Van Velden Continues Be A Cunt To Women Workers

Part-time and sick? “Fuck you!” says Brooke Van Velden

Van Velden shows her inexperience — and the privilege of the MPs surrounding her — as she announces potential new sick leave for part time workers doing the types of jobs she wouldn’t deign to call “real work”. Her older, more established colleagues are equally sheltered, or equally uncaring. David Seymour and Todd Stephenson wouldn’t know the meaning of a part time job if it slapped them in their smirking faces.

Part time? That’s when you’re on contract rate, right?

(Our politicians have become accustomed to their million dollar paydays for doing not really all that much work, except for their connections, corruption, and task of telling the public what the government wants them to hear. The Chancellor of the Reserve Bank paid Steven Joyce a million dollars to sell his Waikato Medical School to the Public (while under his “University Chancellor hat”) and Bill English was paid the the same staggering sum by his former party to write a hit piece on Kainga Ora, just to justify their predetermined sell-off.)

Of course, on contract rate, things like sick days are moot. They don’t exist. No wonder Van Velden has no concept of how sick leave works — she sees the dollar signs in her future and why would she need to look further?

No, it’s the poors who are the privileged ones. Sick days come from your own income as a contractor — consider yourself lucky, part-timers!

Part time work is often considered by prettily-paid politicians as “student jobs”, or perhaps if you rewind time thirty years to the decade Winston Peters thinks he’s living in, maybe a “mum job” for women to take up when their children start school. Times are changing, though, and this government would hate to make those part time jobs seem too cushy. You might think you’re allowed to sit down or something.

Neoliberalism doesn’t much agree with part time work — that’s wasted productivity from people who could be working their fingers to their bone — and successive governments have been slowly discouraging the uptake of such work by providing more subsidised (and sometimes free) childcare to get those parents back to where they should be: the workplace. Between that and the cost of living pressures that have been inflated and dumped back onto everyday families in the form of service cuts that far outweigh their tax breaks, the plebs will soon get the message.

Work or die.

“Who will raise the children while we are all away?” women used to wonder, as workplace return for mothers increased and wages supposed to sustain entire families shrunk.

“Leave them to fend for themselves,” Ruth Richardson replied.

“Enrol them in pre-primary education,” Helen Clark offered.

“I don’t care,” Van Velden shrugged. “Just don’t let them make you miss as much work. Why would you think you can take as much time off as a man?”

The Men’s Liberation Movement of the 70s joined their voices with women to answer such questions

Although women now make up almost half the paid workforce, they make up three-quarters of our part-time workers. That reflects the greater role women tend to take in unpaid domestic work, especially in families with children. As such, they are three times more likely than a man to be affected by Brooke Van Velden’s cuts.

Many part time workers hold multiple part time jobs. Again, this is not distributed evenly across the demographics, as low-paid workers are more likely to be in multiple streams of employment, scrambling to cover their bills on too-few hours. A lot of them are underemployed — which means they want more hours, maybe full time hours, but they’re simply not available.

Certain roles require part-time workers. Teacher aides, relief teachers, cleaners, service workers, and receptionists are all jobs likely to offer part time work, and these are often taken up by women and working mothers. Those who work with children will experience the same increased illness risk and frequency as other teachers, but because of Brooke Van Velden, they will now receive only a fraction of the sick leave.

People who work with food and in hospitality are also disproportionately likely to be affected, which will impact the number of sick workers interacting with customers and passing on their illnesses to the public. In hospitality, working while sick is an expectation — surveys show over half of workers do it. COVID prompted us to extend the full amount of sick leave to these employees, recognising the public good that comes from alleviating the pressure to show up to work sick. This government, who seem to have forgotten COVID ever happened when discussing the economic management of the last government, again rely on their short-term memory to justify bowing to the business interests who would rather not pay out any more sick days than they have to.

That is where this pressure has come from. Van Velden calls it feedback — but it is not feedback from employees, from the people who actually have to take time away from their jobs. I would bet it is mostly not even feedback from people whose job it is to organise the leave of workers — HR, managers, team leaders, small business owners. It is the bigger, wealthier business interests that donate disproportionately to NACT, and especially to ACT, that are pulling Van Velden’s puppet strings.

ChatGPT can generate some creepy images if you ask it to give you Brooke Van Velden as a puppet. The strings get less connected each time.

“Generic female politician” does look a lot like Van Velden, actually

This one was the best but sadly lacked the string. Hand up her arse is maybe a better metaphor.

The realities of these jobs, and the lives of the workers who work them, have not been properly considered by Van Velden and her cabinet colleagues.

Part time hours can often involve working five or more days per week, sometimes for a single role—the same as a full-time worker. They may just have shorter hours, or if they work fewer days, they may be more bunched together, resulting in more time off taken when they are ill — 6 sick days for a 3 days on and 4 days off job would mean that a single medium-term illness can take out half your leave at both workplaces. That is a very common length of leave to have to take, and so reducing the days available to part time workers will result in workers cutting their sick leave short, jeopardising their recoveries and putting their coworkers and the public at risk.

ACC, for example, requires workers to take a full week of leave before covering time off for injury. That quota is no different for part time workers, but Van Velden doesn’t presume to shorten it as part of her changes.

A year ago, Van Velden appeared on AM and tried to claim part time workers got 20 sick days compared to full time workers, who only got ten. Why stop there, Brooke? Some part time workers are working three or even four part time jobs. The greedy fuckers! They’re getting 40 days sick leave a year and here’s you only getting ten!

Of course, it doesn’t really work like that. Someone working multiple jobs will often have those jobs overlapping — working two jobs in a day, for example, sometimes three. They will also have to split those days between illnesses, so if they work as a cleaner monday-thursday and a waitress thursday-saturday, those “twenty days” are still stretching across 7 working days, including the overlapping thursday, even though they only work 6 of them, and might be working half the hours of a full time worker only on 5. A single flu on that timetable would take out 4 days from one job and 3 days from the other out of their “twenty” total sick days, while a full time worker would lose 5 out of their 10. If you do the maths, that means a full time worker would use only half of their sick leave, while a part time worker uses more than a third and just under a half.

Almost like the people who implemented it bothered to do the maths.

Either Van Velden has been taking her counting lessons from Nicola Willis, or she doesn’t understand the realities of being a part time worker juggling multiple jobs because her privileged lifestyle has never even forced her to consider it.

This text should become mandatory reading for Parliamentarians

I am delighted that Andrea Vance has given my potty mouth journalistic permission to describe “female politicians” as what they are. (The male ones, I presume, were already fair game). Because the anti-worker, anti-women agenda she forges ahead with proves that, as much as she may dislike the term, Brooke Van Velden remains one of Parliament’s biggest ever cunts.

Move over Ruth Richardson.