Economists at Alliance Capital Management LP in New York have looked at employment trends in 20 large economies and found that from 1995 to 2002, more than 22 million jobs in the manufacturing sector were eliminated, a decline of more than 11%. The US lost about 2 million jobs, an 11% drop, but Brazil had a 20% decline. Japan's factory workforce shed 16% of its jobs while China's was down by 15%.

Joseph Carson, director of global economic research at Alliance, says the reasons are similar around the globe — gains in technology and competitive pressure have forced factories to become more efficient, allowing them to boost output with far fewer workers. And even as jobs declined, global industrial output has risen more than 30%.

Source—"Who's Got the Jobs" www.jobsletter.org.nz/stt/whosgot197.htm; Independent, 27 October 2003 "Global Factory Employment Falls" by Jon Hilsenrath and Rececca Buckman

In the last two years, US manufacturing employment has declined by 1.3 million, or 8.1%. This is far worse than the first eight recoveries since 1939 that lasted at least two years ... where manufacturing enjoyed strong job growth of between 5.0% and 16.2%.

— The Job Watch website (part of the US-based Economic Policy Institute) can be found at www.jobwatch.org

`JOBLESS RECOVERY' LEADING TO RISE IN US POVERTY

So far, the tax cut stimulus has resulted in little job growth in the US. The number of jobs increased by just 57,000 in November, falling 249,000 jobs short of the administration's projection in that month alone. The administration had projected that the tax cuts plan would result in 1,530,000 new jobs within the first five months after the tax cuts took effect. In fact, only 271,000 jobs were created and the cumulative shortfall is now 1,259,000 jobs.

• The decline in jobs, and in particular manufacturing jobs, has been linked to a big increase in poverty in the US, according to Julian Borger writing in the Guardian Weekly. The number of Americans living below the poverty line (about $18,000 for a family of four) has increased to 34.6 million or about one-in-eight of the population. More than a third of these poor people are children and Borger says that the US child poverty rate is the worst in the industrialised world. And furthermore, poor households in America are likely to stay poor for longer than their counterparts in Europe, Canada or Japan. Borger: "The US may be the wealthiest and the most powerful nation in the history of the planet, but it does not look like so much of a superpower at home. It is being eaten away from the inside by persistent poverty and hunger ... "

• Across the American heartland, the lines of people at soup kitchens and foodbanks have lengthened dramatically ... with scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression. In Ohio, which has lost 16% of its manufacturing jobs over the last three years, nearly a fifth of the population applied for food assistance last year. One-in-six of the state's children are hungry or at risk from hunger.

Lisa Hamler-Podolski, who runs Second Harvest, a food charity in McArthur, Ohio, says that some of those who queue for food are the "new poor". Hamler-Podolski: "These are fiscal conservatives, who thought they had secure jobs. They owned houses and two cars and they thought they would do better than their parents, but they are now liquidating their retirement funds. These are people who never believed they would be coming to a food pantry ... "

Source—Guardian Weekly 6-12 November 2003 "Disillusioned poor no threat to Bush" BY Julian Borger

PRIVATE SURGERY TO GET BENEFICIARIES BACK TO WORK

Maharey says that a key factor would be how much money would be saved by funding operations in private hospitals. This would require accurate calculations of the amount a beneficiary would be paid while they waited on a public list, how much more quickly their operation could be done privately, how soon they could return to work, and the cost of the operation. The principle is the same as that used by ACC which often funds private surgery so that claimants can return to work. Maharey stresses that no one would be pushed down the public health waiting list because the operations would be done by private healthcare providers.

— There are about 69,000 New Zealanders on Invalid Benefits and 40,000 on Sickness Benefits. The total cost of these benefits is estimated to be just under $1.5 billion this financial year.

• ACT Party leader Richard Prebble agrees that it makes no financial sense to pay a welfare benefit to people who could return to work if they had an operation. But why stop there? Prebble: "If it makes sense for accident victims and sickness beneficiaries to have operations done more quickly and cheaply in private hospitals, they why not have the same service available to the rest of us?"

