Nicola Willis’s Catch-22

Would you like to get paid more and have your work get worse, or have your pay decrease in real terms but when you’re saving lives or raising the next generation of workers, you get to keep your head juuuust above the water level during this flood of fiscally unnecessary backbench public service cuts?

That is the choice Nicola Willis has given to frontline workers next year as she cracks down on any increase in public spending in her scramble to cover the government’s unsustainable tax breaks.

CTU economist Craig Renney breaks down Treasury data to demonstrate that the public service workforce is not out of control, and so this wave of mass cuts and spending caps will not be reverting increases but causing massive decreases for the first time in decades.

But the government want cuts. So cut we will.

This will have massive implications for the future of New Zealand’s public service and the ability for “frontline workers” to do their jobs as the behind-the-scenes workforce shrinks. And it gets worse — Nicola Willis has announced that there will no or very few top ups to budgets for departments, which means public service workers can only receive pay increases at the expense of their own workload/support level.

Next year the PPTA will begin negotiations, and before they’ve even started, Willis has effectively ruled out backpay and created a situation in which any pay increase they campaign for will come with the caveat that an already-struggling workforce will have to struggle more. As they point out, this isn’t exactly a good-faith position in which to start.

And the frustration continues that this is a totally self-imposed situation, necessitated only by the amount of money this government has chosen to give away.

Meanwhile the directive that working from home be limited will punish an already-beleaguered workforce for no good reason and drive away a few more of our public servants who have had a real-terms pandemic pay cut and then been put through several rounds of unnecessary layoffs as a reward for their sacrifice.

Why are they doing this? Because ATLAS. Because neoliberalism. Because conservatives are making a concerted effort to force through small government and lie about how it was needed, because that expands the private sector which they mistakenly believe will create wealth (well it will, but mostly for them).

Because Luxon wanted people to vote for him so he promised everyone billions of dollars in tax cuts on the campaign trail before he knew whether he could afford it.

Because this Government don’t care about anyone but themselves.