Ports of Auckland

[Zedder]

Not so.
Everybody who earns has their income added to all the others and then divided by the number of incomes. That gives the average, and there are more than enough with incomes in the millions to drag the average up to an unrealistic level. The median income would tell an entirely different story.

Apologies, I mixed my mean up with my median. You can tell it's been a while since I did this stuff.

[JMemonic]

Yep. Gone are the bad old days when the lend you money you could never pay back (in 35 years).
Mate just got a $400K loan and he contracts out atleast 20 hours a week. So I am guessing he is getting paid more than you.
So in your case "the numbers don't add up". The debt outways your income and they need more hours (or $) on the clock.
They would have assumed that your not likely to get a pay increase in the next 2 years, but can't make the assumption that intrest rates will remain the same with the euro crisis happening.

Which is kind of understandable when you think about what happend in 2008/09.

But feel free to slag the banks some more for using common sense. Banks don't give a fuck what your occupation is, so long as you have the $ to pay the bills.

Um where did I slag off the banks? Oh and this want recently and my income was well above the average at the time, however 20 hours per week was in their view not considered full time employment, perhaps they have altered that due to the number of folks with what would have been called part time jobs.

Heck as a kid at school I worked up to 20 hours a week as part time and after school jobs.

[SPman]

$27+ an hour is still a damn good rate!
In the industry I work in (engineering) thats Foreman rates for a very skilled guy!
These guys are nowhere near as skilled!!! Fact!

In the industry I'm in, that's what the boys get......that's pathetic - I was getting $22/hr as a chippie in NZ 1989! By 1999, I was getting $20/hr and young guys were saying "gee, that's a lot!!!"
Fuck me!

[Winston001]

But seriously, Len Brown can't take sides and must only do what's right for Aucklanders in this dispute under the legislation for a CCO. It's the same concept as John Key not being able to run an SOE as far as I can tell.

Yep got it now. The Council as the shareholder can appoint directors, make policy, and influence governence decisions. However the Council cannot interfere below directorship level - they cannot tell the POA managers what to do. If they did those managers could take an Employment Tribunal claim, plus I think its in breach of the Local Government Act 2002.

A bit ironic though - Auckland Council's hands are tied by employment law involving an employment law dispute.

As far as the 12% target goes, it's not a Return on Investment, Return On Assets or Dividend Return but a Return On Equity.

Equity = Nett Worth of the business being total assets less debts and liabilities. Nothing magic about that, its what the share-market assesses every day. Shares are commonly referred to as "equities".

But thanks for the info, it all helps build up a picture.

[Hinny]

Everyone is working harder for their$$$ now, get over it!!

Why is that do you suppose?
Haven't seen the rewards of Bill Birch's Employment Contracts Act huh?
We were supposed to become so much better off because we could negotiate our own contracts. Yeah right.
The sheeple bought it then and it seems the sheeple are getting corralled again for another cull.
Sure that legislation got repealed but it left it's legacy.
We live in a society that is a lot better off than it was in Victorian times but worse off than it was before Bill Birch came along.
We shouldn't be working harder today than we were thirty years ago. Should we?
We are headed in the wrong direction.
Working 6 or 7 days a week to survive is just dumb.
It doesn't make a better society.

[Winston001]

We shouldn't be working harder today than we were thirty years ago. Should we?
We are headed in the wrong direction.
.

According to the OECD average, the number of hours worked since 2000 has dropped by 4%.

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS

You have to admit we have a wealthy society. Here we are on a motorcycle site enjoying our passion when most of us have a cage as well. Two cages in most families. Good food, good houses, good streets and roads, a safe community, law and order, laid-back society. Mountains lakes beaches vast empty places you can go within a couple of hours of home. Very few people in the world can say that.

[James Deuce]

According to the OECD average, the number of hours worked since 2000 has dropped by 4%.

You have to admit we have a wealthy society. Here we are on a motorcycle site enjoying our passion when most of us have a cage as well. Two cages in most families. Good food, good houses, good streets and roads, a safe community, law and order, laid-back society.

That's a myth, fostered by those who don't want to see what is happening to "average" NZers. I "enjoy" my passion through charity (that I am happy to accept - it's the only nice thing to happen to me in the last five years). As for the rest of it, well it's a struggle that gets harder day by day, and everyone just points the finger, tells me it's all my fault, and judges me a failure and a thicky. Treasured friends have simply stopped talking to us. Because we make a lie of the myth that there is nothing wrong with NZ society.

[avgas]

I always thought people were working harder because there was less people actually working. No direct evidence to back this up, but even in my firm they went from having a 30 engineers in the 80's to 3 of us now.
Seems pretty much the same everywhere else. Lots more chiefs but decreasing number of Indians.

Of course this is all theory - as mentioned earlier, not evidence to support this.

[MSTRS:Me]

I always thought people were working harder because there was less people actually working. No direct evidence to back this up, but even in my firm they went from having a 30 engineers in the 80's to 3 of us now.
Seems pretty much the same everywhere else. Lots more chiefs but decreasing number of Indians.

Of course this is all theory - as mentioned earlier, not evidence to support this.

Not theory...
Look at Hospitals and the ever-increasing numbers of paper-pushers who are appointed to ensure the board is getting the best use of the money it is allocated to run said hospital. Those paper pushers are paid (often big money) out of that allocation, and because the allocation is a limited amount, something has to go somewhere else...doctors, nurses, ancillary staff...the people who actually do the work for which the hospital exists. Or...
When did we ever see an annual govt Budget that didn't allocate more funding for health? Huge chunks of that are actually going into said paper-pushers. Who produce what, exactly, in terms of more and better patient care? And every year we see the waiting lists get bigger. Oh, wait a minute, that's not true. The criteria for requiring surgery is just tightened year by year, so that big numbers now have to go without, or somehow fund it privately.

