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Sunday, December 1, 2024

Roger Partridge: The NZ Initiative welcomes employment law reform for high-income earners


The New Zealand Initiative welcomes today's announcement that New Zealand will follow Australia in excluding high-income earners from personal grievance claims for unjustified dismissal.

The change implements recommendations from the Initiative's 2021 research note "Nothing Costs Nothing: Why unjustified dismissal procedures should not apply to the highly paid" (available here).

"This is good news for New Zealand workers and businesses," says Roger Partridge, chair and senior fellow of The New Zealand Initiative. "When a senior manager is not performing well, the whole business suffers – and that puts everyone's jobs at risk."

"Under current law, even before dismissing an underperforming CEO, boards must first develop a performance improvement plan, consult about that plan, and then monitor performance over an extended period. In the meantime, both the business and the jobs of ordinary workers might be in jeopardy."

"Australia solved this problem in the mid-1990s by excluding high-income earners from unjustified dismissal protections. This flexibility may help explain why Australian workers are so much more productive than Kiwi workers," Partridge said.

Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was first published HERE

4 comments:

CXH said...

NZ is so unproductive because the private sector apes the public sector. When it tries to do otherwise, the public sector create more rules.

Anonymous said...

Trouble is $180k is not that high and in a few years it won’t be high at all and this law will catch average workers. If this law is targeting executives it should be well north of $200k and inflation adjusted.

Basil Walker said...

Anon 7:39 High enough to ensure the current PM can be ousted without quarrel for the good of NZ and the Treaty Principles Bill being able to progress to referendum . Hmmph , that NZ would be so lucky.

Ocean1 said...

You don't get to decline access to legal rights to a single demographic simply because they have more impact on an outcome. If there's a problem it's the unworkable employment law that makes it bordering on impossible to fire anyone at all, not just an underperforming senior exec.