Manufacturing jobs
October 9th, 2012 at 1:00 pm by David Farrar
This graph of of the number of manufacturing jobs, as reported by the Household Labour Force Survey, from the beginning of 2009.
This is what Russel Norman hysterically claims is a crisis.
Tags: employment, Russel Norman
October 9th, 2012 at 1:09 pm
DPF, you get an A for effort. But you must work harder when it comes to spinning the truth.
Even Steven Joyce has admitted that manufacturing jobs are in decline.
http://www.parliament.nz/en-NZ/PB/Business/QOA/5/8/3/50HansQ_20120814_00000004-4-Manufacturing-Sector-Job-Retention-and.htm
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:10 pm
Could you take the graph back to under the last government?
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:11 pm
Thanks DPF! But wait – why start the graph in 2009? The HLFS goes back to the early 1980s.
[DPF: I wanted to go back that far but sadly Stats NZ industry data is only back to 2003. As the focus is on what has happened under National, I started at the beginning of their term]
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Linked Employer-Employee Data (LEED) job numbers versus Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS) people employed:
Take your pick depending on whetehr you want a whirly gig or a micro spotlight.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:26 pm
All of this is a load of CRAP.
New Zealand, according to red melon russel [sic], Parker et al, is the only nation with economic worries (not real trouble!).
The reality is that we are doing pretty well and the MSM are away on planet Uranus. Come back to earth!
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:28 pm
“There is no question that the high exchange rate is hurting some exporters—no question about that.” ~ John Key
http://www.parliament.nz/en-NZ/PB/Business/QOA/a/7/4/50HansQ_20120926_00000003-3-Manufacturing-Sector-Job-Losses.htm
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:30 pm
@ Danyl
Because Norman is blaming National for the current situation. Labour dropped 30,000 jobs in 2008 but they don’t apparantly count according to the EPMU and greens.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:31 pm
Chart I chucked together showing the HLFS manufacturing employment data from statistics.goct.nz infoshare:
http://tinypic.com/r/2gtxeme/6
Shows a well defined drop-off in manufacturing employment from 2008 Q2.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:35 pm
ross69 (899) Says:
October 9th, 2012 at 1:28 pm
Vote:“There is no question that the high exchange rate is hurting some exporters—no question about that”. So what are you trying to say?? Printing money and fucking the entire country by making everything more expensive is hardly going to solve the issue is it? Yet that is exactly what the Greens and Labour are wanting to do. Manufacturing is not doing as badly as it is being made out. Just remember Ross, your beloved Labour party had the export sector in recession from 2005 onwards so anything they have to say on growing exports is a crock of shit.
October 9th, 2012 at 1:38 pm
Because Norman is blaming National for the current situation. Labour dropped 30,000 jobs in 2008 but they don’t apparantly count according to the EPMU and greens.
National ARE supposed to be the economic wizards. Currently their case is: ‘manufacturing not doing too much worse than it was under Labour during the global financial crisis.’
[DPF: My graph was about what has happened under National. It shows there is no crisis, which is the hysterical claim from the Greens. During 2008, the number of jobs fell significantly, but have remained pretty constant since.]
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:39 pm
Because Dany’ls so damn modest http://dimpost.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/still-in-stage-one-of-kubler-ross-model/
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:44 pm
> Printing money and fucking the entire country by making everything more expensive is hardly going to solve the issue is it?
Firstly, we have to admit there is a problem. John Key blithely pretends there is no problem. Well, true, he hasn’t been made redundant. This is about the loss of jobs, not about printing money. But since you’ve raised the issue, I doubt that those laid off are smiling at the current rate of inflation.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:48 pm
Danyl has done a chart too – full time manufacturing jobs per capita since 2006. He disses:
Does he make an unintentional error excluding non-full-time jobs?
It still shows the most significant drop off from mid 2008, while Labour were still running Government, so I’m not sure what point Danyl is trying to make apart from demonstrating his charting prowess.
And proving that graphical depiction of selected statistics can be used in many ways.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:54 pm
Here is the HLFS manufacturing employment data plotted against the TWI, also from infoshare.
http://tinypic.com/r/28m37s6/6
As you can tell I have only just discovered infoshare. I was never any good at Excel.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:54 pm
That’s what your chart shows Danyl. There was a slump in employment when the GFC STARTED in 2008 and it’s been wobbly since, as has the economy due to the extended duration of the GFC which is currently shown on Wikipedia as The 2007–2012 global financial crisis.
Trying to claim the initial slump was due to the GFC but now it’s National’s fault is as bad as any other biased blame based on selective statistics.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 1:57 pm
ross69: John Key blithely pretends there is no problem.
Bull. He’s claiming there’s no crisis, but he hasn’t said there is no problem as far as I’m aware.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 2:01 pm
Why isn’t the decline in global demand being factored into this noise? This is not a silver bullet argument as it appears to be from the left. We could lower the dollar by lets say 5% but is that going to open the wallets of the conusmers around the world to our product in a time where spending on items beyond the necessities are in decline? There doesn’t appear to be ANY analysis done by our media so yet again; “the government is out of touch”.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 2:03 pm
Perhaps if dpf were in the exporting industry he’d be whistling a different tune?
