Guest Post on Roger’s blog
September 9th, 2011 at 3:18 pm by David FarrarI’ve done a brief guest post on Roger Kerr’s blog on the youth minimum wage.
It is inexplicable that National has continued with what can only be called the failed experiment of applying the adult minimum wage to unskilled inexperienced 16 year olds who want to gain some work experience.
Related posts:
- PM on Youth Wages
- NZ minimum wage higher than UK
- The starting out wage
- Jim should back bringing back the youth minimum wage
September 9th, 2011 at 3:57 pm
The simple answer is all western business is being taxed off shore to low wage Asian economies where workers have no rights and work for 10c an hour.
The attack on teh minimum wage will continue till we’re all paupers working for the same. Then the businesses will come back.
Look what they did to one of the most historically famous businesses in the US
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September 9th, 2011 at 4:38 pm
It’s not at all inexplicable.
Vote:1) Few kids who get jobs consequent to a cut in the youth minimum wage would credit Key for it.
2) All kids who get a wage cut consequent to a cut in the youth minimum wage would blame Key for it.
3) Saying utterly outrageous and economically illiterate things on the minimum wage lets Key give some room for ACT on the right on an issue that ought to boost ACT’s vote. I can’t imagine that Key is so stupid as to believe his recent comments on the youth minimum wage; it has to be strategy to try and give room to ACT.
September 9th, 2011 at 5:39 pm
It has to be a strategy to give room for ACT. I cannot believe that Key could justify this any other way. But the price is too high – ruining thousands of lives. It is actually quite sick, and very very selfish. Every National MP should be tossing and turning all night in bed over this issue.
Sometimes you have to make a stand and take the criticism on the chin.
Key’s ploy has worked for me – I’ll be voting ACT.
Vote:September 9th, 2011 at 5:59 pm
Unskilled inexperienced 16 year olds are not paid the minimum wage they are paid the training wage of $10.20 for the first 200 hours of employment if their job requires any form of skill or training. Skilled and trained 16 year olds are paid the minimum wage as they should be.
Vote:September 9th, 2011 at 6:38 pm
Carr you obviously live in some place called lala land. please advise all us employers of the stats to back up your clain.
Vote:You can’t so go back to your state funded salary and look after it before that goes as well.
Willy wanker, rights destroyer, control freak.
September 9th, 2011 at 6:40 pm
It is inexplicable that National has continued with what can only be called the failed experiment of applying the adult minimum wage to unskilled inexperienced 16 year olds who want to gain some work experience.
Hell DPF. You should have learnt better by now. You are talking about the socialist stalking horse here. Nats never change what Labour sets in place. Never have, never will. Open thine eyes and let the day light in.
Vote:September 9th, 2011 at 11:01 pm
This still befuddles me. Will someone please explain how a youth minimum wage is not discrimination? I mean, I get why you would want a lower minimum wage for “unskilled inexperienced 16 year olds”, but then why not unskilled inexperienced 20 year olds? How is it not discrimination to arbitrarily pick an age at which you can pay less, regardless of skills or experience?
Vote:September 10th, 2011 at 12:12 am
I think it’s funny that despite the numbers climbing so high since the youth wage was eliminated, some people still think that is has nothing to do with the youth wage no longer existing.
Key knows this but doesn’t want to upset the soft Nats – who will abandon him anyway once Labour becomes more palatable in a few years. And yet when Labour wins again they would never give National the same courtesy!
Thank goodness ACT is still standing by its own principles over this. Who can forget Sir Rogers’s impassioned speech about youth unemployment… shame on National, shame on Labour and the Greens.
Vote:September 10th, 2011 at 6:10 am
wooh! You nearly had me then, but you had to go and use ‘ACT’ and ‘principles’ in the same breath . . .
Vote:September 10th, 2011 at 6:32 am
But seriously isn’t the only answer to this to abolish minimum wage altogether. If in principle setting a wage rate for ‘youth’ is a skewed model? On the brief episode I ever paid anyone to work for me as an employer, she was young, but I paid more than the minimum wage, and guess what she got trained then left me in teh lurch. But that’s people for you. I wouldn’t be so naive as to think that any leislation about how I manage that relationship would have changd that circumstance. When times are good you pay to keep people on, or they leave, when they are bad, they need all the help they can get to survive so they stay. Well-heeled politicians pontificating about this kind of thing is just disingenuous, facile and false. Never drew the ‘minimum’ wage in their lives.
Not one of them ever docked their own wage to keep a valued employee, and not one of them ever ignored punitive employment law to shed one if it suited them regardless of their political hue. But still they want to micro-manage our business, like King Canute holding back the economic tide, when plainly they haven’t got a clue about how things are operating at grass-roots levels. At least Canute had teh wisdom to inform his sychophants about teh ero of their views. FFS any moron can bang off a speech about how better to curtail the culture of entitlement amongst the [insert label]. You’ll always get the same sheep applauding their ‘principled’ stance.
For example the wages are so low it pays better to go on the dole.
So let’s remedy that by stoppping the dole! cue applause. Simplistic claptrap which appeals to those who glibly wander through life and have never had the experience of really facing hard-times unless it is in a lbound, imited edition of the Dickens version. Champagne reformers, in their heated vivariums completely clueless because they are surrounded by sychophants. Thye pay three, four times the minimum hourly wage for one bottle of wine, laugh at the sucker who serves it to them then pontificate about ‘pulling myself up by my bootstraps’ to any one who is unfortunate enough to get within earshot and have to bear their drunken babbling.
rant ends.
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