as multinational corporations to start meeting their responsibilities to help the poor and the left behind.

[moka]

That is a cop out.

NZ used to enjoy one of the highest standard of living in the world right through the 1950s to the mid 1970s. You need to assess why NZ has gone backwards in such a big way since then to understand why school children need lunch handouts and there are homeless & beggars in the street today.

The simple answer can be provided by this question :

"How can there be tens of thousands of jobs a begging in the agricultural sector when there are several hundred thousand NZers unemployed and on the benefit?"

Why has New Zealand gone backwards in living standards from the mid 1970s = neoliberalism. Neoliberal strategies include driving down wages, opposition to unions, labour market flexibility.
Good chart in the article showing how since 1973 there has been a divergence of productivity versus hourly compensation. US figures but NZ’s shows a similar divergence.

Though productivity (defined as the output of goods and services per hours worked) grew by about 74 percent between 1973 and 2013, compensation for workers grew at a much slower rate of only 9 percent during the same time period, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute.
Labor has become more efficient and profitable, but employees aren't sharing in the benefits.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the-gap-between-worker-pay-and-productivity-is-so-problematic/385931/

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change ... there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.
It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

[blackcap]

Why has New Zealand gone backwards in living standards from the mid 1970s = neoliberalism. [/FONT][/URL][/FONT]

Surely you jest? The NZ from the 70's was way worse than the NZ now. Not even close. NZ's standard of living has improved markedly.