Share the gains and pay fairly
We just don’t know how lucky we are. John Clarke’s wellknown song was written before the Employment Contracts Act. It now has to be the theme song of the Canterbury Employers Chamber of Commerce.
However, not for the many thousands of ordinary Kiwis on minimum wage casual contracts, part-time hours and split shifts. The ECA has ensured our country has a lowwage economy in which employee representation is minimised and one-sided employment contracts persist.
Productivity gains have resulted by removing penal rates and using minimum wage rates.
If you reduce the cost of inputs without reducing price or increasing output, hey presto, productivity increases.
Come on, CECC, let’s get some real productivity gains. Involve workers doing things better, not cheaper. Let them make money for you. Get them to help you get real productivity gains. Share the gains and pay them fairly. Move with the times. You don’t know how lucky you might be.
Rick Robinson, Redwood
Nurses or weapons?
Super hi-tech weaponry or wellpaid nurses? Is that the choice the Government has to make? Which is more important? The answer depends on what kind of society we want.
Maybe there needs to be debate as to just what military hardware New Zealand really needs, not what hardware the ‘‘big boys’’ decide we should have in order to be part of the ‘‘club’’.
Are people aware just how dysfunctional American society has become because of outrageous spending on the military, along with neglect of socially necessary services such as schools, hospitals, teachers’ salaries and, I suspect, nurses’ salaries too?
I feel sorry for those Americans who need medical help but can’t afford it, in spite of living in a very wealthy country. They’d be better off living in Costa Rica, which has no army.
And they’d be better off living here in New Zealand too.
Let’s value our nurses.
Lois Griffiths, Strowan
Obsolete weaponry
The purchase of the Poseidon war planes is a huge mistake and a waste of taxpayers money.
There can be little doubt that this is forced upon New Zealand under pressure of the American war industry.
Russia and China are already very advanced in the development of cyber and laser weapons technologies, which apparently with some success have been tried out in Syria, as reported and experienced by some American and Israeli pilots.
Cyber weaponry jams the electronic algorithms of planes and missiles, causing them to divert from their trajectories, missing their targets or exploding prematurely.
By the time these Poseidons are operational in 2023 they will be obsolete as cyber and laser technologies will by then be even further perfected.
This money is better spent on hospitals, healthcare and nurses’ salaries.
Tom Van Meurs, Rolleston
Rogue on the loose
Americans tend not to talk of bullying but refer instead to ‘‘kicking ass’’. This, lest we be confused, is nothing that the SPCA need fret over.
One of the greatest of transAtlantic aberrations is that while Her Majesty’s subjects deplore bullying, the Yanks see ass kicking as a virtue, being the recommended expedient by which most corporations are run.
A previous United States leader spoke of talking softly and carrying a big stick. Talking softly is incompatible with ass kicking and today’s colossal stick has the Pentagon spending more than most nations’ GDP.
By making the kicking of asses a fundamental plank of foreign policy, the entity usurping the Oval Office has turned America into a rogue state.
Rogue states by definition defy the world, position themselves on the outside, are quixotic, unstable, unreadable, and therefore untrustworthy, and trumpet blowing attention seekers. America? Rogue state?
Nato leaders, keep your backs to the wall.
Michael Goodson, Carlton Mill