Thought for the week - Christmas 2007
Ho! Ho! Ho!
Nu'u arrived in New Zealand as a child, with her parents, who had been brought out to New Zealand from the Islands, to do the standard sort of jobs that white people and the brown people in New Zealand in the 1960s and '70s didn't like to do - cleaning up other people's shit at Auckland Hospital, working in a factory with an average summer temperature of 40 deg C, while manufacturing something for the white owner of whatever type of factory it happened to be. That kind of job.
Nu'u wasn't the smartest kid in class, but she never gave up trying. Her parents worked hard to bring her up as a honest girl, and in that, they succeeded.
Leaving school, Nu'u spent 17 years working as a sewing machinist, sewing all of those nice sheepskin products we proudly used to boast "Made in New Zealand" on the back of, before we found people in China who'd do the work for a few cents an hour rather than the few dollars Nu'u earned. Because the pay there wasn't enough to get by on, Nu'u took on other part-time jobs to help sustain her family, often working twelve-hour - or more - days.
Made redundant, she continued to work as a lowly-paid worker, struggling to make ends meet, keeping the family of five children well fed and schooled.
The next job lasted eight years before the inevitable pressure from China again laid waste to her employer as the 21st century started.
On to the next job - yep, just the third in her entire career. A good job, although pretty dirty work. Wind forward six years to 2007.
Deja vu - the company's in difficulties! No worries, says the executive, we've got the white knight to bail us out, we're moving premises and upwards we go!
Until November, when Nu'u is suddenly told that her job is going to finish on the 21st of December. No warning, no redundancy pay, Merry Christmas, fuck off. In fact, it even gets worse, because the management had been telling Nu'u for the past six months that they would be moving premises at Christmas and everyone was told, as recently as August, "that there would be a job for everyone" once the move had happened.
Nu'u realises that she won't be able to match the great money she was getting in her job. ("Great money" to Nu'u is $17 an hour. At a time when the average wage in New Zealand is somewhere around $42,000 a year - $20.19 an hour - Nu'u's "great money" suddenly isn't looking that great. I'd hazard a pretty educated guess that the average hourly rate in New Zealand for a worker with 25 years of working experience is about 50% more than the national average - $30 an hour. Nuu's "great money" is now a little over half the average for her age and experience. And it's a surety that she won't get that generous $17 every sixty minutes in her new job.
Just before Christmas, scurrying around to take the first job offerred to her so she can keep on living, keep paying the mortgage and feeding the kids - and grandchildren.
Meanwhile, the owners of the company will retire for a peaceful Christmas while they figure out which direction they will head in next, comfortable in their multi-million dollar homes and farmlets, still driving the same late-model European car they did last week.
That the company folded is purely due to poor management, that much is clear, but it is an unavoidable fact of life that sometimes what seem to be good decisions turn out to be bad ones - that's life.
What isn't (or at least, shouldn't be) part of that life is the ability for company executives to withhold information from their staff which would have enabled them to find better jobs, at a much better time than 4 weeks before Christmas.
Merry Fucking Christmas.
Copyright © 2007 Alan Charman