22.
Fulltime Equivalent Employment in New Zealand (31 May)21.
Our Planet needs an International Tax-Benefit System (29 May)20.
On Democracy: letter submitted to The Listener (20 May)19.
Public Transport in Auckland; letter to Central Leader (15 May)18.
The Politics of the 1998 Budget (14 May)17.
Winning the Hearts and Minds of the Post-Muldoon Generation (13 May)
_____________________________________________________________________
Fulltime Equivalent Employment in New Zealand
(31 May)Yesterday I was asked the following:
Do you have access to tables of the number of: "Full-time equivalent employees" in NZ?
(1) To get it, are x part-time converted into y full-time? (e.g. y/x=1/2) ? and:
(2) What have the economic changes since 1984 done to: (a) the absolute numbers, (b) the proportion relative to the number at working age, and (c) the proportion relative to the total population ?
In the '50s, when I started full-time work, I was under the impression that the number of: "Full-time equivalent employees" in NZ was larger than the number of working age men, by an amount dependent on the number of women working and the number of men on the sickness benefit. Basically, that almost all fit men had a full-time job.
My guess is that: (c) above has been decreasing over the last 15 years.
I replied:
Fulltime Equivalent Employment counts all part-timers as "one-half".
The "Reforms" since 1984 have had some apparently contradictory effects. They have hastened the growth of the female labour force (esp. in the 1980s) & have led to a resurgence in labour force participation of older persons (esp. in the 1990s), and have raised the (part-time) participation rates of secondary and tertiary students. The latter now work part-time through the year as a matter of course, whereas those of us born before (say) 1965 worked for wages full-time in the summer vacation and not at all during the rest of the year.
The 1980s and 1990s have also been decades in which an unusually high proportion of the population has been of working age.
There has also been a tendency for the average individual work-week to increase, with more people working very long hours (often unpaid overtime). The mean length of the working week hasn't changed much though, because of the growth of the part-time workforce.
So, employment has expanded through the 1980s and most of the 1990s. Unemployment - official and unofficial - has also expanded. The reforms have given us the curse of simultaneous unemployment, underemployment and overemployment. Many families now commit twice as much parental time to the labour market compared to the 1970s.
The group that has shrunk is the "non-workforce".
Today, males and females under 35 are earning in real terms about the same as females were earning in 1971, before the introduction of equal pay. And men and women in their 20s are earning the same as each other. There is no systematic bias in favour of males in the labour market as such, although there may be in the upper echelons of the corporate world. These executive echelons of the labour force however conform to their own corporate culture, and not according to labour market principles.
Anyway, the proportion of full-time equivalent workers to the entire population has barely changed since 1984. The reforms have affected the structure of the labour market, rather than reducing paid employment. Old-fashioned 37.5 hour jobs have given way to McJobs.
------------------------------------------------------------
Our Planet needs an International Tax-Benefit System
(29 May)A recent article by Edward Carr in The Economist "A Second Fall" ("The ocean used to seem infinite in its bounty. Now it needs care and maintenance.") - plus news reports about the earth-damaging fires simultaneously burning in Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico and Central America - demonstrate the urgency for the introduction of effective global governance with respect to economic (ie environmental) issues that are too big for national governments to resolve.
The environment is subject to many "positive feedback" or destabilising mechanisms, in addition to the "negative feedback" or equilibrating mechanisms that are emphasised by neoliberal economics. The international economic system is acting to break the planet because it lacks any adequate provision to take public action to correct areas of international market failure.
In the case of the fires, a number of destabilising mechanisms have been identified whereby loss of rainforest leads to a loss of rain which - through drought, wind and fire - leads to further loss of rainforest.
Humankind, as hunter-gatherers and as farmers, regarded land - either as a tribal domain, public commons, manor or as individual plots - as the principal source of income. Neither hunter-gathering (of which fishing is the principal modern example) nor the unregulated private farming of marginal lands are sustainable.
The labour market is now the principal source of income, and the tax-benefit system (rather than the plot of land or the fishing boat) is the principal fall-back. This is the way is has to be now; modern living is far removed from the Garden of Eden. Social welfare systems must act to ensure the adequacy of labour market wages, and to provide a non-land (& non-sea) alternative when labour market incomes fall short; ie as a result of short- or long-term unemployment, or a result of circumstances in which people can contribute more to social well-being through non-market activity than through market employment.