Source—Dominion Post 5 December 2003 "Surgery plan for beneficiaries" by Martin Kay. New Zealand Herald 5 December 2003 "Private care plan for sick beneficiaries" by Ruth Berry.

MORE PEOPLE WORKING PAST RETIREMENT AGE

Source—Dominion Post 27 November 2003 "More work beyond age of retirement" NZPA

MORE WOMEN NEEDED FOR APPRENTICESHIP SCHEME

The Modern Apprenticeship Scheme pays training co-ordinators to relieve employers from administrative responsibilities when taking on workers between 16—21 years. The heavily funded scheme has been well received by the public and generated strong demand by employers for apprentices. But in a Human Rights Commission discussion paper, McGregor and Massey University researcher Lance Gray point out that of the 5,739 apprentices on the scheme at the end of June, there were only 381 women. They say that equity issues must be addressed for the scheme to be taken seriously as a "modern" initiative.

(Maori make up 14.3% of the Modern Apprentices, which reflects the national population balance. But Maori women account for only 9% of the Maori apprentice numbers).

• Minister of Tertiary Education and Employment Steve Maharey says that the report "puts the onus on us" to encourage more female participation. The government has tried to lessen the gender imbalance by expanding the scheme to more "female-friendly" fields such as hospitality, tourism, retailing and office administration. As the number of trades included in the Modern Apprenticeship Scheme grew to 28, the proportion of women participants has edged up from a level of 5% in June last year.

Source—New Zealand Herald 8 December 2003 "Training scheme fails `half' population" by Matthew Dearnaley.

APPRENTICES WANTED

Source – The Dominion Post 10 December 2003 “Call for the return of apprentices” by Tim Fitzsimons

WORKPLACE REFORM

• The Bill will also provide higher levels of protection for "vulnerable" workers when a business is sold, transferred or their work is contracted out. These "vulnerable" workers are commonly cleaners, food service workers, orderlies and laundry workers in the health sector and in rest homes, and laundry workers and caretakers in the education sector ... a group of workers which Darien Fenton, the Service and Food Workers Union national secretary, describes as "the least visible in our society." Under the new Act, these workers will be able to transfer on similar conditions to the new employer, or have the right to redundancy if they are not wanted by new employer.

Green MP Sue Bradford welcomes the changes: "No longer will workers have to worry about showing up to work one morning, discovering that management has decided to sell or there's been a hostile takeover, and then having to apply for their jobs again, possibly with reduced conditions and lower pay."

Source—New Zealand Herald 5 December 2003 "Unions to get more power" by Kevin Taylor; Minister of Labour's press release, Employment Relations Law Reform 4 December 2003, Questions and Answers http://www.beehive.govt.nz/wilson/era-law-reform-bill/home.cfm Questions and Answers.

BANKS SAYS NO TO TASKFORCE

Banks believes that school leavers will be recruited into Auckland's growing road construction industry. He says developers are also desperate for tradespeople to work on some big projects looming, including the building of 6,000 houses on the former Winstone Quarry in Mt Wellington and the shopping development at Sylvia Park on 24 hectares of land. Banks says that under his leadership over the next 20 years, Auckland City will absorb $20 billion worth of investment and will provide 100,000 new jobs.

— Between 1993 and 2002, unemployment in Auckland dropped by 6%. The youth unemployment rate in Auckland is 13.6%, much higher than the 4.3% for the population generally.

Source—East and Bays Courier, Auckland 12 November 2003 "Banks says no to task force" by Jenny Keown.

MIGRANT JOB HELP FOR AUCKLAND

Minister of Employment Steve Maharey says that migrants and refugees have many skills and talents to offer employers but they often face language, culture, qualifications and skill barriers. The intention of the new strategy is to help migrants overcome these and achieve economic and social independence.

