Stop overworking, The Dominion [Wellington], 31 March

It's time to get selfish over jobs

Just how much last week's unemployment summit can achieve in finding more jobs in Manawatu remains to be seen. Cynics might say that all such meetings are ever likely to achieve are a few jobs for those employed to help cater to the meeting and clean the council chambers afterwards. But then cynics don't usually achieve much themselves, so their viewpoint offers no hope either.

Frankly, there is still a place for visionaries and for people uniting to achieve something in a good cause. As causes go, they don't get much better than finding out-of-work people employment, and so the summit deserves the support of the Palmerston North community.

More than 100 people from all sectors of the city and from all over New Zealand made the effort to think up ways in which more jobs could be created in the city. By the end, the ideas covered four whiteboards, but where to from here? As the summit pointed out, the trends aren't promising. Technology continues to replace workers, and employers increasingly only have positions for the highly skilled who work longer hours and earn more. Those unskilled or semi-skilled people filling the fringes of being employable are finding that fringe is getting bigger and bigger.

While the summit is a good idea, in some ways it is a little naive. Attendees spoke generously of working toward jobs for all instead of selfishly putting Palmerston North first. The fact is, though, that's exactly what must happen. The city must have the bloody-minded attitude that if Palmerston North has even a hint of a chance of attracting a business to the city which will create jobs, then it should be in boots and all to grab that business, and tough luck for other districts.

Often we are told of how attractive this city is, and how much it has to offer employers with its central location, and educated workforce. Maybe that's not enough now. If it also takes special deals, flattery, wining and dining, and so on then that's the game the city must play. The jobs must be hunted as hard as possible. It is vital that Vision Manawatu, the main organisation responsible for this role, has this aggression.

It's a game worth playing too, because employment levels respond in cycles. High unemployment creates more unemployment as people stop spending. Fortunately the reverse is also true. Put the effort into creating a few jobs and other jobs appear automatically to take advantage of the extra spending going on. But it must be remembered that a job is work that someone is prepared to pay someone else to do. In the long run the business must make a profit after the labour costs are taken into account.

The most successful regions in the country are doing well because they are feeding off the results of real jobs. Of course government support should be sought for job-training programmes, business development and such, but at the end of the day the outcomes must be real. A united city, pooling its ideas and energies and constantly searching for those jobs, must have a better chance of success than one that sits waiting for something good to happen. That's a loser's stance and one taken too often in the past. Good luck to the summit and those who took the time to try and make it work.

UNEMPLOYMENT needs to be at the top of the political agenda, and employment needs a local and national "big bang" to create jobs, speakers said at yesterday's Palmerston North Employment Summit.

About 120 people met to talk about ways to create more jobs in the city. It was obvious that employment concerned people from all walks of life - impeccable business suits were seen beside ethnic cotton clothes all over the packed Palmerston North City Council chamber.

National speakers outlined unemployment problems. Nationally, unemployment was at 6 percent, with about 200,000 people looking for work. Unemployment was poised to grow as technology overtook more jobs, and a workforce with more skills was the only way to climb out of this situation. The voluntary sector was seen as a big future job provider.

Social shake-ups, such as reducing the working week to 30 hours or four days, would be necessary, and people would have to re-evaluate social goals and what work achieved.

The widening gap between rich and poor would have to be addressed.

Keynote speaker and Napier City Council economic policy adviser Sean Bevin said talking about unemployment was important for local authorities, as debate would keep the issue alive. Local authorities had to be advocates for their communities.

During the lunch break, many participants said the summit would not achieve anything unless jobs came out the other end.

Mature Employment Support Agency spokeswoman Gil Absalon summed up the feeling: "I just hope today goes beyond being a talkfest. There has to be good follow-up."

Local speakers spent the afternoon talking about Manawatu initiatives. Then groups were formed to come up with ideas. The 15 groups came back with clear messages: Somebody has to do something.

People with ideas had to be connected with people who did things. Employers had to be brought on board. Young people and job seekers had to be trained. Local people should employ locally, and there should be local and national subsidies to create jobs. Manawatu had to be sold better as a lifestyle area.

Small businesses needed mentoring. Training courses had to be job-focused, and venture capital to start small businesses, through a People's Bank, was vital.

A change in attitude was needed. People without jobs had to be seen as a re source to be used, not a drain on society.

