(Robert brings out a vacuum cleaner, a piece of wood and a bag of nails.)

Since I didn’t have Power Point, I thought that the next best thing would be to bring this vacuum cleaner.

I have to admit I am feeling the same as all the other panellists this afternoon, being in a bit of a quandary as to how to answer the question that we have been given to address.

This session is meant to be about bringing the issues of this morning back to the local level. I am not now a local of Palmerston North. In fact I was only here for four years so I do not know if that qualifies.

However I remember when Mike Moore stood for selection as Labour Party candidate for Christchurch North, he claimed to be local by having stopped once in the electorate a few years earlier to buy a hot pie. Maybe he is trying the same thing in Geneva as I speak.

I will try and bring the discussion back to the local level from the perspective that I come from. So please allow me to make some macro comments first and then move on to some local reflections on them.

The point I wanted to start with is that we are in the era of the speculative economy. That is money running amok, money rather than being the means of exchange becoming the dominant aspect of our lives, our society and the global economy. I want to look at the impact that this is having on employment and unemployment.

I am reading two books at the moment that really makes these points. The first is Bruce Jesson’s "Only their purpose is mad". It is written in a wonderful Bruce Jesson way. If you haven’t read this please do.

The second is "The Globalisation of Poverty" written by Michel Chossudovsky.

We were very lucky to have him speak in Wellington just a few weeks ago.

I want to borrow from Professor Chossudovsky’s lecture where he showed how the US was able to rip off other economies in the world through IMF bail outs that saw the bail out money eventually return to the US while the third world country still owed the IMF debt. Michel used US dollars and drinking glasses to illustrate this point.

I am going to use a vacuum cleaner instead. I want to do this to show how the speculative economy works. Nationally we have a floating exchange rate along with a so called independent Reserve Bank and locally we are less and less in control of our local economies.

(Robert pulls out some paper money from his wallet and throws it on the floor. He turns on the vacuum cleaner and begins to suck the money up.)

We can see the vacuum cleaner as the world economy, especially the United States.

Where money is loose and is able to float freely, it is very easy for the US speculators, people such as George Soros, to pick up the money and bring it back to them.

It is very easy for them because that money has no home. It does not have any organic relationship with us as people. It does not describe how we relate to each other.

(Robert turns off the vacuum cleaner and picks up the piece of wood and the nails)

(Robert nails the notes onto the piece of wood.)

It is my and many other people’s point of view that we need to nail down the money, the currency, at a national level and at a local level.

(He turns on the vacuum cleaner and tries to suck the notes up again. They cannot be picked up by the cleaner.)

So as you can see it is much harder for the speculative economy, or the already rich, the already powerful to take this money out of our hands, out of circulation, when it is nailed down. At a local level a number of groups are already starting to deal with this with local currencies such as green dollars, just dollars, or kiwi dollars

I am also aware of the local debate in Palmerston North at the moment over who is going to own the water and the water supply. To me, those dollar notes can also represent our water supply. (Mayor) Jill (White), if you don’t hammer down the shares in the water company the assets will just float away and the City will be less able to deal with unemployment and the other social issues that we have been talking about today.

My view can best be summed up as a view from the bottom, using the logic from below.

Although there are many aspects of the contributions of previous speakers that I agree with, all of their presentations have been views from the top. They have been views from the policy elite network (which to a degree, I am also part of). But they miss out the views or reality of people who exist at the bottom, or the grass roots level.

Whatever seems logical for those at the top looking down may not seem logical for those at the bottom looking up.

So rather than accepting the prescription that the open, more market economy will create jobs, the prescription I have is the opposite. If we are wanting to gets jobs moving in this country and address issues of full employment we have to strive for the end to the speculative economy that puts money as the prime focus and forgets the original role that money had.

We need to put an end to the Reserve Bank "independence". Michel Chossudovsky, when he was here, was able to expose what 'Reserve Bank independence' means. It means independence from democratically elected governments. It means control by those people who already control the world’s economy.

