OnPoint by Keith Ng

I'm sitting in a session discussing unpaid leave right now. The idea is to make unpaid leave more acceptable as an option for businesses that are feeling the pinch. It's the exact same argument as the four-day week - less pay --> more to go around --> fewer redundancies --> lesser social impact.

A problem is starting to emerge. Like the four-day week, it's being presented as a no-loss option. Employers get to reduce their labour costs and keep going, while employees get to keep their jobs and have time off for "leisure" or training. At a cost of 20% of their pay. Ahem.

This assumes that government isn't going to step up and subsidise the fifth day. This is being discussed right now. The speaker is talking about it pretty seriously, specifying how it'll be limited to certain businesses. He's going into an awful lot of detail about the mechanisms of the scheme. It seems like a lot for the government to stump up, but then again, if the alternative is that these people go on the dole, maybe the numbers will add up.

I don't have anything against the four-day week or similar proposals. It's probably better than the alternative of layoffs. But everyone seems to be in "sales" mode at the moment - and ignoring the intensely ugly scenarios that could come out of it.

The most obvious is that employers will pressure employees into taking it. If it's subsidised, that's not so bad, but if it's not, it's asking employees to take a 20% pay cut.

The employees who are under the most financial stress will also be the ones most resistant to it. If you're barely making ends meet, you can't take a 20% pay cut. But as jobs become more scarce, their alternatives dry up. They'll get mushed between taking a pay cut they can't afford and losing a job they can't replace.

And because they're most resistant to "flexible arrangements", that'll make them most problematic for employers. Stuck between a rock and a hard place with a target painted on their forehead is a shitty place to be.

Of course, if the alternative is that the business goes bust, leaving them and their workmates jobless, then maybe this is the less shitty of two evils.

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Prominent right-winger says, that now is "obviously" not the time to be adding climate change-related costs to the economy. Gets shot down by the chair.

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Please use the discussion thread from the previous post.

If there's one heartening thing about the jobs summit, it's how utterly media unfriendly it is. Sure, there are set pieces where Key & Co stand up, sing "We're Doing Something" and takes a bow, but the actual summitting part of the summit is not just for show. In fact, it's so unshowy, it's unshowable (Chatham House Rules = no filming or recording).

Right now, there are about a dozen "sub-workflow" going on. Industry people clustered around focal points of influence - ministers and big name official. (Except for Gerry, who I passed on the way to the media room, perched by the sandwiches. I'm assuming that's not covered by Chatham House Rules. Anyway.)

The media are skirting around the edges, picking off the stragglers, but the tables themselves are tough. Aside from the fact that it's a group of industry chums sitting around talking among themselves, where media is really out of place, they're talking about detail.

So. Much. Detail. With a side of waffle. But mostly detail.

For example, the four-day work week is pretty much the four-day work week (or the nine-day fortnight), but the actual discussion that happens after that is around training, how to arrange the training through industry training organisations, how to ensure that the training programmes are driven by employer needs, employeer/employee negotiations about the kind of training... this is the kind of stuff that would make a news editor cry.

So, it's a little encouraging that much of this is not a pony show. It is a genuine attempt to listen. I'll let you know when I figure out what the hell they're actually saying.

National’s “we’re not so bad” rebranding was always going to be a problem. I doubt that either Key or English has a single bone in their bodies that would support raising the minimum wage, and yet, they’re positioning themselves to make – at least – a token increase.

The key message here, as the Herald helpfully leads with, is that “Prime Minister John Key appears to be sympathetic…”

But he shouldn’t be.

A recession isn’t some nebulous evil that lurks in the ether. It has tangible effects of reducing demand for exports, making credit harder to obtain, blah blah blah – or it doesn’t. For a salary earner with a steady job, the recession is not going to seep through the window and eat his money.

Wage levels may rise slower (or not at all), but they’re not going to fall. The December figures from the Quarterly Employment Survey shows that the average hourly earning is up 5.5% from the previous year. Wages have not fallen.

Sure, the working poor who are still working are still poor – but it’s the working poor who can’t get work that we should be worried about.