Afternoon session convenor and Palmerston North Mayor Jill White said the most important thing would be follow-up. Palmerston North's new local employment co-ordinator, Shona Spicer, said everyone's suggestions would be discussed at next week's local employment committee meeting. This was the best forum to follow up ideas.

THE GOVERNMENT has "lost the plot" on unemployment, particularly Maori unemployment, according to Maori Employment and Training Commission chairman Rongo Wetere.

Mr Wetere, a keynote speaker at Palmerston North's Employment Summit yesterday, said Maori unemployment was four times higher than the official 6 percent rate. And one out of every two Maori males would have a serious criminal conviction by the age of 20.

"These are marks of a people in crisis," he said. "Lack of job opportunities, failure to excel at school or tertiary training ... these are not just Maori problems, it belongs to all of us."

New Zealand could not be satisfied with a society that marginalised 20 percent of its people, he said.

Only 8 percent of Maori earned more than $30,000 a year. For more than half the Maori population, incomes were less than $10,000.

"It seems Government in recent years has lost the plot," Mr Wetere said. People thought paying out huge welfare payments alleviated the need to solve unemployment.

Mr Wetere also criticised Work and In come New Zealand.

"It is a white, mono-cultural organisation with no way to meet Maori needs," he said. What was needed was a high-profile Maori appointment at commissioner level, to get things moving for Maori.

Maori-led initiatives were helping, but it was a struggle to get resources. Mr Wetere is chief executive officer of Te Wananga 0 Aotearoa. This is a Maori tertiary institution with seven North Island campuses, training as many people as UCOL in Palmerston North. He told how Te Wananga started as a series of training schemes to skill young Maori offenders.

But Government funding was not readily available for Te Wananga, Mr Wetere said. He congratulated Manawatu on the Government's providing more than $40 million to rebuild the UCOL campus. "This area has done very, very well."

Te Wananga's capital funding applications were turned down. Protests in the rain outside Parliament did not help, so the matter had gone to the Waitangi Tribunal.

Issues like this had to be addressed, Mr Wetere said. The huge disparities between rich and poor, between Maori and pakeha, had to be resolved.

"We need targeted policies to create jobs. Japan is doing it, Ireland has done it ... why can't we?"

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MANAWATU CCS manager Barry de Geest said all Mr Wetere's comments went double for people with disabilities. They earned less and had higher rates of unemployment than Maori, yet nobody wanted to know.

"We are the most disadvantaged group in the community," Mr de Geest said, during a break in summit proceedings.

"People with disabilities are still seen as needing charity," he said. "We are people who need jobs. We have skills, we have strengths."

He hoped the job summit would do some thing concrete for people with disabilities and not put it back in the too-hard basket.

OFFICIAL propaganda about a buoyant economy in New Zealand is not overcoming increasing joblessness, helplessness and despair, says unemployment expert Vivian Hutchinson.

Mr Hutchinson gave an overview of unemployment in New Zealand to the Palmerston North Employment Summit yesterday, which was attended by about 120 people.

He has been a pioneer worker in unemployment issues in Taranaki, and is now editor of The Jobs Letter.

He said the problem was that people had accepted unemployment as part of life.

'The official propaganda about what's happening in our buoyant economy is not right for many people. A significant part of our community is slipping into joblessness, homelessness, hopelessness and despair," he said.

"It's up to us to do something about it."

Mr Hutchinson said unemployment was not a mistake made by an economic system, but a consequence of a system pursuing other goals.

The answer was for society to change its goals. Quality of life should be as import ant, as a goal, as profits. Furthermore, the Government would have to be directly involved in job creation.

He said views of unemployment had changed since the 1970s, when it was seen as an aberration.

The 1984 Labour government viewed having 50,000 people unemployed as a crisis, he said. But today, with more than 200,000 looking for work, it seemed unemployment was no longer an issue on the Government's political agenda.

"We don't even have a Minister of Employment any more."

Unemployment had been accepted as part of the competitive market model. Yet the attitude persisted that people were unemployed because they were lazy.

Mr Hutchinson said unemployment was completely unnatural. "No other species tolerates it."

Quoting from American author and unemployment expert Jeremy Rifkin's book The End of Work, Mr Hutchinson said society and the global economy were poised to shed huge numbers of jobs.

Mr Rifkin predicted that, in 20 years time, only 20 percent of the workforce would be employed in elite, highly-qualified jobs.

The other 80 percent - people who had traditionally run manufacturing processes and provided unskilled labour - would be redundant.

