I've nearly been arrested twice in the past month. Both times it was after international owners of call centres told local managers to lock out their Kiwi workforce to force workers to accept employment agreements determined by accountants in another country.
One of the call centres is British-owned, the other Australian. I'm aware of only one other lockout of workers this year but it's disturbing they were all instigated by overseas corporations.
After the workers widened the dispute by barricading the doors of the employer's premises against managers, picketing managers' homes and approaching call centre clients, the standoff ended satisfactorily.
But I can't help thinking there must be a cultural difference where overseas owners mistake Kiwi politeness for weakness. These owners offer workers essentially nothing above the minimum wage then expect everyone to roll over and accept it. The normal threat is to close and go offshore.
This is supposed to terrify the workforce into submission. But, frankly, no matter what concessions workers make they'll never compete with countries like India. Unless the Act Party has its way and the minimum wage is abolished.
Call centres in New Zealand are almost all owned by Australian interests and serve the Australian market. Their unions have maintained their contracts and the going wage rate is A$22 ($27.70) an hour, twice what the Kiwi workforce is paid.
You have probably worked it out by now, that the purpose of the Kiwi call centres is to threaten the Aussie workers that their work will be shipped off to our side of the Tasman unless they agree to wage cuts.
Apparently there's also a crude attempt to pass our accents off as Australian. On some projects, Auckland workers are instructed to tell Australian interviewees that they are calling locally, they tell me.
Call centres are just the latest front for Australian ownership and control. I suppose after we lost control of our banks to them the rest of our economic autonomy would follow. New Zealand's business elite and our Government seem to think it's a grand idea to become an Australian colony. After all, they enthusiastically support getting rid of the petty rules and other pesky irritations that prevent foreign capital from taking ownership of anything they want.
Getting rid of the independent-minded head of the Commerce Commission, as well as cutting so-called bureaucrats from departments that are supposed to keep an eye on this sort of thing, will help a new era of unfettered selling-off of our heritage.
But none of this is new and most of us feel powerless to do anything about it. So we just retreat into denial or defiant ignorance about what is happening. Some may think this ownership is benign and doesn't really matter, except that billions of our dollars are shipped offshore to pay for tycoons' yachts and mansions.
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