They Don't Give A **** About Workers' Rights.

This post has now reached 50 likes from Paid Subscribers and so is now FREE!

How quickly we forget. At the height of the Covid pandemic grocery workers and other essential workers were lauded as heroes. Today many of those people remain on minimum wages. Just think about what that term means – it’s the lowest wage permitted by law otherwise, if they could, employers would pay less.

Yesterday The Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU) hosted protests in main centres around the country against to fight back against "the government's ongoing attacks on workers' rights” includingthe scrapping of fair pay agreements, and reintroduction of 90-day trials.

But wouldn’t have known that if you rely solely on 1News or THREE for what is happening in our country? No. They didn’t cover it.

Why not?

Mmmm… let’s see…could it be perhaps that both these organisations have recently fired so many of their staff and intend to shed even more?

To their credit RNZ covered the event as it happened, and the NZ Herald did reported it, but as an example of the demise of public interest journalism by our television broadcasters this was a doozy. No wonder the viewership ratings for these channels are plummeting.They are progressively becoming disconnected from our lives.

What 1 News did choose to cover was whether Andrew Bayly, who is Commerce Minister and Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing, been drinking before he allegedly told a worker on a visit to a vineyard to “take some wine ... and f*** off” and then repetitively called the man a “loser”.

Bayley has since unreservedly apologised and his boss, Prime Minister Luxon, has said he accepts his apology and wants to draw a line under the matter.

So what I take from that is, whatever the truth about the actual words Bayly said that day, Luxon knows that his Minister behaved badly to a worker and isn’t that concerned about it.

Why?

Well, only Luxon knows the answer to that question, but my suspicion is it is because,he holds the same disparaging attitude towards workers and their rights as Bayly clearly does.

This, of course, should come as no surprise. After all, Luxon heads up a Coalition that had has fired thousands of Public Servants and let’s not forget he is also the leader of the National party that ushered in the Employment Contracts Act in 1991 which deregulated labour markets and turned all collective contracts into individual contracts between an individual employee and their employer and thereby weakened the power of the unions.

Friends, our democracy has become an oligarchy.

We once prided ourselves as being a nation where the principle of fairness ruled.

Not anymore.

It is because of Paid Subscribers like you that I am able to continue to do my public journalism work - thank you . If this post reaches 50 likes I will make it Free.