— unemployment has dropped in all the categories for youth, the mature, the long and the very long term unemployed.

— the unemployment rate for Pacific Island people has remained the same as last quarter but has risen over the year from 9.1% last June to the current 9.7%.

— Maori unemployment has risen in the last quarter from 10.8% to 11.0% but is still lower than it was a year ago.

— there were 57,000 new jobs created in the last year, an increase of 3.1%.

— full-time employment grew by 1% (or 14,000 jobs) in the quarter while part-time employment dropped by 1.2% (or 5,000 jobs).

— the labour force participation rate has dropped and is now at 66.7%

— the greatest regional reduction in unemployment has been in Northland. While the region still has the highest unemployment in the country, the rate reduced from 10.5% to 8.4% this last quarter. Official jobless figures in Northland (those without a job and wanting a job) dropped from 17.5% to 13.8%.

Source — The Household Labour Force Survey June 2002 quarter commentary by Statistics New Zealand

OVERWORK

Interim Report of the Thirty Families Project: The Impact of Work Hours on New Zealand Families a report commissioned by the NZCTU, July 2002, can be viewed in HTML format: www.union.org.nz/publications/1027290655_21731.html

Source — New Zealand Herald 22 July 2002 “Overwork damaging families, say unions” Mathew Dearnaly; Workers Online issue 146, 26 July 2002 “The right to life” by Noel Hester; The Dominion Post 24 July 2002 “Longer working hours take toll” Grant Fleming, “The Dominion Post 27 July 2002 “All work and no play” Diana McCurdy; New Zealand Herald 24 July 2002 “Loyalty stems from life, work balance” Ashley Campbell;

BANK TO TOP-UP PAID PARENTAL LEAVE

Source — Sunday Star Times 23 June 2002 “Bank to pay 12 weeks parental leave” by Miriyana Alexander; New Zealand Herald 24 June 2002 “Move to offer new parents full pay” by Martin Johnston, Rebecca Walsh, Mathew Dearnaley

TEACHERS LEAVING

Leaving teacher Simon Walter told the Weekend Herald that money was not the biggest issue for teachers. He says that even $10,000 more would not entice him to stay. Walter: “It would be good for the teacher who are staying, but it won’t effect my decision. What I think would be better would be to see a workload reduction of about a fifth.” Other new teachers say they are leaving because they can’t earn enough to pay-off their student loans. Some say they only earn enough to pay the interest on their loans and are looking for work that pays enough to reduce the principle as well.

Source — Weekend Herald 15-16 June 2002 “Those who can, leave” by Dita De Bono; The Dominion Post 3 August “Learning about a better life elsewhere” by Juli e Clothier

FROM PRIMARY TO SECONDARY

TeachNZ manager Irene Lynch defends the scheme saying that only experienced primary school teachers who had a minimum of one Stage Two paper in the subject they intended to teach would be enrolled in the ten-week course. Lynch: “All they have to do is learn the difference between teaching older and younger students.” However, a recent Post Primary Teachers Association survey found that 25% of schools are forced to use teachers to teach outside their subject specialty.

Source — The Dominion Post 6 August 2002 “Fast-track teacher training ‘ludicrous’ by Leah Haines; Weekend Herald 15-16 June 2002 “Keeping our teachers” PPTA school staffing report March 2002

THE FOREIGN STUDENT INDUSTRY

There were 52,696 fee-paying foreign students in NZ last year, 85% of them from Asia. More than half attend private courses but many of them attend tertiary institutions and 10,555 of them are at secondary and primary schools. The parents of foreign school children pay about $10,000 in fees per year for their child to attend school and these fees add as much as a third to the operations budgets of some schools. These schools tend to sport new classrooms and upgraded language and technology suites as well as additional teachers which they say benefits more than just the foreign students.

Minster of Education Trevor Mallards says that operations grants for schools will never meet community expectations but inflation-proofing the annual grants, which the government has done, was the most effective form of defence against dependence on foreign fee-paying students to augment budgets. In some schools foreign student numbers represent 10% of their roles and Mallard agrees that NZ schools have just about reached their capacity. However, Education NZ (a government agency responsible for foreign student education) says that the foreign student industry could grow to three or four times what it is now.

Source — North & South July 2002 “Schools for sale” by Nicola Shepheard; Weekend Herald 18-19 May 2002 “Lesson in foreign exchange” by Warren Gable and Graham Reid; Sunday Star Times 19 may 2002 “Billion-dollar student boom” by Greg Ninness; Weekend Herald 1-2 June 2002 “Mean host jeopardise” by Geoff Cumming; New Zealand Herald 12 June 2002 “Education industry revving up” by Caron Taurima; The Guardian Weekly July 2002 “Ireland rise to Chinese student ‘flood’” Marie O”Halloran and “Student visa shocks”, Citizenship classes”, “Japan conversation”, “Slovak training” by Max de Lotbiniere.

INTERNATIONAL DEMAND FOR NURSES GROWS

Source — Guardian Weekly July 25-31 2002, “Alarm as US woos nurses from NHS” by John Carvel

LONGER WORKING LIFE

During the last two decades the trend has been for both males and females in the over 45 year old age group to have a diminishing workforce participation rate. But the latest Australian figures show that workforce participation for older workers has increased over the last decade and for the 55 – 59 age group it has risen sharply from 54.1% to 61.2%, getting closer to the participation rate of the general population.

Source —The Melbourne Age 29 may 2002 “Grey power digging in at work” by Tim Colebatch; Weekend Herald 15-16 June 2002 “Job boom for baby boomers” Bloomberg

MEXICANS WAVE (GOODBYE) TO JOBS

The shift in manufacturing from the US to Mexico was boosted by the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994) and by the fact that American workers are paid six to ten times more than Mexicans are to do the same work. Now, manufacturers are being drawn to Thailand, Vietnam, China and Indonesia where workers are often paid just $US15 a week, which is less than what a Mexican is paid to work one day, and less than many American factory workers would get for an hour. The wage differential is so great that, at current fuel prices, it is cheaper to manufacture goods in Asia and transport them across the Pacific Ocean than it is to manufacture with the cheapest labour in North America.

Source — Guardian Weekly 11-17 July 2002 (The Washington Post) “Mexican workers become victims of their success” by Mary Jordan

SOMAVIA: GLOBAL JOBS DEFICIT

The ILO estimates that about 500 million new jobs will need to be created mainly in developing countries over the next decade just to cope with the young people and women entering the labour market. Somavia: “No one is producing a scenario for the next decade based on the need to fill this yawning deficit.” Somavia is calling on public authorities to try to harness the potential of informal workers and small businesses, and to provide a better social safety net through minimum income schemes. He also calls for greater localized development initiatives as well as new ways of guaranteeing social protection and support for the informal economy. Somavia: "Employment continuity is an increasingly fragile foundation for the social protection system”.

Source — Tehran Times 5 August 2002 “Globalisation’s inability to create jobs fuels mass migration: ILO chief”