Sickness doesn’t work part-time, which is one of the design flaws in the government plans to amend the Holidays Act. Once the revamped Employment Leave Act has gone through select committee vetting and become law, part-time workers will accrue sick leave only in proportion to the days they’ve worked. No longer will they be eligible – as they are now – for 10 days sick leave after being six months on the job, and for up to 20 days over the years thereafter.
Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden is selling this change as a “fairness” issue i.e. to ensure that part-time workers will no longer get the same number of annual sick leave days as full timers. There has been no evidence that this theoretical injustice has been a burden on employers, and/or has created workplace tensions. Nor has there been any evidence presented that part-timers have been abusing their current 10 day entitlement.
The fallout from the “pro rata” change being proposed will be felt most keenly by the groups more likely to be employed part time i.e. women, Māori, Pasifika and disabled workers. People in customer facing jobs, mothers with childcare responsibilities and anyone seeking a gradual return to full time work all stand to be hit by the proposed change. As Jess Fuller – a retail worker and member of the Workers First Union national executive – has argued:
“It seems like they just don’t get what it’s like to work a retail job and deal with sick customers, when you also have kids in day care who bring home all kinds of bugs. Having access to decent sick leave is one of the reasons a young mum can go back to the workforce after parental leave. I think this will just increase the number of people forced onto welfare, and make more retail workers come to work sick and spread germs to customers. It’s also going to compromise an already burnt-out workforce that’s struggling with low staffing levels and low pay rates in the industry.”
Fuller’s main point is worth repeating: some of the part-time workers in our bars, cafes, restaurants and shops will soon have no choice but to come to work while sick, especially given the current climate of job insecurity, and chronic understaffing. How can this be good for anyone running a business, or for anyone else?
Face it: ten days sick leave a year is not wildly generous, given the severity and stubborn persistence of the recent variants of colds, influenza and Covid. Anecdotally, some workers in retail are already having to draw on their annual leave to get by, when they fall ill. The logical sense of offering all workers the same sick leave entitlements – regardless of their part time or full time status – used to be self-evident, back when New Zealand was a less mean and miserly country.
Footnote : A pro rata system makes more sense when it comes to the earning of annual leave, which is taken voluntarily. Sick leave is involuntary. Surely, we don’t want to force sick people to be in the workplace, around food preparation and table service, and out on the sales floor.
In the spirit of bi-partisan horse sense, lets hope that when the Holidays Act reforms get to the select committee stage, all of the political parties and unions and employers alike can agree on the fact that bugs and viruses work full time – and therefore., the status quo on sick leave entitlements for part-time workers should be retained.
Keeping score
As the NZ Herald has reported, the nation’s business leaders have looked at our sinking GDP figures, and came to the conclusion that Finance Minister Nicola Willis and PM Christopher Luxon aren’t doing a very good job. So, the captains of industry have ruthlessly ranked both of them outside their list of top ten Cabinet performers.
Yet hang on. When the Cabinet Ministers rated above them are Simeon Brown at six, Judith Collins at seven, Brooke van Velden at eight, and Shane Jones at nine, then maybe Willis and Luxon should be taking this as a back-handed compliment. In case you’re wondering, Erica Stanford is Boardroom NZ’s runaway favourite politician.
Amid the schadenfreude, one can feel a twinge of compassion for Willis. It must be tough to have spent your entire life in the political trenches doing your best to please and further enrich your corporate sponsors, and then watch them turn around and publicly express their displeasure with you. Sad!
Even so, Willis has only herself to blame, not that she ever would. As the great American nature scientist John Burroughs (1837-1921) once said: “You can fail many times, but you’re not a failure until you begin to blame somebody else.” Mission accomplished.
Diplomacy, in whispers
All week, New Zealand has been keeping its position on Palestinian statehood under wraps, as if this is a complex decision (it isn’t) and that we need to furrow our brows and get more information before we make the final call (We don’t). It has been clear all along what our final decision will be. We just want as few people as possible to notice it.
To that end, the over-riding aim has been to say nothing to displease the Americans, while trying to look as though we’re only Australia’s reluctant “plus one” on Palestine. Foreign Minister Winston Peters is also hoping that by the time we finally get around to publicly adding our five cents on Palestine, most of the Western media will have packed up and gone home.
All the same…the Western nations that did take the plunge earlier this week and formally recognised Palestine’s right to exist, were still only making a symbolic gesture. Why are they making it now? Because the governments of France, the UK, Canada etc are all under pressure to placate the huge numbers of protesters at home who are incensed at the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza by the Netanyahu government and its US sponsor. Statehood is an attempt to make it look as though Western governments are doing something on Palestine – even if it means cantering around the same track on that tired old nag, the two-state solution.
