Politics comes and goes. This article is talking about a change to how the statutory minimum if 10 days of sick leave is calculated, which may disadvantage some (but not all) part time workers. This 10 days is on top of the 31 (or is it 32 now) other days off for public holidays (in NZ everyone gets them, or a day in lieu, not just government workers) and annual leave.
The US has approximately 0 days of sick leave or other paid time off as a statutory minimum, if I understand correctly.
It’s probably best not to let news articles sway your judgement. With steps backwards, sometimes we forget all the steps forward. This applies to the US, too.
Well put. In a way you could argue that the current government is making changes that will make NZ more like the USA. That may or may not be true, but the implication is that we are currently less like the USA too.
So the things you like about NZ will still be there in some amount, just perhaps just a bit less than it would have been a few years ago. And as you say, governments come & go so in 3, 6, 9 years things can just as readily change the other way again anyway.
And yes its 11 national public holidays, plus 1 provincial public holiday, plus 20 days annual leave for 32 in total, then 10 days sick leave on top for 42 in total. It can get slightly complicated in terms of accruals & entitlements. NZ has a bunch of different leave that may or may not be foreign to a US citizen!:
12 Public holidays - must be taken on the day they happen, or if you can’t you get a day in lieu to take at your leisure. Usually you will want to ensure you use the lieu day before you use any of your annual leave entitlement as the former doesn’t get paid out to you when you cease employment.
Annual Leave - there’s two counts for this, from the date you start working for an employer you begin accruing an annual leave balance, and then 12 months later you become entitled to four weeks of annual leave, and your accrual balance starts again from 0. The difference matters as I think technically the employer only has to allow you to take entitled leave, not accrued; and conversely if they have a customary closedown period then there’s a bunch of different rules about what happens. Typically nowadays most employers (big corporates anyway) will see your annual leave accrual as a liability and will be encouraging you to use it so its pretty rare to have much of an argument about having leave. Both sides have to be reasonable in giving notice and rearranging things to covering when you’re not there.
Sick Leave - this is the 10 days that’s mentioned in this article, like Public holidays sick leave doesn’t get paid out when you leave, and unlike annual leave sick leave doesn’t continue to accrue. So it is each 12 month period of employment that you get a new up to 10 days per year sick leave. Some employers do accrue sick leave as well though - I think my balance caps out at something like 40 days, so good news if I ever get the big C or something I suppose!
Bereavement Leave - you get a minimum of 3 days per bereavement for funerals if its for people in your immediate family, or miscarriages and then there’s a bit of flexibility where you can have another 1 day per bereavement if they’re not immediate family but there’s some specific reasons why you gotta be there responsibility wise.
Parental Leave - im not as up with the play on this one, but its available for both parents, just to differing amounts I think.
Family Violence Leave - employees affected by family violence have the right to up to 10 days of paid leave per year, and can ask for a short term rearrangement of their work schedule.
Other Leave - there’s all sorts of other rules for Jury service, disasters, leave to go vote in an election and some employers have other stuff too like I worked somewhere where you got an extra 2 weeks a year if you represented NZ in a sport (even an obscure one) and were going to an international tournament.
So it is each 12 month period of employment that you get a new up to 10 days per year sick leave.
You can accrue up to 20 days by law (two years worth). But employers don’t have to let you accrue any more.
Some employers do accrue sick leave as well though - I think my balance caps out at something like 40 days, so good news if I ever get the big C or something I suppose!
We’ve had a lot of cancer in the family over the past few years, 40 days isn’t gonna be nearly enough I’m afraid.
Edit: oh and
im not as up with the play on this one, but its available for both parents, just to differing amounts I think.
While the wording is a bit funny, the entitlement can go to either parent (but not both). There is unpaid time off (up to a year) and there is paid parental leave (up to 26 weeks, proportionally replaces time off so you can only get 1 year total).
The entitlement is for the primary carer, and the other parent can get “partner’s leave” which is super shit, like 2 weeks unpaid. Everyone I’ve ever heard of has just taken annual leave.
No 40 days wouldn’t go far at all, but 8 weeks paid before having to chew into annual leave would still help ease the stresses a bit. Of course, im lucky to have that much.
It’s probably best not to let news articles sway your judgement. With steps backwards, sometimes we forget all the steps forward. This applies to the US, too.
The cynic in me thinks its only so hard for employers to figure out what someone’s leave entitlement is because they account for it as a liability and try to minimise how much anyone can take while maximising the times when they are forced to take it.
I can’t remember now, but wasn’t the context for the law change that shift workers who did 4 days of 12 hours, then 3 days off only getting paid the equivalent of 8 hours when they took a day of leave?
Yeah - but did sick leave ever get the same clarification? The language in the forms I use at work is half day, full day off sick.
But in effect you’re asking for your shift off work - so if a shift is 12 hours then yeah I would think it would be sensible for 12 hours, I just don’t know if sick leave actually gets paid the same way.
