Daily loss of jobs 213

Press, 25 January 1988, Page 1

Daily loss of jobs 213

The Labour Government had destroyed 213 jobs a day during December, as a Christmas present to the country, said the Opposition spokesman on employment, Mr Winston Peters. These figures showed that the earlier provincial recession had now flowed into the metropolitan areas where its effect was bad and getting worse. He said the proof of that was in the severe drop in job vacancies being notified to the Labour Department—4s per cent fewer than a year ago. It was a measure of the Government’s incompetence that all it was doing about the increasing rate of unemployment was to promote a “stay-at-school” campaign on television.

But the Minister of Employ-

ment, Mr Goff, could not keep everyone at school indefinitely, Mr Peters said, and these statistics portrayed a life of poverty for thousands of school leavers.

It was not just areas like Northland where whole communities were going on the dole; Christchurch had record jobless levels and there had been an increase of 2000 unemployed in Auckland over the month.

Mr Goff said the figures reflected the impact of the October international sharemarket crash on business confidence. But he warned that the employment situation would remain difficult all through 1988. He blamed international economic uncertainty, the slowness of the United States to address its deficit, and economic conditions in

New Zealand. There was a mood of pessimism and employers generally were reluctant to take on staff and were delaying investment decisions. The Government refuses to return to P.E.P. or other makework schemes in spite of having nearly 100,000 registered unemployed. ,Mr Goff rejected suggestions that might help in reducing unemployment if they included what he called “a return to expensive and unproductive make-work schemes.” Nor would the Government relax its policies to defeat inflation, he said. The uncertainty in the international economic environment made it all the more essential

that New Zealand reverse the pattern of low growth, low productivity, high inflation and heavy borrowing of earlier years.

While restructuring and disinflationary policies hurt, the cost of not reforming the economy would be even greater, Mr Goff said. . Make-work schemes displaced real employment and did not address New Zealand’s need for more emphasis on acquiring skills at all levels of the work force. Recorded reductions of nearly 4000 trainees were normal on Access and other Polytechnic programmes over the summer ‘Real’ rate much higher, page 4