An international benefit system is necessary to ensure that desperate people are not obliged to destroy rainforest or overfish the seas in order to survive in a market economy. That of course requires an international tax system, which is overdue anyway, given the emergence of transnational corporations and Internet commerce.
Naturally, the international tax-benefit system should be integrated. The use of the international public domain for private economic gain must be subject to taxation, and international social dividends must be paid (the form of such dividends might vary from country to country; from culture to culture) so as to ensure that all people on the planet are able to live in a way that sustains the international public domain that in turn sustains all of humankind.
An economic system that works by both creating "losers" and by denying them sustainable means of living (thereby obliging them to adopt unsustainable means of survival) is nothing short of madness; a kind of slow collective suicide. The international system requires an international social contract; assurance of social welfare in return for sustainable living.
------------------------------------------------------------
On Democracy: letter submitted to The Listener.
(20 May)Ruth Richardson, despite her membership of a party that depends on MMP, wrote the introduction to Graeme Hunt's book Why MMP Must Go, (reviewed by Grant Mackenzie, May 23).
A few years ago (1991) she described as "unscholarly" some economists who suggested her policy of contracting public spending in the middle of a recession might be "counterproductive". Yet this book she endorses is characterised by "gross inaccuracies", "incoherent hectoring" and "intemperate assertions presented as facts".
It would seem that Richardson's interpretation of the meaning of "scholarly" is any work that allows "the New Right to carry on the reform process unfettered", and that anyone who seeks to fetter the juggernaut - be it a group of economists or a coalition partner - represents either an "unscholarly" viewpoint (meaning "politically incorrect" rather than a lack of scholarship) or an "electoral disaster".
Ideologues seeking power, seeing that democracy inhibits the realisation of their personal utopias, seek to discredit the democratic process. Democracy, always on tentative foundations, is much more important to us than the realisation of any political vision.
------------------------------------------------------------
Public Transport in Auckland; letter to Central Leader
(15 May)letter published on 27 May 1998
I am very concerned about the level of cynicism towards public transport in Auckland displayed by Pat Booth (Off Pat, 13 May) and some correspondents.
Auckland has developed its car culture as a result of a lack of a single convenient place that connects ferry, train and bus transport (including long distance services and airport buses). Furthermore, the sad state of the old Post Office in particular and the Queen Elizabeth Square in general is testimony to the long history of dithering over public transport in Auckland.
Rail travel is essential to making the whole system work, as it is in cities of similar size to Auckland, such as Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane. Unlike buses, trains by-pass the roading gridlock.
What is also needed is a ticketing system that enables passengers to take a single journey on a single ticket where that journey involves connections between transport modes and carriers. We could learn from Adelaide here, a case I'm familiar with.
Aucklanders (not only students) will use public transport when it's cheap and convenient. High subsidies will be essential to establishing a public transport culture in Auckland. Indeed I favour a 12-month period of zero fares, to coincide with the opening of a downtown transport centre. Carriers, funded on a per passenger basis lower than today's fares, would gain from the rise in patronage. Such a fare subsidy should be thought of as an investment in the creation of a city free from arteriosclerosis.
------------------------------------------------------------
The Politics of the 1998 Budget
(14 May)Those on the Left have taken a cynical view of today's budget - a view of resignation rather than one of constructive opposition. There is no "fire-in-the-belly" alternative vision to that presented, based on extreme fiscal conservatism (insisting on a budget surplus during the trough of a cycle) and the social policy of asking for a social contribution from everyone of working age.
The budget should be interpreted as a political statement, and hence we should withhold judgement about its social and economic implications.
NZ First has only one viable strategy in 1998; to make itself an accepted - even respected - part of the government. It has to reign in the Act threat - the threat from the Right - to secure its role in the coalition. It has to make soothing noises to the NZ establishment. Only then can the government make its run for the centre, in 1999, with NZ First playing a key role as the government's "moderating conscience". There will be no early election. APEC ensures that. Winston Peters has time to placate his critics on the Left next year.
The Community Wage - the centrepiece of government social policy - should also be understood as a political concept that is being allowed to mean different things to different people. It's bark may be worse than its bite.
