1 Summary 1.1 This short paper sets out a scheme for reducing the shock of lost income from redundancy. 2 Preliminaries: Dealing with a Private Market Failure 2.1 This proposal arises because the private market has not been able to provide adequate income protection for those who become unemployed from redundancy. In particular…
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Migration patterns provide further evidence that wellbeing is not simply measured by income. New Zealand’s GDP per person is about 20 percent lower than Australia’s. Some think that the difference arises because our economic policies have been inferior. They then leaps to arguing for new policies based on ideology rather than evidence. Frequently those policies…
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I was asked to make a short contribution at the function on 18 December 2019 for Bill who is retiring from director of policy at the NZCTU. He will continue to work on labour issues part-time.
Free movement of labour is often described as one of the four fundamental economic freedoms. Putting it into practice is somewhat more difficult. To make the intentions of this column clear, I am generally in favour of migration. I am a descendant of immigrants and live in a country in which virtually everyone admits to…
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How come we tolerated such appalling working conditions for so long? (And a tick for crusading journalism.) Charles Dickens would be appalled. So would Fredrick Engels who wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, as would New Zealand’s Sweating Commission of 1890. Even Simon Legree, the slave owner in Harriet Beecher’s Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, would…
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We should focus more on introducing and adapting the world’s innovations using a skilled workforce. Pundit: 17 November, 2014 Keywords: Growth & Innovation; Labour Studies; Our so called ‘innovation policy’, which is at the heart of the government’s growth strategy – insofar as it has one – seems to be fundamentally flawed….
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Comments for Concluding Session of NIDEA University of Waikato, February 2-3, 2012. Keywords: Labour Studies; Political Economy & History; To begin with congratulating the organisers of conference, who have produced one of those stimulating events which will be long remembered by the professions as the foundation for a major debate. But I would also like…
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Prelude to Arbitration in Three Movements: Ulster, South Australia, New Zealand: 1890-1894 by W. J. Gardner (2009) 174pp. (Available from W. J. Gardner, Box 5634, Papanui, Christchurch 8542, $NZ30) Published in Labour History Project, Newsletter 49 July 2010, p.25-27. Keywords: Labour Studies; Political Economy & History; The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, passed in 1894,…
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Presentation to an EPMU seminar, 29 April, 2010 Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Labour Studies; Twenty years ago the Engineering Union commissioned me to think about the alternative to Rogernomics. According to the last prime minister, Helen Clark, my report Open Growth was influential on the last Labour Government’s economic strategy, although it was not totally…
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This was a note I prepared following a discussion on some troubling statistics. 1 March, 2010. Keywords: Labour Studies; Statistics; Suppose you did exactly the same job for the whole of your life. How do you think your wages would increase the same as inflation, or faster? I cant be sure of the answer for…
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Contribution to a panel which is a part of the launch of the Australia-New Zealand Connections Research Centre (ANZRC), University of Canterbury, Christchurch, Friday 10 October 2008. Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Labour Studies; Political Economy & History; The Trans-Tasman labour market is over two hundred years old – perhaps since the first convict…
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Chapter 3 of New Zealand, New Welfare, edited by N. Lunt, M. O’Brien & R. Stephens. (Cenage Learning, 2007) Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Labour Studies; Social Policy; In March 1952, just two men were on the Department of Social Security’s unemployment benefit. The rules of entitlement partly determine the numbers, but those registered…
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Published in the last issues of The Jobs Letter 254, 9 September 2006 (http://www.jobsletter.org.nz) Keywords: Labour Studies; It seems a such long time since unemployment peaked in early 1992 in at 11.1 percent of the labour force, when over 181,000 New Zealanders were jobless and actively seeking work. Others had become so disheartened…
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This was prepared in May 2006 for a report on a Youth Labour Market Guarantee. Keywords: Education; Growth & Innovation; Labour Studies; Introduction. This paper provides an environment in which any Youth Labour Market Guarantee package must function. It covers the Government Vision statement, the latest Department of Labour 2005 statement The…
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How to preserve the social market economy in a modern Europe.
Listener: 30 July, 2005.
Keywords: Labour Studies;
Reform is a weasel word, avoiding specifics because advocates are either not sure what it means or they don’t want others to know. So, when the German Government and the Goethe-Institut offered me the opportunity to study the German economy, I just had to look at the reality of its “reforms” debate. Some of the implemented ones – pressures on the unemployed to take up work – seem not too different from ours. But some proposals have the ideology underpinning our Employment Contracts Act (ECA).
Presentation to the Annual Conference of the Industry Training Federation, 16 July, 2004, Wellington.
Keywords: Education; Labour Studies;
Economists are not very good at forecasting the future. I look at what I wrote twenty years ago, and realise just how much I got it wrong. Or you might consider that before you is one of the first New Zealand university students to use a mainframe computer, someone who encouraged his children to use ZX81s, who was probably one of the first economists in New Zealand to use a PC (a 186), and who still failed to forecast the ICT revolution.
Chapter of TRANSFORMING NEW ZEALAND. This is a draft. Comments welcome.
Keywords: Labour Studies;
The endogenous account of technical change means that all workers are involved in the application of new technologies. It is not a matter of some white-coated workers turning up at the warehouse taking the blueprints and handing them over to business that put them smoothly into practice. In practice workers can be intimately involved with the technology transfer process.
Keywords: Growth & Innovation; Labour Studies;
New OECD data bases enables the revision updating and extension of an earlier version of Productivity and Employment: New Zealand’s Post-War Economic Growth Performance. It still belongs to a series, Comparison with the OECD and Comparison with Australia.
An earlier version of this paper [1] used the Maddison data base which had some statistics of employment and hours worked, and allowed it to provide some estimates of productivity.[2] Recently the OECD published a more comprehensive. albeit shorter, data base.[3] This paper revises the earlier paper, incorporating the new data.
Listener 14 December, 2002.
Keywords: Education: Labour Studies;
Instead of the five percent downtime the manufacturer specified, the expensive German machinery was malfunctioning at four times that rate. The increasingly frustrated management called in its workers, who explained they had never had any training on the use of the machine. The German manufacturer would have been astonished. Their view is that each worker was a skilled technician who had a positive role in managing the machinery, not someone to do the jobs that the machine designers had not yet automated. Training for a new technology would have been routine.
Paper for the 2002 Labour Employment and Work Conference. 21 November, 2002. (1)
Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Labour Studies;
It is argued that globalisation was a far more potent force in the nineteenth century, than it has been in the late twentieth, for then labour was highly mobile as well as capital and goods – although it was really only European labour which was mobile. Moreover, aside from initiative, the labour which migrated probably had similar characteristics to those which stayed behind.(2)