The global view was that high-technology machines were cheaper, faster and made fewer mistakes than people.

Mr Rifkin's answer was to shorten the working week to 30 hours, and share the profits of high productivity.

This had already happened once this century, when the working week dropped from 60 to 40 hours.
 

TEACHING young people and workers skills was the most important issue for New Zealand to solve unemployment, says company rebuilder and apprenticeship scheme co-ordinator John Fraser.

Mr Fraser was a keynote speaker at yesterday's Palmerston North Employment Summit.

He wanted to see more apprenticeship group schemes set up, to get more young people trained. These schemes operate as worker training banks. A pool of training apprentices were matched with employers who had work, on short-term contracts. When the contract ran out, the apprentices went back to the pool and another employment contract.

It had many advantages, Mr Fraser said. Employers, loathe to take on apprentices due to economic uncertainty, could still train young people and get help at busy times. And apprentices had guaranteed work-based training with several different employers.

"Group scheme training is a lot more flexible," Mr Fraser said.

New Zealand employers needed that flexibility. About 95 percent of New Zealand businesses employed fewer than 15 people.

"If these businesses could increase their staff by one person, we would solve the problem."

About 150 apprentices were now training in group schemes. Those who had finished apprenticeships generally got job offers from employers they had worked with during training.

Skills and qualifications were vital. Less than 30 percent of school leavers went to university or polytechnics. This had to be increased.
 

VENTURE capital to kickstart small businesses was one successful solution to Unemployment discussed at Palmerston North's Employment Summit yesterday.

The scheme meant people on benefits or without capital borrowed modest sums at low interest to test a bright idea, start a business and get jobs going. Palmerston North's Angels Fund already did this for women.

Just Dollars director and summit key- note speaker, Peter Taylor of Christchurch, said personal outrage at the 1990 tax and welfare benefit cuts prompted him to start micro-economic loan funds or venture capital trust.

He and some friends started in 1993 with just $12 - all the cash they had in their pockets.

Approaches to people they knew with more money proved successful. The Just Dollars Trust now held $280,000 in investment funds. It had made 189 loans since 1993 and the average loan size was $2700. Requirements were to have a viable business proposition, some referees and ideas that did not breach gender, Treaty of Waitangi, environment or violence issues.

Often loans were made to people who did not have perfect credit records. Mr Taylor said many of the loan recipients were people who had been on welfare benefits.

"You can't be on a benefit and not have credit defaults at times."

The Auckland Methodist Mission had also used a small venture capital scheme to create 251 jobs in Auckland and North land in the last five years, said apprentice ship scheme coordinator John Fraser.

It had capital of $430,000, and had recycled that money to loan $900,000 for business startups. The scheme was the same; it lent small sums of money to people to start businesses, charged 8 percent interest and expected repayment within three years. Losses had been 12.5 percent. The average loan size was $10,000.

This scheme required mentoring. While people might have a bright business idea, they might not be accountants, managers or tax experts. Financial management help was provided.

PEOPLE with jobs were working too hard, employment lobbyist Vivian Hutchinson told a conference in Palmerston North yesterday.

"Society is skewed - there's a huge number out of work while those in work are overworking," Mr Hutchinson, editor of The Jobs Letter, an information sheet on employment issues, told about 200 representatives of Manawatu business and social agencies.

He played a video interview with United States economist Jeremy Rifkin, who said the world was entering a new phase in history characterised by the steady and inevitable decline of jobs.

Mr Rifkin said the world was fast polarising into two potentially irreconcilable forces: an information elite that con trolled and managed the global economy and growing numbers of permanently displaced workers who had few prospects.

His solution would be the shorter working weeks many companies in Europe were instituting. In return for working shifts, workers' hours were reduced to 31 a week while their pay remained the same. Factories were running 24 hours a day, doubling and tripling productivity at the same time as providing more jobs.

Mr Hutchinson said New Zealand, which had real unemployment of 200,000 people, had to face up to the same problem and look at the same answers. The hundreds of different people and services represented at the conference had to work together to find those answers.

Speaking later, Mr Hutchinson said New Zealand's civil sector had been mostly demolished by the New Right and he and others had to persuade the people with power to change their social values.

But the biggest problem was overcoming the distortion of the work ethic - that it was acceptable and expected that people worked too hard.

"I went to see Jim Anderton, and he's in his office piled up with work, and I thought, 'This man's working too hard, he's not going to change anything'."

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[Background Papers]   [Ian Ritchie]