Green Employment Policy

I also recommend people read the Green Employment Policy, or should be called their unemployment policy. Highlights are:

* Increasing the minimum wage for 16 and 17 year olds from $7.60 to $12 an hour.

If you don’t think this will reduce work opportunities for teenagers, then you don’t live in the real world. Let’s be blunt – often the work an unskilled 16 year old can do is not worth $12/hr. But by being able to employ them for less than that, they gain the skills to be able to obtain higher paying jobs in future.

* Investigate a 35 hour working week

Obviously they have not noticed France which introduced this now has 10% unemployment.

* Double sick leave entitlement to a month a year, if you have dependents

* Also allow a week’s leave per bereavement, no matter how close or distant they are to you.

* The right for staff to strike not just over pay and conditions, but over any issue at all that grabs their fancy – supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, protesting rain-forest felling in Brazil, opposing the freeing of Afghanistan from the Taliban – all would be valid reasons to strike with the Greens.

* Employers to provide unions with an on site office for their union activities, if over 50 staff belong to the union.

Wow what fun it will be to be an employer when the Greens are in Government.