You can read April 2014 Essential Update here
The official unemployment rate in Canterbury is now only 3.3% according to Statistics New Zealand – this is considered to be “full employment”. This is the lowest since September 2008 and you will find that it is becoming harder and harder to find New Zealanders to fill skilled roles. For those of you forecasting growth in the coming months, it would pay you to start thinking of strategies to access skilled migrant labour – be that from other places within New Zealand, or from overseas. You will need to allow for a longer time to fill positions and may need to invest in moving good candidates to Canterbury. Other actions you will need to consider are placing job ads automatically with WINZ (through the Canterbury Development Hub) so you can get the approval needed for Immigration to approve recruitment from overseas; and putting more effort into retaining the staff you have.
Budget 2014 was announced last Thursday and is widely viewed as careful and considered. The underlying message is that the economic outlook is reasonably positive, especially with activity from the Christchurch rebuild, but there are challenges – including upward pressure on nominal wages and a tight labour market.
The government’s Labour Inspectorate has just concluded a review of 44 farms nationwide in relation to their employment law compliance. 31 farms were found to have breached at least one law, and on average over 2. While farms are generally given 28 days to comply, the cost of not doing so is up to $20,000 for a company. The major source of non-compliance is in the area of wage and time records, but wage rates, leave and stat days and the existence of employment agreements all featured.
The government has issued a draft set of regulations to support the new Health and Safety at Work Act. Through MBIE (what used to be the Dept of Labour) they require feedback on the regulations to ensure the new health and safety framework is practical and robust. The more of you that are interested and can find the time to make representations the better. I will be looking at it myself and if you wish to suggest things for me to say – please do.
You can read May 2014 Essential Update here
The Holidays Act specifies that Annual Leave must be paid out at the greater of "ordinary weekly pay" and "average weekly pay". Now, ‘Ordinary weekly pay’ is the pay the employee would receive under his or her employment agreement for working an ordinary working week, which is often pretty easy to determine. But, where an employee usually works more than the ordinary/minimum working week per their Employment Agreement, the Holidays Act provides a formula for “average weekly pay”, which is the correct rate for annual leave.
The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment has just released a report on the impact of recent changes to the Employment Relations Act and the Holidays Act. Amendments were introduced to both acts in 2010 with most changes taking effect from April 2011. The report focused on the following key areas:
An interesting court case (NZ Aluminium Smelters) has confirmed that pay for a lieu day must be at the rate of what they would have earned – so 12-hr shift workers must receive 12 hours for a lieu day. No amount of rewording employment agreements can get around this.
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