I’ll have a Big McPaula with lies please

The truth is out!

Sue Bradford questioned Minister of Social Development and Employment Paula Bennett in Parliament today.

Last week Paula Bennett revealed a supposed job creation agreement with McDonalds during a select committee meeting at Parliament. The agreement will (according to Bennett):

…provide up to 7000 unemployed for the fast-food chain’s restaurant expansion plans over the next five years…

Her Deputy Chief Executive said:

Under the deal with McDonald’s, Work and Income would help with the recruitment and training of 7000 staff in service roles and “positions which provide a career path”, Work and Income deputy chief executive Patricia Reade said.

“We’re very pleased that we will be able to offer unemployed people over the next five years opportunities in the food and hospitality trade,” she said.

McDonald’s intends to open 30 new restaurants over the next five years.

But today, under questioning from Sue Bradford, Paula Bennett has been caught out telling fibs. As Paula Bennett told Sue Bradford in Parliament:

It is a job subsidy for long-term beneficiaries, and it has been around for years. The job subsidy that goes with the individual is not new. The partnership and the way that we access those employees are different, but the job funding is not different or exceptional.

So there is nothing new about the arrangement with McDonalds. There is no special agreement – it is just what they have inherited from governements past. As Paula now admits, it’s been around for years.

As I suspected, National has no idea about how to create jobs and stimulate the economy in a recession. They won’t buy into the Green New Deal proposals, apart from the home insulation one that Labour had already been dragged screaming and kicking to agree to before the election.

This really is a clueless government as far as dealing with the recession goes. They sit back, hope all will come right in a year or two (in time for the next election) and watch untold thousands of New Zealanders being thrown on the unemployment scrapheap.

And their solution is to trot out an job placement and subsidy initiative that has existed for the last couple of decades in the hope that New Zealanders will see this as something new and McDonalds uptake of it as the solution to our financial and employment crisis.

Anyway, Paula, would you like fries with your financial and employment crisis? Because the economy and the unemployment statistics won’t come right until you actually do something, rather than rely on the somewhat parsimonious initiatives of those who have done something before you.

Paula’s new partner

Oh dear, this is just a really bad look for Social Development and Employment Minister Paula Bennett.

Her vision for addressing New Zealand’s rising unemployment is a partnership that involves Work and Income “recruiting and training” 7000 staff to flip burgers for fast food multinational McDonalds.

Exactly what the “training” Work and Income will be providing is beyond me. I can’t imagine how it would take more than half a day to train someone to work in a fast food restaurant.

McDonalds has a reputation as a poor employer – paying low wages, providing insecure hours, and being vehemently anti-union.

They also have a poor sustainability record, a poor animal welfare record, target their advertising to children, and while their nutritional standards have improved somewhat in recent years, much of their food is still crap.

So Bennett sends 7000 people off to work in dead-end, menial, low-paid jobs at McDonalds, while cutting the access to Training Incentive Allowance that would get many beneficiaries the qualifications to get into well-paid and secure employment.

Go figure!