Michel gives an example in his book and also gave it in his Wellington lecture that highlights this Reserve Bank "independence". It is very topical with the Balkan’s war going on at the moment.

When Bosnia was finally declared an independent state and set up its central (or reserve) bank it was made "independent" in its constitution. Not only was it made independent from any democratically elected government but the Constitution also states that the Governor of the Reserve Bank is never allowed to be a Bosnian.

We need to expose this free trade and investment theory, this zero tariffs policy, this wonderful APEC that needs a squash player, a so-called trade unionist and an All Black to sell it to the rest of us.

We believe that the free trade agenda costs jobs in this country. Look at the car assembly companies that are now closed throwing thousands out of work. Look at the footwear, textile and clothing companies who are on the brink of closure even though they had a mild victory last year when their tariffs didn’t go down to zero.

The whole question of contracting out and so-called flexibility of labour. Buzz words that are supposed to bring us prosperity and more jobs but produce jobs that are low paid and so flexible that you don’t know if you have a job from one day to another.

And finally, the cruelest cut of all is the criminalisation of labour. In New Zealand this has two aspects, the work for the dole which is nothing other than periodic detention for the unemployed, and prison labour.

In our union UNITE! We have had many people complaining to us that they were better off on real PD than they are now on the Community Wage. At least on PD they were given the correct equipment to use, the correct gear to wear.

Community Wage workers are given all sorts of jobs. But when it comes time to be paid they are told that they are not jobs.

This is one of the biggest hoaxes that we are facing at the moment and is part of blaming the victim

The second area is the growth in this country and internationally of prison labour. This is horrific. First they make people unemployed. Then they cut their benefits. When they commit a crime, they put them in jail. Then they get them to work for less than $2 a day rather than $10 and hour that they may have earned before.

I represented the footwear workers in Wanganui who saw their factory close, then in less than a couple of months saw it staffed by prisoners on 91 cents per day instead of their $8 to $12 an hour. The joke in Wanganui was: what do you have to do to get a job in a footwear factory - rob a bank. Now we have the wonderful spectacle here where prisoners at the Manawatu Prison are making fences for all the other prisons in New Zealand.

If we think this is good that prisoners are working, lets think of the effect that this is having on society as a whole. In the United States for example, prison industry is huge and is taking away work from "free labour". Prisons are now being used for call centres, software development, airline ticketing as well as the traditional manufacturing.

Finally I want to mention NAIRU, the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment.

There is a bit about it in the background papers including an article by Tom Walker.

Its goal is to keep unemployment at a level that will not put pressure on inflation. At the moment in New Zealand it is about 6%. So matter how well we do on employment creation at a local level, no matter how successful our job creation scheme is, if we start to have an effect on unemployment the Reserve Bank will tighten the money supply and dampen the economy.

As long as NAIRU exists in the Reserve Bank and Treasury models we are all talking to each other for nothing. Because there will be no dent in the 6 or 7% unemployment that we have as long as NAIRU is an aspect of Government economic policy.

• First, we must see employment as a goal in itself, not just as a by-product of business or economic development. If we are concerned about employment then that is what we must focus on. We must do everything in our power to alter the other indicators or levers of government and local government to ensure that full employment, or the generation of full employment, is our top priority.

• Shorten the working week. This was shown on the opening video.
• Build the voice of the people at the bottom, the marginalised labour. That is what we are trying to do with our new union UNITE! It includes not only unemployed people and people on the work-for-the-dole schemes but people right through society and in other jobs that have been de-unionised over the years. The unionisation figure in this country that was about 70% in 1991 before the Employment Contracts Act has now gone down to about 17%. It is those people who are not unionised who are in the marginalised and casualised jobs. That’s the voice that we are trying to generate so that it is listened to as much if not more so than the voice from above.
• Local employment initiatives.
• Public and community investment.

• And finally building the community sector.

To summarise: Work at the local level is so important. But it can only be successful if there are the national and international policies in place to ensure that employment generation for full employment is allowed to take place.