Actually, no perhaps about it.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 2:13 pm
> He’s claiming there’s no crisis
You’re playing semantics, Pete. If there’s a problem, you try to sort it. You don’t wait til it worsens…but Key is happy to sit on his hands.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 2:16 pm
The graph shows ten thousand jobs gone. That’s crisis magnified ten thousand.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 2:29 pm
The graph should have a vertical scale that goes to zero. As displayed, it over-exaggerates the fluctuations.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 2:33 pm
You’re playing semantics, Pete.
No he is not, the difference between what is considered a crisis vs a problem can be quite large. What you have done is exaggerate the problem into a crisis.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 2:33 pm
Ross, Key isn’t sitting on his hands. He simply doesn’t agree that there is a crisis and others don’t either.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 2:35 pm
ross69 – what do you suggest Key does?
Prop up the international coal market?
Prop up the international aluminium market?
Prop up international manufacturing that uses coal and aluminium?
Prop up jobs in any sector that says they are going to shed them?
Create new jobs that aren’t needed?
Or do you have some better suggestions? Like twiddling with exchange rates? Which would probably be as effective as piddling on a volcano.
Ah, so Labour should have sorted it all when it happened in 2008? Before it worsened.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 2:35 pm
But since you’ve raised the issue, I doubt that those laid off are smiling at the current rate of inflation
Do you only care about those laid off due to the high dollar? Or will you also care about those workers laid off as a result of purposely devaluing the NZ dollar just to save a few manufacturing jobs?
My guess is you’d still blame National, regardless of who is in power.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 2:39 pm
Ah, so Labour should have sorted it all when it happened in 2008? Before it worsened.
No, they should have foreseen the impending clusterfuck and restructured the economy accordingly WHEN the country had excessively large surpluses to fund it. Instead they budgeted for structural spending increases to give handouts to their core constituents that could not be wound back during the downturn.
Ross would call that ‘progressive economics’ – I call it ‘economic-sabotage’.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 2:48 pm
DPF has deliberately “cheery picked” the graph, but the point is the Greens, the Unions and Labour are doing the same with the manufacturing data to score political points.
The real question is are governments responsible for creating jobs (read: improving the “economics” of select industries in NZ by tilting the playing field in their favour, thereby benefiting a few over the many). They can do that, but that’s called subsidising, picking winners, etc. Overall we don’t benefit.
What the government can do is reduce it’s compliance costs, and operate a safe, corruption free, business friendly environment. The rest is up to the rest of us. I don’t care if it is Labour or National “in charge” of the tweaking, but let’s not place too much expectation on the magical abilities of John Key, Russell Norman, Winston Peters, or David (Shearer, Parker, Cunliffe?) to change the world economy in our collective favour.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 3:09 pm
So the Greenies want to fuck over the rest of us with much higher inflation and/or interest rates so they can give their ‘mates’ in the private sector huge amounts of corporate welfare so they can just pocket the extra profits?
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 3:22 pm
“What the government can do is reduce it’s compliance costs, and operate a safe, corruption free, business friendly environment.”
How do you facilitate a safe and corruption free manufacturing environment without compliance costs? Does it just happen by itself?
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 6:41 pm
@ Ross69
PG asked you a fantastic question at 2.35pm. You abviously are an economics genius who can fix a GLOBAL, YES GLOBAL, financial crisis all on your own. Please don’t leave yourself out there looking like a mouth piece only – as they say “if we wanted to hear from an arsehole we could have asked you to fart”.
I am also keen to know, when you are king for the day, what jobs would you create. Industries please.
Won’t hold my breath.
Vote:October 9th, 2012 at 9:21 pm
Bad stuff happens in the real world. So does good stuff. And often it depends on which end of the telescope you are at for how you see things.
Now it is easy for governments to transfer wealth around to fix the squeaky wheels that are suffering (in this case exporters), particularly if the hurt can be hidden by spreading it thinly (who’s going to notice a bit of inflation in the short-term).
The hard thing is for governments to adopt policies that will make us better off in aggregate. Holding the real value of the NZ$ constant (after taking account of productivity improvements of the odd percentage point or two) is one such policy. It simply means that economic activity goes on in the economy without the distortion of the value of the $ changing over time. It avoids wasteful economic activity encouraged by that distortion.
What good monetary policy does do – and this is one of its strengths – is that it draws attention to the rigidities in the non-tradeables sector. In NZ the pain being felt by the exporter (tradeables) is more intense because they can’t pass it on to the non-tradeables.
The solution from the Greens and Labour is to shoot the messenger.
They should instead focus on policies that improve real productivity in the non-tradeable sectors; encourage policies that make it easier to move resources away from areas that long-term are in decline (i.e. greater adaptability); and look to helping the tradeable’s sector to develop strategies to ride through the ravages of price changes in the external economy (natural hedging and high value adding that can provide a buffer for these eventualities).
Vote: