Employment/Jobs

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• Remove crippling regulations that benefit those with jobs at the expense of those without jobs and that cause involuntary unemployment.
• Restore the common law freedom of contract between employers and employees.
• Restore common law freedoms of association and of speech in hiring labour and in communicating with staff. (more here)
• Bring back youth rates to get young people back into work. (more here)

• Increase the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour and ensure it cannot fall below 66% of the average wage.
• Ensure government policy recognises the contribution of unpaid work to society and the economy, including the work of parents and caregivers.
• A greater commitment to proactive job creation, including more public sector support for self-employment, small businesses, co-operative and community-owned enterprises, and for employment resource centres and agencies that train and support people going into business.
• Expand the apprenticeship programme.
• Access to careers advice and job search support for all registered unemployed (and other beneficiaries should they so choose) as soon as they register as jobseekers. (more here)
• Extend the Heat Smart home insulation scheme to a further 200,000 households employing 4,000 (10,400 total jobs) New Zealanders for a cost of $350M.12 EECA calculates the benefits in terms of energy savings, reduced doctors visits, and fewer days off work sick will amount to more than $70 million per year or $1 billion over 30 years.
• Before the rebuild of Christchurch creates industry capacity constraints, build an additional 2000 new energy-efficient state and community houses nationally, to help rents become affordable and give more families the security of a place to call home. This initiative would create 3,100 direct jobs (9,300 total jobs) and cost $670 million over three years.
• Put a team of 3,000 paid conservation corps to work planting alongside our degraded streams and rivers, controlling wilding pines, and trapping pests throughout our conservation estate, costing $396 million over three years and creating a total of 8,600 jobs if you include indirect and upstream employment effects.
• By removing uncertainty over New Zealand’s response to climate change, we can stimulate the planting of approximately 665,000 hectares of new forest in the next ten years. This would create 3,700 direct jobs (11,000 total jobs) over the next three years, cost $36 million, and result in a massive 27 million tonnes CO2 being sequestered by 2020. (more here)

• An Industry Standard Agreement will be a collective agreement representing the employment standards in the particular industry, agreed in the first instance between unions and employer organisations in the defined industry. Through the Industry Standard Agreement, these standards would be extended to all workers in the industry, providing a set of minimum pay and conditions, based on genuine negotiations in other parts of the industry.
• A system for extending minimum wage and conditions standards in suitable industries.
• A Workplace Commissioner in the Employment Relations Authority to agree appropriate.
• $15/hour minimum wage.
• Repealing National‟s 90-day law.
• Amending the Holidays Act to ensure 11 days of public holidays each year, regardless of them falling on a weekend day.
• Restoring reinstatement as the primary remedy when an employee has been unjustifiably dismissed. (more here)

• Immediately increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour (by 1 April 2012) and raise it to two-thirds of the average wage (by 1 April 2013).  We oppose the call to reintroduce a lower minimum wage for youth.
• Pursue measures to create full employment with the dole abolished over time.
• Work towards implementing a Universal Tax Credit/Universal Basic Income where everyone in Aotearoa aged 18 and over would receive a minimum, liveable, tax free income after which progressive tax would kick in.  This would eliminate the huge costs involved in administering the current shame and blame Work & Income system, end poverty traps, and assist in creating a far more equal society. (more here)

• We will establish a $16 minimum wage.
• Extend Community Max; Māori trade training; cadetships and apprenticeships across growth areas.
• We will establish work based training incentives within public sector and local government (‘job-taster’ programmes) - rotation amongst different companies.
• We will announce a short term subsidy to business owners who create new jobs for the unemployed; take on trainees; or instigate career pathways. This will be aligned with a social marketing campaign to encourage employers to give a young person or a low-skilled person a chance of work.
• We will establish incentives for innovative employment opportunities such as a steel-framed housing pilot; or enterprise workshops (tourism).
• Strengthen the Careers Services to help whānau better understand NCEA and become whānau decision-makers on careers information; and establish a Whānau Recruitment and Employment Agency.
• We will reinstate the Training Incentive Allowance to support sole parents into work.
• We will support investment in Teen Parent Units.
• Encourage employers to develop part-time and flexible healthy working arrangements and subsidise childcare, to support whānau to benefit from quality time with their children as a vital ingredient in whānau ora and in doing so, addressing ‘time poverty’ as a cause of stress.
• Promote collaborative arrangements between WINZ, iwi and education providers for training opportunities. (more here)

• Establish a new Starting-Out Wage set at 80 per cent of the minimum wage. 16- and 17-year-olds in their first six months of work with a new employer. This is an extension of the existing New Entrant’s Wage, which is set at 80 per cent of the minimum wage.
• 18- and 19-year-olds who have come directly off a designated benefit (including the Independent Youth Benefit), having been on that benefit continuously for more than six months before starting work.
• 16- to 19-year-olds in training in a recognised industry training course involving at least 40 credits a year.
• Extend flexible working arrangements: Extend the right to request flexible work arrangements to all employees.Remove the six-month period before an employee has the right to request a flexible working arrangement.Remove the limits on the number of requests an employee may make for flexible working arrangements over a 12-month period. Promote the benefits of flexible working arrangements and flexible workplaces more widely to employees and employers.
• Remove the ‘requirement to conclude’ collective bargaining.
• Remove the requirement that non-union members are employed under a collective agreement for their first 30-days.
• Allow employers to opt out of negotiations for a multi-employer collective agreement.
• Apply partial pay reductions for partial strikes or situations of low-level industrial action. (more here)

Not set out on their website.