Back to your case...3 cannot do the work of 30, unless it was a govt contract, so I'm guessing much of your shop's output was re-sourced from Asia? So 27 engineers either shot through, are (still) sitting on the dole, found a job as a school crossing guard (don't laugh - it happens) or if they were really lucky managed to hire on with another engineer's shop. My money is on most of them having gone overseas or been lucky. But a few will feature in the dole/other stats.

[Ocean1]

Not theory...
Look at Hospitals and the ever-increasing numbers of paper-pushers who are appointed to ensure the board is getting the best use of the money it is allocated to run said hospital. Those paper pushers are paid (often big money) out of that allocation, and because the allocation is a limited amount, something has to go somewhere else...doctors, nurses, ancillary staff...the people who actually do the work for which the hospital exists. Or...
When did we ever see an annual govt Budget that didn't allocate more funding for health? Huge chunks of that are actually going into said paper-pushers. Who produce what, exactly, in terms of more and better patient care? And every year we see the waiting lists get bigger. Oh, wait a minute, that's not true. The criteria for requiring surgery is just tightened year by year, so that big numbers now have to go without, or somehow fund it privately.

A lot of that is true. To some degree. The increase in funding is very true, even measured against GDP. But let's compare apples eh? If you recall; the typical secondary or terciary facility a couple of decades ago amounted to something that could have passed as a school building, with minor differences in equipment. The procedures / interventions now funded now cost many times more than those that were available a couple of decades ago. And that's just the ones that WERE available then. The introduction of new services is always a political decision, and the budget never grows enough to match it. So waiting lists grow... until the govt of the day mandates waiting list minimums. Something else's got to give next eh, and this time it's patient numbers as ACC begin to limit access. So next time a government offers to supply, say herceptin ask what the real costs are, eh?

Oh, and if you'd rather replace those paper pushers with nurses then next time there's a shock: horror story about some aledged, (or actual for that matter) poor service at a hospital how about you think twice before demanding procedural mechanisms be put in place to guarantee compliance to some arbitrary and unachievable ideal. Here's a starter for 5: every ED apearance generates almost 40min of paperwork. Multiply that by a fair hourly rate and then by about 40,000 and you'll get the annual cost for that particular function for that department.

Oh, and the paper pushers? are mostly the nurses themselves.

[Swoop]

I always thought people were working harder because there was less people actually working. No direct evidence to back this up, but even in my firm they went from having a 30 engineers in the 80's to 3 of us now.
Seems pretty much the same everywhere else. Lots more chiefs but decreasing number of Indians.

I see this most every working day. There are far less people at the "pit face" but a fuckload more parasites on the system in back rooms and boardrooms.
The amount of beauracracy that NZ has generated to keep paper-pushers pushing paper is unbelievable for a country of our size.

[Macontour]

You have to admit we have a wealthy society. Here we are on a motorcycle site enjoying our passion when most of us have a cage as well. Two cages in most families. Good food, good houses, good streets and roads, a safe community, law and order, laid-back society. Mountains lakes beaches vast empty places you can go within a couple of hours of home. Very few people in the world can say that.[/QUOTE]

So true. Thank you.

[Robert Taylor]

You have to admit we have a wealthy society. Here we are on a motorcycle site enjoying our passion when most of us have a cage as well. Two cages in most families. Good food, good houses, good streets and roads, a safe community, law and order, laid-back society. Mountains lakes beaches vast empty places you can go within a couple of hours of home. Very few people in the world can say that.

So true. Thank you.[/QUOTE]

I think what you are trying to say is there are forms of wealth other than in tthe monetary sense, in which case we are ''wealthy''. But I do have to agree with some of what James Deuce and others have said, we do have a broken society.

[Paul in NZ]

Quite out of character I ended up reading the weekend herald ..... There was a very in depth piece, mostly POA sided, but they claimed management offered 2.5% p.a. for 3 years plus shift notification one month in advance. I'd probably have taken that to be honest.

BUT I don't actually know much about loading / unloading ships so while people claim the whole 26 hours working per week - that actually might be sensible. ie Back in the day when I worked for a living and we would be doing one of the heavy jobs of say installing 350kg frames and you had a small team - you just couldn't go at it hard all day or you started making mistakes. So you took longer breaks etc.

[trustme]

Quite out of character I ended up reading the weekend herald ..... There was a very in depth piece, mostly POA sided, but they claimed management offered 2.5% p.a. for 3 years plus shift notification one month in advance. I'd probably have taken that to be honest.

BUT I don't actually know much about loading / unloading ships so while people claim the whole 26 hours working per week - that actually might be sensible. ie Back in the day when I worked for a living and we would be doing one of the heavy jobs of say installing 350kg frames and you had a small team - you just couldn't go at it hard all day or you started making mistakes. So you took longer breaks etc.

The ' ups ' system was finally canned not that many years ago. In the good old days pre containers when cargo was loaded & unloaded by hand, 2 shifts worked at the same time, forty minutes on 40 minutes off. That continued for years , well after containers arrived & the heavy manual labour aspect of the job was long gone. Going down late in the arvo was not clever as many guys were pissed. Friday afternoon was a right fuck round , hopeless. Those were the days.
Driving a straddle is not much different to a forklift or a digger or truck or bus or a crane, those guys can all manage a full 40 hours & some, just another piece of machinery

I can't reconcile the $27/hr no penal rates with earning $90000, who is being less than truthful ??