What *has* fallen the most is overtime hours, by a whooping 11.1% in the last year. At the same time, the total paid hours (the number of hours of paid work by everyone in the country) is down by 1.4%, the number of part-time workers is down 3.4%, and the number of full-time workers is almost stagnant.

These numbers paint the picture that you’d expect. Businesses are taking the brunt of declining exports, consumption and investment. They try to cut costs by cutting overtime hours, not hiring new staff, and trimming back the hours for temporary employees.

It’s that last group who are now on the plank, and if the minimum wage increases, they will be the ones who are most expendable and relatively expensive. Increasing the cost of hiring people will just force these businesses to cut back on hours, or push them into lay-off territory.

Nor will the supposed benefits be worth squat. If you raise the minimum wage by 10% ($1.20) and cause, say, 1 in 20 of those minimum wage workers to lose their jobs, the other 19 are not going to spend their additional earnings. Rather, they’re going to freak out about people getting fired, and get even tighter with their spending.

Increasing the minimum wage is not inherently a bad thing, but to do it now, when so many businesses and their employees are tethering on the edge is a seriously bad idea. The social harm done by the job losses would far outweigh the $20 or $30 it might mean for those other families.

If Key and English were serious about maintaining living standards for low-income families and using their spending to stimulate the economy, it’s pretty straightforward: Working for Families.

Dude, it’s like, right there.

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Don't get me wrong, I hate boy-racers as much as the next guy.

“Excuse me, do you know that your muffler doesn't muffle, you’ve got a leaky valve going *pssssh* all the time, and that you're in the wrong gear? Also, did you run over a Christmas tree? You have some lights stuck to the bottom of your car.”

But are boyracers “a matter of priority”? Really?

More importantly, Collins says she's considering crushing boyracers cars as a purely punitive measure. It's colourful, poetic, and... well, pretty damn sweet, but it's hardly fair. Boyracers might be young, stupid and dicks, and they might be all that in a particularly obnoxious way, but that doesn't mean we should single them out for exceptional punishment more than any other group of drunken yoofs who are young, stupid and dicks.

I hope Collin’s just doing a bit of sabre-rattling before they settle on something a little less poetic and a little more reasonable... though did I mention that it’s pretty sweet?

Under intense diplomatic pressure, I am forced to retract my last post: Phnom Penh is, in fact, not necessarily the skankiest city I've ever seen. Probably. The smelliness and the offer of child prostitutes in broad daylight made me less than objective.

To be honest, it really isn't that bad. It's just that, nested between Thailand and Vietnam, it's a shock to see how far it's lagging behind its neighbours.

The first time I visited India, I had some ridiculously high expectations. The myth of IT powerhouse India had taken on a life of its own. India was supposed to be highly educated, wired-up, modern and ready to step up as a global superpower. It was a reality in downtown Mumbai, and maybe Bangalore, but the rest of the country lagged far behind.

Sure, India can brag about its cellphone coverage, internet connectivity and massive emerging middle-class, but at the same time, a significant segment of its population was destitute, and even more lacked access to modern sanitation, healthcare, education, and everything else they need to move up the ladder.

I'd recalibrated my expectations for “developing nations” accordingly. If India was leading the pack amongst developing nations, well...

It was a shocking thing to see in Vietnam: Joggers. Parks full of them. People who treated calories as a nuisance, not as energy. People who could make a living with enough time and energy left over to run around in circles. More than the flash cars and the flash cellphones, it was the joggers who made the biggest impression on me, that Vietnam was really doing rather well.

With that in mind, I compiled this list.

You know your country has made it when:

* You have public sanitation (yay!).

* You have public spaces.

* Locals use the public spaces.

* Old people sit around these public spaces instead of doing anything useful.

* You jog, when nothing is chasing you.

* You have to line up to pick up your kids from school after work.

* Your kids go to school and you have work.

* KFC stops being an aspirational brand.

* Starbucks starts being an aspirational brand.

* You pay $4 USD for shitty coffee.

* A 5.56mm round goes for $1.50 USD a pop, and only tourists buy them.

* Your head is worth more than a helmet.

* You can tastefully pimp your scooter.

* All you want from tourists is for them to get off the goddamn road already.