For me, the Community Wage concept opens the door for a full unification of unemployment benefits, sickness benefits and student allowances. That in turn creates an environment in which "contribution" can mean any of: paid work, unpaid work, education/training. That may mean the removal of the barriers which today prevent people who cannot find paid work from contributing through education or unpaid work. The labour market may be being allowed to discreetly retreat from our lives.
At present, education and unpaid work make a person ineligible for the unemployment benefit. It will be harder to find a reason to deny mature students and community workers the community wage than it was to deny them the unemployment benefit. At present, student allowances are not payable to people who have already received them or their past equivalent for five years. The logic of the new approach means an eventual end to that barrier, thereby making it possible for many more adults to re-participate in tertiary education; to reskill or gain new skills.
While the new social policy clearly has its downside, it may be more useful to the Left to focus on building on its upside. After all, there will be a Left-wing government on 2000 if the Left can offer a constructive forward-looking programme.
The rhetoric today is on beneficiary-bashing. But that may be there mainly to prevent Right-wing voters from drifting to Act. Indeed Richard Prebble offered a far harsher version of workfare in his post-budget speech.
The inchoate upside of the new social policy - the commitment to community work and to finding ways that people can contribute - represents an opportunity to move into a new century; a century in which the labour market is no longer the institution that rules our lives.
Even the conflation of the unemployment benefit and sickness benefit has its upside. It softens the practical definition of unemployment, leaving much discretion to allow beneficiaries already doing useful things to keep doing those things. After all, women who are in the final trimester of pregnancy get the sickness benefit. They are neither sick nor unemployed, and they will not be expected to do paid work under the new rules. The door is opening for the unemployed who want to contribute in some way to be treated like the pregnant, rather than the pregnant being treated like "unemployed layabouts". The new labels are not dividing the non-employed into deserving and undeserving categories.
I can live with this budget. It is a political document that accurately reflects the current political environment.
------------------------------------------------------------
Winning the Hearts & Minds of the Post-Muldoon Generation
(13 May)An editorial by Tim Watkin in the NZ Listener (9 May 1998) lamented both the lack of knowledge of young New Zealanders about their own nation's social and economic history, and the almost complete acceptance of the New Right interpretation of life in pre-1984 New Zealand.
My own marking of students' work - especially of students seeking commerce degrees - confirms Watkin's concerns. The youngest of stage 2 university students today were born around 1979, well into the Muldoon era; they were only five years old when New Zealand came to be turned upside down.
In the absence of any proper study of New Zealand economic history, works by the two Rogers (Douglas and Kerr) take on the presumption of authoritative texts. Next it will be Richard Prebble's books; books which represent little more than Act campaign material.
It is very easy for a group of impressionable people to believe that there is no other way, when they have never been exposed to any other form of public administration; when they have never been part of an inclusive society. People who have come to see the government as a naturally corrupt and thieving organisation will struggle to accept any argument that more taxes might be better; better for them individually and for their peers collectively.
The anti-democratic bias of the Douglas / Kerr doctrines appear to have generated a huge amount of cynicism towards public institutions. Why vote? You only get politicians. And politicians are all the same, aren't they? etc. etc. Cynicism breeds Hobbesian characteristics. Economic man is inherently suspicious, believing that collective action is doomed to failure, that someone is always ready to stab them in the back, and ready to walk over others who might stand in their way.
Those of us who wish for a socially cooperative future - a society in which we recognise that the self-interest of each is to a large extent the mutual-interest of all - would do well to recognise that the hearts and minds of those born after 1975 may have already been lost to the social darwinism implicit in neoliberal rhetoric. That means damage control. And damage control begins finding ways to instil our young with an awareness of their society's history.
In the early 1980s, New Zealand was neither a "basket case" nor a "fortress". Rather it was one of the five fastest growing economies in the OECD. Much of that growth was export-led, was generated by the private sector supported by a lean public sector, and took place despite a series of crises in the world economy.
The New Zealand economy had changed significantly compared to the 1960s, and of course would have kept changing if the neoliberal political revolution of 1984 had not taken place. These changes, prior to 1984, were evolutionary, in that they retained contact with our deeper social past. Thus there was a political commitment to a social wage that goes back to the forty-hour week, the Factory Acts of the 1870s and the Liberal reforms of the 1890s. And there was a political commitment to maintaining the economic strength of provincial New Zealand.
Notes:
© 1998 Keith Rankin