Ports wasting more ratepayers' money

When a management has to bring in Ernst and Young to attack its own employees with partial and skewed analysis, you know that management has lost the plot completely. Never mind the cost of the exercise, the simple fact that management's ability to conduct a negotiation in good faith is so lacking is a bitter indictment. First, as I've pointed out before, you cannot earn the much-trumpeted $91k by working a standard week. Second, the pay rates that exist are agreed by management. No-one held a gun to their head. They are negotiated rates, and for management now to attempt to undermine them is a statement of its own incompetence. Third, the real issue is flexibility, not rates, and on that MUNZ has shown itself, perhaps reluctantly, to be flexible.

There is a solution on the table, but management are now in grandstanding mode, having gone nuclear and now facing the possibility that it will backfire on them.

As for the Right blogs, they simply parrot POAL data, and revel in attacking decent wages. They clearly prefer a Victorian model of labour control, in which property rights carry with them the right to dispose of workers as seen fit. We will never have a high-performing economy on that basis.

And one would be interested to understand how the POAL distributed its PR information - the speed with which the Right, pro-National blogs picked this up was remarkable. One does not need to invoke conspiracy theory in NZ to see many linkages in play round this dispute.