Because its definitely not paid out as “days” - in the 24 hour sense. Like if you’re a part timer doing a 4 hour day, I can’t imagine the current law lets you have 20 shifts off right? Its more like “day” in that sense means, times not working due to being sick.
It’s not based on any particular number of hours, but rather on what they would have earned that day. So an employee working part time 4 hours a day will be paid 4 hours for a day off, so their 10 days only costs the employer half as much as an employee working full time (i.e. it ends up proportional). But funky stuff starts to happen if someone’s part time hours are 2.5 full days instead of 5 half days.
An employee gets paid their relevant daily pay (with a backup method if that’s not possible), which is laid out here.
It says it’s what they would have earned, and clarifies things like taxable allowances and overtime are included if they would have otherwise earned them that day.
The obvious solution that seems to be overlooked every time sick leave comes up, is to roll it up into ACC, and have sick leave paid out from there, instead of having employers fund it directly.
The sum of costs to employers and pay for employees would be unchanged, but it would eliminate the uncertainty on how many sick days your particular employees take, making life easier for businesses, and it would allow for sick leave to be taken right from day one in the job, making like easier for workers.
I think the reason we cap sick leave at the moment is because it is employer funded. It would be unreasonable to burden a business with paying for the long-term illness of someone just because they happened to be an employee when they got sick.
When ACC was first set up, the working group that put it together had actually recommended that non-inury sickness be covered as well, but it was not implemented because of the political situation of the time.
If we move the burden of supporting workers who become ill from individual employers, then I think it makes the argument for long-term or indefinite sick leave a lot more palatable.
Yeah, it would be interesting to see a proposal for this. If you’re gonna do it, the first step might not be to push all sick leave onto ACC but instead do something like continuous sick leave of more than 30 days is covered by ACC (perhaps under ACC rules, 80% of pay up to a cap I think is how it works). Basically make ACC for all long term sick leave not just accidents. It seems a reasonable starting point, and is an easier jump to covering all sick leave.
The benefit of this is you don’t have to mess with the current employer funded system yet, you can leave it in place for the time being while still having better support for people who get cancer or whatever.
I’m not sure what this would do to ACC levies, but it would be interesting to at least see it calculated and considered.
It’s quite an interesting idea actually, one issue I can think of is employers encouraging employees to pull a sickie, instead of taking leave, as sick days aren’t a cost to them.
That’s a possibility, but I think with some degree of oversight, and checking up on businesses with significantly above average leave rates, it could be avoided. A lower amount of leave taken is generally indicative of a healthier workplace, so perhaps there might be an incentive system where companies get reductions in their levies for low rates of sick leave… although that just turns the problem you described on it’s head…
Just thinking about the current rules, if you work 4 hours a day across 5 days a week, don’t you get a smaller number of paid hours off on sick leave than if you work two full days a week?
For annual leave, having an accural system is so much simpler. The current system seems simple, but it is far from it, the main complications come around working extra to cover for others, every instance that this occurs requires a recalculation of your entitlement, in an accural system this kind instance is a non-issue.
I’m not sure about the sick pay changes, I’d have to look into it more.
How does working extra affect sick leave entitlement? My understanding is you just get paid what you otherwise would have been paid on that day, but don’t have to work it. I don’t understand how sick leave entitlement changes from extra shifts?
(Annual leave is a whole nother ballpark, and is definitely affected by extra shifts).
Not sure, at the moment it is “10 days”, but what constitutes a “day”. For salaried employees, it is really simple. For wage workers it is the normal rostered shift, but I’m not sure that it is fair.
Should you accrue sick days at 1/2 (10 days Vs 20 days) the rate of annual leave? Would that be better? This way any extra work you do would accrue extra sick leave.
Yes, I think that makes sense. However, from a National/Act point of view, you get into dangerous territory. What if someone works 6 days a week? Under the old system you’d get 10 days regardless. But under this new accruing system, you are still working 8 hours a day but you’re accruing at whatever the hourly accrual is times 48 hours per week. You’ll end up with 12 sick days a year!
Another potential issue is all the contracts out there that X days of sick leave. The government is saying how much easier it will be for payroll software providers, while the payroll software providers are probably fainting at the thought of now having to handle employees grand-parented in on an old system with new employees starting on a completely different calculation system 😆
It will be interesting to see how the actual bill shapes up once it’s released.
I don’t think they deserve any credit for not being even crueler.
But lol yes won’t someone think of the payroll developers?! That’s been a common complaint across the numerous attempts to sort out the holidays act.
I can’t see how this would even help on that in this case, but I am not a software guy. Like isn’t this just introducing another category with different rules that you have to account for?
Yeah, also not a developer, but it seems the rules for sick days are not complex, it just requires a separate set of logic. i.e. it takes longer but it’s not hard.
In my experience as a user of payroll software; I suspect its a combination of things.
Developers could customise the logic for New Zealand’s legislation better, but corporations think magically about software and try to buy “out of the box” solutions, even if they don’t quite fit right.
