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Source: ONE News -
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More than 100,000 New Zealanders could soon be working just nine
days a fortnight, spending the 10th day training instead.
The government would pick up the tab for the training day in a bid
to avoid the looming threat of massive job cuts.
The idea was raised during the much-heralded Job Summit in Auckland
on Friday which also heard dire warnings about the state of the
economy from the country's most powerful and influential
leaders.
There have been 600 ideas raised in the summit from a cycleway
to a nine-day fortnight for companies facing a shortage of work,
with the government helping to pay for training costs on the 10th
day.
The estimated cost of that is $40 million a year for 100,000
workers. No detail has been settled and other estimates had as few
as 10,000 workers affected.
"We know our productivity issues, basic literacy IT financial literacy. Those are the ideas that are starting to emerge. We can get a win win there, get some flexibility, retain some jobs, upskill the workforce," says Mark Weldon, Job Summit chair.
Bank-government fund for distressed firms
After a day of intense debate, the country's banking bosses came up with an offer of a joint fund with the government to help financially distressed firms through short term equity injections.
The fund, if it gets off the ground, would result in the banks putting in $1 billion and the government matching this and then the fund borrowing another $8 billion to create a $10 billion kitty to deal with companies that had good long term prospects but needed equity to survive in the short term.
The banks said they were committed to continue lending on the same basis in the future to "creditworthy" businesses.
The banks have also offered to develop over a longer period an equity growth fund to make "quality" investment in small to medium size businesses.
Prime Minister John Key says the idea of a joint fund is one that had come solely out of the day's work and the government will look at it.
Other major ideas from the summit:
- A freeze on regulation making and enforcement activity
reduced to minimum acceptable standards.
- A moratorium on the introduction of minimum air and drinking
water quality standards until that could be afforded.
- A $60 million fund to boost tourism numbers set up by the
private and public sectors.
- A mountain bike track running through the entire country to
attract tourist and create thousands of jobs around the
country.
Down to work
There was no standing on ceremony, with 200 people at the summit, representing 80% of the economy, getting down to the business of saving jobs.
"The hope we offer to someone who is losing their job today is
that the government and the people we are going to work with today
will be totally focused on every opportunity for them to get
another job," says Bill English, Finance Minister.
And the scale of that challenge in a global financial crisis was
laid bare.
"We think it is the biggest destruction of wealth, of global wealth, that the world has seen, says Alan Bollard, Reserve Bank Governor.
"We've stopped talking about billion dollars we are talking about trillion dollars. A trillion dollars. So you can imagine is what happens if you take one dollar notes and string them all together they would go from here to the sun and half way back again."
Internationally more public money has been thrown at this than at any event except World War II. But that alone won't save us.
"We are deluding ourselves if we think we can simply spend our way out of this," says John Whitehead, Secretary to the Treasury.
Labour is cautious about the success of the summit.
"There is a strong PR element but I think the discussion is worthwhile and we hope that the good ideas that emerge from that are picked up by the government," says Phil Goff, Labour leader.
"But critically, refocusing the tax package that's billions of dollars, that's the way we will preserve and create thousands of jobs, not just a handful."
Treasury and the Reserve Bank believe unemployment will stay under 10%. That's less than it was in the last deep recession of the early 1990s.
Social Welfare bosses are preparing for the worst case scenario.
"We need to squeeze every vacancy out of the labour market and we're doing well at the moment. There are 8,000 vacancies on our books," says Peter Hughes, Ministry of Social Development CEO.
And they may need those jobs. Union representatives at the summit claim retailers are planning to shed thousands of workers and that the young, Maori and Pacific Island people will bear the brunt of that. Critics say those groups were not adequately represented at the Job Summit.
