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    Voices
    Feedback on the Employment Taskforce Report
    from The Jobs Letter No.7 / 20 December 1994

    The Jobs Letter has been receiving many comments by phone, letter and fax over the last fortnight. Here's a sampling -

  • Massey Economics Professor Srikanta Chatterjee believes that NZ's expected budget surplus should be seen as an opportunity to invest in proposals for the education and training of long-term unemployed, even though such investments would slow down the debt retirement programme. Chatterjee : " The NZ economy has achieved a number of notable gains over the last decade. It is now necessary to spread the benefits in favour of the disadvantaged. Reducing unemployment substantially would be the single most important step in that direction..."

    Chaterjee believes that the debate around the Taskforce report must now address wider policy issues. In particular, he advocates that (a) there should be an explicit acceptance of full employment as a policy goal by government, (b) a widening of the fiscal and monetary goals to balance the economy, not just the budget, and (c) an acceptance of the need to examine the economic and social costs of unemployment together with those of inflation before setting policy priorities.

  • Alistair Shaw of the NZ University Students Association writes: " I strongly oppose your definition of increasing the school leaving age to 17 yrs as one of "five hot proposals". All this will do is further hide people from the unemployment statistics. If school was appropriate for the young people then they would be in class already. The key to making people spend more time in education and training is to make that education and training relevant to them - not by forcing them or threatening them with poverty by removing access to income support ..."

  • A fax from BERL's economist Dennis Rose : "The proposals deserve wide attention and discussion. Most make good sense. I have two reservations. The first hangs around the problems of creating effective support systems on the scale proposed, with the consequent risk of churning the unemployed past an unhelpful bureaucracy, leading to disillusionment and backlash... Secondly, whilst initiatives in training, education and individualised practical support are all likely to be employment positive, at the end of the day the aggregate number of jobs is significantly influenced by the overall performance of the economy ... There are significant differences in opinion on macro economic management which need to be faced in the forthcoming multi-party talks and indeed by the community at large."

  • Tim Hazeldine, Auckland University Professor of Economics, writes in the Independent : " The Taskforce's explicit or implicit assumption is that unemployment is a supply-side, micro-economic phenomenon. There is no macro-economics; nothing much on the inadequacies on the demand side. It is as though Keynes - the greatest economist of the 20th century - had never existed.

    " ... the Taskforce report is nearly all about honing and polishing the "pegs" - the workers - so they fit better into the existing "holes" - jobs. But what if the real problem is that there just isn't enough holes to go around ? And, if pegs and holes are different shapes, why not explore the exciting idea of reshaping the jobs, rather than always assuming it is the workers who have the wrong skills or attitudes or wage expectations and who must adjust to fit in..."

  • Sue Bradford, of the Auckland Unemployed Workers Rights Centre : " The Taskforce members are to be congratulated for having listened to what groups like ours had to say in their submission process. After many years in the wilderness, it is a pleasant surprise to have people like John Anderson, Steve Marshall and Ken Douglas take our submissions seriously. The onus is now on the government to take immediate action on this report. If Mr Bolger drags the chain on this one, it will be clear to all NZers that the process has been nothing more than the elaborate public relations exercise we thought it would be in the first place... "

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