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Meanwhile, few tears are going to be shed for those sentenced to death over the melamine case. There are arguably more tears being shed that *more* people didn't get the death sentence, especially Tian Wenhua, the former chairwoman of Sanlu.

Not that angry mobs can justify anything, but I think Keith Locke really got the wrong end of the stick last week:

The death sentences are a symbol of the problem, not part of the solution... They show the harshness of the regime towards anyone who embarrasses it, whether they are real criminals, whistleblowers or dissenters. Many Chinese knew the milk was being contaminated but said nothing for fear of repercussions from those in authority."

Sure, the Chinese government is an autocratic regime, and it does a lot of shitty things to stay in power, etc., but here's the rub – if an autocratic regime tries to maintain power by governing well, is that really a bad thing?

Of course, that assumes that executing people was an example of governing well. Somewhat perversely, I think it's much more justifiable to execute people for economic crimes than for violent ones. First, people who commit economic crimes are likely to be more rational and almost certainly premeditated. That means that they will consider the consequences much more carefully than violent offenders, making harsher deterrents more effective.

And the consequences of their crimes are much more significant than violent offenders. What violent offenders – hell, what terrorist group – can cause the kind of lasting damage and panic that we saw? In this case, it was a direct link: melamine = sick infants. But in every corruption case involving public funds, there are massive consequences downstream, from weakened health or public sanitation services to substandard infrastructure or schools that are unsafe.

If the death penalty can deter these economic crimes, and these economic crimes affect millions of people, isn't it worth it?

The ironic thing about Locke's statement is, whether the death penalty is an effective deterrent or not, this is the Chinese government acting with the full support of the people. If anything, a democratic Chinese government would be even less likely to spare the death penalty.

I've been walking around with my guarded face on. Not my "come near me and I'll stab you in the eyeball" face. No, not that bad. Just my more versatile "come near me and I might make unkind comments about your appearance" face.

Hard. Core.

With waist-high piles of trash everywhere and urine dripping from the footpath, dimly-lit central Phnom Penh is not the most inviting place in the world. Not that it's dangerous either, but it is *ghetto*, at least. The constant stream of touts is tiring too, but more than any other place I've been to, the grotty end of the sex trade here leers out like a plumber's crack.

Dingy workshops are lined with plastic chairs, which are filled with working girls. Everywhere I go, tuk-tuk drivers ask if I require "Tuk-tuk? Ladies? Massage? Boom-boom?"

"You want jungle boom boom?"

I don't know. I really, really don't know.

It's not as if my chastity is being threatened, but christ, Phnom Penh couldn't look more skanky if it tried...

Even an *Australian* tried to con me here, claiming tales of woe, stolen wallet, hasn't eaten all day, family will wire him some money, but needs $20 USD to get that money because um... Western Union fees... can't call his family, consulate won't help... consulate needs $20 USD...

It *was* a first, though.

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Bangkok, on the other hand, had cleaned up all shiny. Downtown Bangkok is an utterly modern hub of offices and shopping malls, criscrossed with zippy subways and skytrains. The more... "flavoursome" old alleys were left for the tourists.

Not many downright scams, just tolerable levels of overpricing, and the seediness was contained (relatively speaking) to the seedy parts of town.

Down there, the traditional shows were still on offer. Ping pong et al. The "et al." turned out to be quite a considerable menu (that's a literal menu, printed and laminated) that touts shoved in my face. I didn't quite see what all the "et al." were, though - my friend Nicola, who was tasked with defending my virtue, beat back the pimps, touts and ladyboys with great success. "No" most certainly meant no.

But that's okay - you can find out on Wikipedia (work-safe, naturally). Ah, sum of human knowledge indeed.

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But the grim face is not just because of the dirtiness. It's because Phnom Penh could, and did get skankier. 20 minutes after I arrived, looking for a hotel with my backpack on:

"Tuk-tuk?"
"No thank you."
"Massage boom boom?"
"No thank you."
"Boom boom? Small? Very small, very young!"

I'm pretty sure I was getting offered child prostitutes in broad daylight, on a busy street in the respectably touristy part of town. There're signs everywhere for the government's anti-child prostitution programme. Clearly, it's got some way to go.

(Still on my way to Hanoi. Getting closer, at least.)