As the veteran negotiators Robert Malley and Hussein Agha recently pointed out in their book Tomorrow is Yesterday, the two-state solution became a global goal only after it was no longer viable. Under the Oslo Peace Accords in the 1990s, the Palestine Liberation Organisation had renounced terrorism and recognised the state of Israel, thereby creating an opportunity for a land-for-peace trade to become a reality. This trade was never going to happen.
Instead, and while the Oslo Accords were still being taken seriously, Israel was encouraging settlers to build on the very land being touted as the basis for a just and lasting peace. Only after the settlements had become a reality did the West suddenly develop an enthusiasm for a “two-state solution” that had never been debated in good faith during the Oslo process, and that was now no longer possible. After 30 years of these deadly charades, countries like New Zealand still cannot bring themselves to publicly criticise Israel (much less sanction it) in any significant way.
Quite the contrary. Once again, New Zealand and the rest of the Western world is demanding that the Palestinians make all of the concessions up front. As in: release all the remaining hostages unconditionally, and disarm unilaterally in return for…absolutely nothing. No matching commitments are being demanded of Israel to respect a truce, cease the genocide, withdraw the IDF from Gaza, allow the entry of a UN security force, allow in an unfettered amount of food aid and medical supplies, and prevent an influx of Israeli settlers into Gaza – let alone commit in any way to what a future Gaza administrative body might look like.
No wonder the Hamas negotiating team in Dubai have baulked at such a totally one-sided “deal.” No surprise either that Israel tried to kill them, right in the middle of what were supposed to be negotiations for a lasting peace. If and when Hamas ever did comply with the West’s demands, Israel would be left absolutely free to resume its onslaught. In that respect, securing the unconditional return of the remaining hostages would be a reward to Israel, for committing genocide.
Regardless, here we are. New Zealand is using its tardy gesture on statehood to demand further concessions from the Palestinians and to bang on again about much we support the mythical two-state solution. Even if Israel hadn’t repeatedly denied Palestine’s right to exist, where, pray, might this imaginary Palestinian state be built? On the West Bank perhaps, in some kind of federation arrangement with Jordan?
Even that limited scenario would still require Israel to remove the existing Jewish settlements on the West Bank, a step that’s impossible to imagine ever happening. Neither Christopher Luxon nor Winston Peters have ever been asked (let alone offered) to identify the land on which they think a Palestinian state might be built. As the Guardian noted recently:
Robert Malley and Hussein Agha describe the two-state solution as a meaningless distraction and a performative notion used by diplomats for 30 years to avoid finding real solutions. They say without practical steps to make Israel engage, “the offer of recognition won’t change the life of a single Palestinian”.
Those “practical steps to make Israel engage” would include enacting sanctions against the state of Israel; advocating for an arms embargo to prevent the weaponry being used to commit a genocide; a trade and sporting boycott; and an active domestic and international divestment policy. It would also mean imposing personal sanctions on all members of the Israeli Cabinet, given that they share collective responsibility for the IDF actions in Gaza.
If we did enact and advocate for sanctions, embargoes and boycotts, and did urge larger countries and economies to do likewise – such a stance would be entirely consistent with how we (a) helped to bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa and (b) sanctioned Russia over its actions in Ukraine. We need to admit that the two-state solution is a lost cause, and act accordingly.
Footnote: BTW Israel’s claim that by recognising the state of Palestine, the world is giving a reward to terrorists is not only factually wrong, but deeply ironic. After all, the state of Israel came into being in 1948 as a direct result of terrorist actions taken by Jewish extremists, who – among their other acts of violence – killed 91 people when they bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
Soon afterwards, an even more radical Jewish terrorist faction assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator who had been (a) trying to negotiate a truce between Jews and Palestinians and (b) devise a partition plan to resolve the Israel/Palestine dispute, via what we would now call a two-state solution. Meaning: given its own blood-soaked history of state formation via terrorism, Israel is hardly in a strong position to decry terrorist acts being committed against the agents and allies of occupation forces.
On that point…as Malley and Agha point out, the current atrocities by Hamas and by the IDF are not aberrations, but look more like historical re-enactments of the horrors of Israel’s foundation. As they say, we are now back before Oslo, before the 1967 borders, before even 1948. Israel may talk about its need for security, but its actions in Gaza and on the West Bank are more about affirming its supremacy.
It really shouldn’t be feeling so insecure. Israel has the world’s richest and strongest military power as its unquestioning ally. It commands the strongest military forces by far in the region. It is the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Yet still Israel plays the victim card. It has options. For his own reasons though, Benjamin Netanyahu is choosing the path of eternal war. As a consequence, a solution that serves both sides is as elusive now as it was in 1948. Even people who know their history, can still be doomed to repeat it.