Media Release: FIRST Union
Monday June 25, 2012

John Key’s Top 10 list about as useful as his Letterman Show appearance

John Key’s just-released Top 10 list is meaningless without a dedicated plan to grow jobs in the economy, FIRST Union said today.

John Key today released his list of 10 ‘better results’ areas for the public service. Among these is a reduction in the number of people on a working-age benefit for more than 12 months from 78,000 to 55,000.

However workers in manufacturing firms were losing their jobs, and workers in service sector jobs were struggling to hold on to what hours they had, said Robert Reid, General Secretary of FIRST Union.

“Our union has members in the wood processing and textiles industry, and in both sectors we have been dealing with large scale redundancies in recent months.”

“And in service sector jobs like retail, there is already intense competition for available hours. In every supermarket or department store we deal with there are workers who want more hours because their incomes from part time hours are not enough to get by on.”

“It’s completely unclear to us where John Key’s jobs are going to come from”

The government itself has been a major destroyer of jobs over the last 4 years, such as those lost at KiwiRail’s Hillside workshops in Dunedin because of an unwillingness to use government procurement to protect local jobs, Robert Reid said.

“John Key runs a do-nothing government when it comes to job creation It has done nothing of substance on jobs since the talked-up Jobs Summit over three years ago.”

“The government should be more aggressive on monetary policy to control the volatile NZ dollar, to help prevent further layoffs and a lack of growth in manufacturing, and invest in job creation programmes, including through involvement of the Maori and not-for-profit sectors. It should also reverse the trend of layoffs in the public sector.”

“Without any plan for jobs, John Key’s Top 10 list today is about as gimmicky as his Top 10 list on the David Letterman show,” Robert Reid said.

Ends.

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