Then they rely on HR staff to try to configure their way around logic limitations so it ends up just as kludgy but in a way more reliant on people knowing why something was done some given way than just in the tool.
I’ve run into stuff you would think is really really simple - like marking the NZ public holidays as not a work day; but if those holidays change - like the addition of Matariki, or you move so you have a new provincial holiday its usually months, years or never that it gets updated.
The thing that stood out to me is the $12B in borrowing. Here’s our budget, where we need to borrow an additional $12B and push out the return to surplus to way past when Labour’s 2023 budget forecast it.
Also here is $15B in tax cuts. We are paying for it with cost cutting, the $12B in borrowing is for something else.
I’m thoroughly sick of every single protest having to disrupt traffic as part of their activities. It’s lazy, unoriginal, and punishes people who may otherwise be on your side.
Isn’t it to be noticed, so that the issue that you are protesting gets attention.
What is a valid way to protest, to garner the most attention to your issue?
Disrupting normal activities seems to be the best way, I remember when I was at uni, there was a sit-in in the admin building that prevented the admin staff from doing their work, is this valid? It certainly got a lot of attention.
The question you should be asking is, how does this help the issue, rather than the cop out of “gaining attention”.
If your method of protest is to disrupt the lives of people just trying to get to work, they will certainly be aware of your cause, but they will likely think you’re a bunch of nutters.
In the past I’ve worked near parliament and walked past the parliament lawn every day. There were protests all the time, so many protests, and mostly they respectfully kept to one spot to allow others to use the lawn (it’s a popular lunch in the sun spot for nearby workers).
Recently there does seem to be a rise in the number of people stopping traffic in their protests. Does that just represent that protesters aren’t feeling heard so they feel they need to make the news to get their point out? Or is this just that there isn’t really a “protest spot” in Auckland or Tauranga so they take to the streets?
Another question is whether there are actually more occurrences than there used to be, or if we just notice it more (say, from more reporting in the news). I’m not sure that’s an answerable question though, I don’t think there’s a a central record of all protests and the number of those that stopped traffic.
Interesting question that I have been thinking about for a while. There is a lot of hate directed at investors, but they provide an important function in the housing market, so what do you think the appropriate level of rentals / non-owner occupier properties is in the market.
I am not making a distinction between govt landlord or private landlord, since they SHOULD be held to the same standards.
From my personal perspective, when I went to uni at Massey, I went flatting, I didn’t want to buy a house nor could I afford one at that time. I was happy that rentals were available.
Even if I could have afforded a house when I was that age, I’m sure that I would not have wanted that much money tied up in a house in Palmy.
Houses cost as much as they do because of supply and demand. If we could increase supply (e.g. state housing), then land values would be much lower and then you could buy a house for a lot less. You could afford a house more easily, but investors wouldn’t be able to make much on capital gains because houses would only go up with inflation.
This leads to a world where rentals need to cover their costs instead of relying on capital gains. But those costs are a lot lower due to lower house prices. And you need less rentals because more people are buying.
Plus if you have ample supply, then competition between rentals keeps rents down to just above costs.
I think that boosting the housing supply is the best answer without going full socialism. If you wanted to go further, nonprofits or the government could run rentals and charge just enough to cover their costs.
I think we have too many rentals now, and building costs are sky high. But you are right, the rental market is not competitive.
Increased supply of houses would solve a bunch of issues, but there is a big hurdle to getting that supply. If LL’s had to compete to keep tenants I think the market would be hugely different.
I agree about too many rentals. Every man and his dog were buying them up when they were cheap. I have worked with various people buying rentals because everyone else was, now they have properties that can’t get enough rent to cover their costs because they paid too much for the house and didn’t have a business plan before buying - they just bought the house then worked out later what they would be able to rent it for and what the costs would be.
building costs are sky high
They are, but if nothing else changed, house prices could be a lot lower if there was ample supply, because most of the cost is imagined value. I believe there is plenty of opportunity for prices to reduce while still being profitable to build houses. Developers currently pay say $700k-$1m to buy an old house and section to build three medium density new houses on. If they were paying $350k-$500k, the houses could be $100k-$200k cheaper and they’d still make the same profit.
Hopefully the recent changes to allow us to import more building products easier from comparable countries should help the actual building costs as well.
Increased supply of houses would solve a bunch of issues, but there is a big hurdle to getting that supply.
Definitely. Especially when the government is gutting Kāinga Ora instead of doubling their funding.
TL;DR the reserve bank is going to loosen restrictions on equity and instead have restrictions on income, with an expected impact that investors can’t just buy more houses using equity when the house values go up.
Yes it seems like a good move on behalf of the RBNZ. Interest rates are likely to head down from here on out, and that means people can borrow more on the same income. Adding a cap before it starts to happen is a good plan.
Yeah that’s what interests me, given the funding they’ve raked in from property related interests over the last couple of years they are quite beholden to that lobby.
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