Employment N.Z.’s worst problem — Mr Rowling

Press, 7 June 1980, Page 2

Employment N.Z.’s worst problem — Mr Rowling

PA Palmerston North Employment is the single biggest social and economic problem New Zealand has to face now and in the foreseeable future, says the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Rowling). “At present it is the problem we are least equipped to deal with,” he said in a speech for the winter lecture series at Massey University. He began by warning his audience that one in five of them would be out of work within 10 years. Mr Rowling said New Zealand's critical employment position was not only the result of the economic recession, t'ft is also the result of the way we ■ are allowing ourselves to drift into what will be‘virtually a new industrial revolution — the revolution'■ of the microchip.” New Zealand seemed not only totally unprepared, but almost unaware of what was happening. "The time we have left for effective response is fast running out.” Mr Rowling said there was a real danger that the working generation would be left to pay the price. “We have ah appallingly weak structure to deal with redundancy,” he said. . “Our education and social structures seem totally unable to deal with the phenomenon of the schoolleaver who walks from the classroom on to the dole. “Yet we are now living with an unemployment problem, which, if accurately analysed, would be among the worst of comparable Western democracies.” Mr Rowling said that a minimum of 26,000 jobs a year would be needed during the next five years; this had to be set against the background of New Zealand’s economic performance in the last 10 years, when a total of only 30,000 additional jobs had been created. There was now a solid pool of unemployment, skilled people were pouring out of the country, and the technological revolution was

spreading, largely unchecked and unmonitored, Mr Rowling said. • He warned that the microprocessing revolution was dramatically different from earlier developments in technology. • - For a start, its introduction throughout the Western world was coinciding with an already unhappy combination of recession and high inflation. In most cases it was not being used to boost production but rather to save labour costs. In New Zealand it was being directed into what people might unkindly call the non-productive service area* — banks, insurance companies, finance houses, retail outlets, and some areas of the bureaucracy. “The much talked about shift of resources from the non-productive to the productive sectors that is now fashionable among sections of the National Party, would be fine if there was a growing productive sector for those people to go to.' “In a recession and at a time of low investment and nil growth, that theory is a bit tatty,” Mr Rowling said. Dramatic consequences were already appearing from the Post Office’s move into computers. The introduction of subscriber toll dialling would cost 3000 jobs when fully introduced. Mr Rowling said New Zealand must be prepared to accept, for the first time in its economic history, a genuine manpower planning policy within which the impact of technology could be constantly monitored. “I do not accept that workers alone should bear the brunt of technological change, as they are doing at the moment. Both the employers and the State must accept an equal share,” Mr Rowling said “I believe that where redundancy is caused by technological change there should be a mandatory period.of notice and a minimum level of redundancy payment for the individual worker.”