EPMU vitriole wins the day

Hattip: Scoop / Scoop

Unfortunately it looks like the EPMU et al. campaign of lies and hyperbole has managed to convince enough people that Wayne Maps Probationary employment bill is an "attack on their rights". And so the Maori party have decided to withdraw their support for the bill meaning it is likely to be defeated rather shortly.

Workers need to wake up and realize that initiatives like this are *not* an "attack on their rights" but are attempts to actually bring realistic responsibilities back to those rights that they possess. The current climate of repealing employers rights and making the employee ever more powerful and legislated will continue to drive New Zealand down its path of foreign ownership and small business ownership.

Those people with enough entrepreneurial spirit to start their own businesses will continue to trend towards being single proprietorships, possibly expanding to partnerships, and then typically moving offshore for expansion - if that isn't where they started already. It is ludicrous that it is becoming increasingly less risky and orders of magnitude cheaper for someone to move into a partnership agreement than to hire their first employee.
Only large multi-corporates are likely to continue with the increasing hassle of employment, only they can continue to take the risk and employ the legal / HR teams that are required to deal with actually having employees. If workers think either of these trends are in their favor then they are severely mistaken.

We have already seen a number of our businesses start to replace staff with machinery due to their increasing costs - this is the one positive side effect of these moves. New Zealand needs to increase its labor productivity if we are to regain any kind of comparative standing in the OECD. However it would be nice to be able to have a domestic manufacturing segment rather than watching them all (Jack Links et al) slowly collapse and shut down, it would be nice to continue having a domestic clothing market, car assembly - in fact almost anything other than food and aluminum would be good.

As we continue to make this less of a reality for ourselves, as we punish the entrepreneur for the lack of vision, lack of risk tolerance, and lack of intellect for their workers we will see ourselves continue to decline until we are that prison colony at the end of the Earth that Gene Roddenberry predicted.
Tags: nz, politics, employment