09 September 2014

Internet Mana's job creation figures don't add up


invest $1.03 billion each year to fund approximately 100,000 temporary jobs where the labour market is not able to create jobs.

Given the goal is zero unemployment, you'd expect the jobs to be fulltime, right? 

If you divide $1 billion among 100,000 you get $10,000 (gross) per job (let's say generously that it only costs $30 million a year to administer, although I'd argue it is closer to around treble that, given the need for offices, managers, etc).  

$10,000 a year means 260 work days a year if you deduct weekends, and include full pay on all statutory holidays.  So that's $38.46 per day.

Divide that by eight hours a day, you get $4.81 per hour, around a third of the current minimum wage.

So unless Internet Mana wants jobs that involve less than 3 hours work a day (which wouldn't surprise me given its heavily socialist leanings), it proposes funding 100,000 below minimum wage jobs.

If they were minimum wage jobs, the cost would go from $1.03 billion per annum to:

$14.25 per hour x 8 = $114 per day
$114 * 260 = $29,640 per annum
$29,640 * 100000 = $2.96 billion per annum

or let's say $3 billion +

but wait...

Internet Mana wants the minimum wage increased to the so-called "living wage" of $18.80 per hour.

This lifts the figure to an annual salary of $39,104, so a total cost of close to $4 billion if you include administration (and frankly with a "living wage" minimum wage, there would be a lot of unemployment to soak up with state "make work" schemes).

So leaving aside the Internet Party and Laila Harre's commitment to cannabis law reform, and Hone Harawira's opposition to it, the party's own policies on a single website, are contradictory.


No comments: