Satire? Drama? More like Rubbish

So you’ve never heard of the truism: you can always earn more by using your brain than by using your hands.
Given your above comment it’s clear you haven’t heard of it. Have a nice life stacking shelves on the minimum wage, griping about all the people earning more than you.

An excellent come
back showing a clearly thought out plan to justify your original statement. Make
up your mind. One minute they were free labour now they earn the same? Except of course the dole pays about $4
per hour if you based it on a 40 hour week I believe. Never having been on it I
don’t really know.

So let’s try extrapolating your little economic theory. I
can see 3 possibilities.

1.
The one I fleetingly mentioned earlier where you
take over all the private companies and nationalise them (You could name them
The Ministry of Works?) and drag all the current employees’ wages down to the
level of the dole by laying them all off and re hiring them on work for the
dole schemes. (Sounds like an excellent and workable concept to me, worked well
for Stalin.) We should also introduce gulags.

Of course you’ll have to vote Red and Green
to get this option.

2.
You continue with the status quo but let more
contracts to private companies and force them to employee a certain percentage
of the bludgers who will in turn be forced to attend and then be paid less than
those they work alongside.

For this option you need to vote for a
combination of Ruth Richardson and Roger Douglas and possibly throw Colin Craig
in the mix, probably giving you a kind of Lavender vote but you can’t leave out
The Green and Red because you still need their money tree to pay for the
additional capital works that isn’t in the budget.

3.
Since options 1 & 2 are ridiculous that
leaves option 3. A work trial period where the bludgers are given an opportunity
to earn the same money (more or less with skills matrix’s and the like thrown
into the mix).

Now the problem with this is the same as
before. Where is the money going to come from for additional capital works to
be done when there is a huge waiting list and no dollars to go around?

Simply saying that the dole bludgers can do
the labour does not at any level satisfy the actual true costs involved in
major capital projects, the cheap labour cannot offset all the other costs
involved and in fact make up a small percentage (the unskilled labour) of the
overall tender price. The reality is the labour costs in NZ are more or less
low enough in these types of industry that the savings would be marginal and
probably not at all due to the costs of training and the overheads involved in
all the cock up’s accidents and disasters that a totally unskilled work force
would bring.

Sounds nice in theory but has no actual
grounding behind it without the money for the capital works in the first place.

Back to school young ‘un! I have shelves to
stack.