Employers Take Advantage of 90 Day Act at Time of Recession

All bets off as jobless hit six-year highEmployers are turning to easier-to-fire part-time and casual staff for a more flexible workforce to help them through the economic downturn.Figures made public yesterday by Statistics New Zealand show unemployment hit a six-year high of 4.6 per cent in the December quarter. This was up from 4.2 per cent in September a rise of 10.8 per cent in three months. There are now 105,000 jobless nationwide. Most economists expect unemployment to reach 7 per cent this year, putting pressure on the Reserve Bank to further cut the official cash rate from 3.5 per cent to as low as 2 per cent by the middle of the year. But economists say the big surprise in December's figures was the 0.9 per cent increase in the number of people in work in the quarter, mainly due to the 3.5 per cent rise in part-time workers. The number of fulltime employees also rose, but by a modest 0.3 per cent. Just over 69 per cent of the workforce was employed, up 0.6 per cent, as people tried to make ends meet, economists said. "All these extra job-hunters overwhelmed the supply of jobs," ASB economist Jane Turner said. Robin Clements at UBS said the increase in the number of part-time workers suggested employers were turning to casual staff who were "easier to let go if need be".Just as Tumeke predicted when National misused urgency and pack raped the select committee process to ram through the right to sack law, employers are now starting to focus on only casual employment so that they can sack new workers under the new 90 day law. With over 7% unemployment predicted this year, plus the many NZers who will flee the Australian economic and environmental collapse plus the 100 000 NZers who find themselves as new employers every 3 months, that creates a massive slice of NZ who are always new employees and as such are ripe for exploitation. These figures show how quickly that exploitation is starting.
(Reprinted from www.tumeke.blogspot.com/ -)