• Maharey has also recently opened the Multilingual Contact Centre, a new Winz service that will enable clients to speak to a Winz staff in their native language. The Contact Centre will offer 0800 telephone lines for people who speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic and Hindi and it expects to add five more languages by early 2004. It is also expanding its online services so clients can download self-paced English as second language training packages.

— Work and Income Multilingual Contact Centre, phone general inquiries at 0800 559 009 and ask for the telephone number for the language you would like to use.

Source—press release NZ government 1 December 2003, "New strategy targets employment for migrants"; Dominion Post 2 December 2003 "$21m set aside for migrant job help"

EXTRA ANNUAL LEAVE TWICE AS EXPENSIVE

Minster of Labour Margaret Wilson says the government had made it clear there would be unspecified flow-on costs and there was likely to be "give and take" when it came to wage negotiations. She estimates that a worker earning $10 per hour would lose only $80 a year in lost wage increases and conditions. Wilson: "You don't get something for nothing ... everyone has four years to make the adjustments. The extra costs can be spread over that time and the impact on everyone should be minimal."

• National Party leader Don Brash predicts that taking a week of production out of the economy will have a big effect on wages. The party caucus has confirmed that a National-led government would revoke the fourth week of leave and instead allow employers and employees to negotiate whether they take the money or the week.

Source—Sunday Star-Times 30 November 2003 "$700m true cost of extra week's leave" by Jonathan Milne

OZ TARIFF CUTS ON FIVE-YEAR HOLD

Tariffs will stop at 10% for cotton sheeting, woven fabrics, carpet and footwear and 7.5% for sleeping bags, table linen and some footwear parts between 2005 and 2009. From 2010 these will be reduced to 5%. Clothing and certain finished textile tariffs will stop at 17.5% from 2005, then drop to 10% from 2010 and to 5% from 2015. The assistance package includes a A$50 million structural adjustment programme to offer case-by-case support for workers made redundant by large plant closures.

Source—New Zealand Herald 28 November 2003 "Tariff cuts on 5-year hold".

WAL-MART — THE SHOPPING WAY TO UNEMPLOYMENT?

Wal-Mart is not just the world's largest retailer. It's the world's largest company — bigger than ExxonMobil, bigger than General Motors, bigger than General Electric. The scale of its business is enormous: Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what the number two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals.

The giant retailer is at least partly responsible for the low rate of US inflation. A McKinsey & Co study recently concluded that about 12% of the US economy's productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s can be traced to Wal-Mart alone.

• But, according to Fast Company, the "story that never gets told" is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of providing "everyday low prices".

Fast Company: "Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close US plants in favour of outsourcing products from overseas ... "

Of course, US companies have been moving jobs offshore for decades, long before Wal-Mart was a retailing power. But Fast Company concludes that there is no question that this huge chain of stores is helping accelerate the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to "Buy American", has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone, buying some $12 billion in merchandise in 2002. This amounts to nearly 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States.

• One example from the Fast Company article: Steve Dobbins is president and CEO of Carolina Mills, a 75-year-old North Carolina company that supplies thread, yarn, and textile finishing to apparel makers — half of which supply Wal-Mart. Carolina Mills grew steadily until 2000. But in the past three years, as its customers have gone either overseas or out of business, it has shrunk from 17 factories to 7, and from 2,600 employees to 1,200. Dobbins's customers have begun to face imported clothing sold so cheaply to Wal-Mart that they could not compete even if they paid their workers nothing.

Dobbins: "People ask, `How can it be bad for things to come into the US cheaply? How can it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?' I say, sure, it's held inflation down, and it's great to have bargains ... but you can't buy anything if you're not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs."

— Fast Company Issue 77 December 2003 "The Wal-Mart You Don't Know" by Charles Fishman can be read at www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

Source—Fast Company Issue 77 December 2003 "The Wal-Mart You Don't Know" by Charles Fishman.