Seventy percent of workers in New Zealand want new jobs

February 10, 2011 by

by Byron Clark

Job advertising website SEEK’s 2010 Employee Satisfaction and Motivation survey, which had about 3000 respondents, has found that 70% of New Zealand workers are wanting a new job this year with one in four planing on leaving their jobs in the next three months. The main reason was looking for ‘a challenge’ (28%) followed closely by feeling unappreciated at work (23%). Nearly half of those surveyed (49%) responded negatively to the question “How’s the current morale in your workplace” and a slightly higher number (52%) said they would not recommend their friends apply for jobs at the organisations employing them.

What would change that would be better management (49%) and more employee motivation (41%) about a quarter of respondents also said better pay and work environment would make a difference. This open ended question also drew responses such as “ Cut the amount of work required to increase the salary to bring it into line with the extra work done for no pay” and “stop breaching employment law”.

When asked what they liked about their jobs, the most common response was “people I work with” (19%) and when asked what they hated 24% said the stress levels and 23% said the overall quality of management. Those in ‘service and support’ industries appear to have it worst, feeling less happy and less secure, as well as more likely to hate aspects of their workplace. Most were planning on leaving their job in the next six months. While 30% of young “generation Y” workers cited boredom as a reason for seeking new jobs (compared to 15% for generation X and 12% for Baby Boomers) they “tend[ed] to be more upbeat, [and] confident about their future” according to the report.

Filed Under: Work rights

If you’re dissing the hookers you ain’t fighting the power

February 8, 2011 by

Reprinted from Not Afraid of Ruins blog.

The new Auckland Supercouncil has voted to support a submission in favour of the Regulation of Prostitution in Specific Places Bill. This law would let Supercouncil pass bylaws banning street workers in specific areas.

Arguments in favour of criminalizing street workers are usually about protecting families, and moral values, and community standards, and ‘won’t somebody think of the children?’

But sometimes these arguments are also about ‘won’t somebody think of the hookers?’ because, according to Sandra Coney, ‘she supported the bill because prostitution was harmful to women and led to violence and murder’.

Let me break this down for you:

Yes, being a street worker probably isn’t an ideal employment situation for most workers. It’s possible that some street workers work on the street because they truly prefer it. But I suspect most sex workers who work on the street are doing it because they don’t have other options, like working at a brothel, or for an escort agency, or hiring a flat to work from. Maybe brothels and agencies won’t hire them because of a drug dependency or maybe because they’re transgendered or maybe they just managed to piss off all the bosses and maybe they can’t afford to put an ad up on nzgirls.com and hire a flat or a hotel room.

The point is that those sex workers who work on the street are usually the ones who are most marginalized, most disadvantaged, most discriminated against and most vulnerable to exploitation. Sandra Coney is right to worry about their safety. But she is living in an alternate universe if she thinks giving the police more power over street workers is going to protect them. Actually, all that’ll happen is that the police will have even more power to exploit and oppress street workers. This law will allow police to arrest anyone they think might be a sex worker. Who do you think police think might be a sex worker?[1] This law isn’t going to prevent sex workers from working on the street. Because it doesn’t actually address any of the reasons some sex workers end up working on the street. All this law will do is make street workers’ lives more difficult and more dangerous.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized

Melbourne Storm salary cap breach

June 10, 2010 by

Joel Cosgrove, June 2010

Much has been written about the Melbourne Storm and their repeated breaching of the salary cap. Although there has been much comment on the issue, the vast majority has been shallow and generally misses some pretty obvious points.

To recap. The Australian National Rugby League (NRL) has a salary cap, the cap for 2010 is AU$4.69 million for the 25 highest paid players at each club. The Storm from 2006-10 breached the cap by at least AU$1.85 million in a process that involved two sets of financial accounts, a calculated fraud. The scandal came out when an insider at the club notified the NRL who then acted on the systemic breach.

Newstalk ZB talkback host Murray Deaker, talking on his show, made the point that the Storm breaching the salary cap was not an oddity; it is a process at the centre of things. Since 1991 there have been at least 50 instances of clubs being fined for serious or minor breaches of the cap. Deaker raised the point further by saying that the salary cap scandal was comparable to the recent financial crisis, in that greed is at the centre of things and that when you commercialise something greed becomes a part of it.

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Filed Under: Sport
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