What: Mass youth protest march and gig (headlined by Nesian Mystik) to end youth rates

When: Saturday 11th of August at 12 noon

Where: Britomart, bottom of Queen Street in Auckland City

Who: Young workers, school students and their union and community supporters including National Distribution Union, Radical Youth, Unite Union and the Youth Union Movement.

Why: To tell politicians - just before they vote on whether to abolish youth rates or not (most likely on the 15th of August) - that the Labour Party’s watered down proposal for a 200 hour ‘new entrant rate’ isn’t good enough and that it’s time to abolish youth rates for good. Under the Governments proposal, it would take most young workers up to 5 months or more to work 200 hours but we want equal pay for equal work, now!

ENDS

Factsheet attached

CONTACT:

Media Opportunity: We can arrange a young school student/worker from a school in your region, with the bright red Unite bus in the background and one of the Nesian Mystik musicians handing out leaflets to school students. School finishes around 3-3.45pm. Students are attending from all across Auckland.
Please contact EndYouthRatesNow.com Media Liaison: Simon Oosterman on 021 922 551 for more information.

Key Points on Youth Wages:

• Research shows that three out of ten young people live in poverty. 175,000 young people live below the poverty line. Yet unemployment is the lowest in 27 years at 3.7%.
• Young people can legally be paid 20% less than people over 18 for doing the exact same work.
• Before 1972 woman were legally paid less than men for doing the exact same work.
• The arguments used against paying equal pay for equal work for women then is the same ones they use now against young people.
• The minimum wage is $11.25. Minimum wage for under 18 is $9. There NO minimum wage for workers under 16.
• Abolishing youth rates gets rid of unfair competition between people under 18 and people over 18. Ending youth rates levels the playing field.
• Major companies paying youth rates say they can afford to pay us the same wage, but don’t want to if their competitor can still pay less. That’s why it needs a law change.
• The End Youth Rates Now campaign isn’t just about money. It’s about equality and showing that we as youth also have the power to change society.
Past campaigns:
• Last year over 1000 school students walked out of school in support of abolishing youth rates.
• Last year thousands of young Unite members in the SuperSizeMyPay campaign working in fast food restaurants went on strike to abolish youth rates. They got some change.
• Youth rates have been abolished at many workplaces around New Zealand including BP, Postie Plus and New Zealand Post.
• But to get rid if youth rates for everyone we need the law changed.
What is the campaign doing:
• Email and txt campaigning
• Will soon start spreading to social networking sites Bebo, Myspace and Facebook
• Have already visited and signed up thousands of school students to the campaign

The Organisers:

• Unite - community union for workers in fast foods and cinemas - ran SupersizeMyPay campaign.
• NDU (National Distribution Union) – the union for retail and supermarket workers.
• Radical Youth – anti-capitalist student movement that organised the school walkout last year.
• YUM (Youth Union Movement) – sub-committee of the CTU (Council of Trade Unions)

Select Committee Report on Minimum Wage (abolition of age discrimination) Amendment Bill

• Sue Bradford’s private members bill, the Minimum Wage (abolition of age discrimination) Amendment Bill, was pulled by ballot in Parliament on the 8th of December 2005
• The bill passed the First Reading and the Second Reading

• The original intention of the bill was to extend the adult minimum wage to 16 and 17 year old workers.

• The select committee have made amendments to the bill which maintain age-based minimum wage discrimination and could even allow the difference between the wages of 16/17 year olds and workers over the age of 18 to be increased.

Problems with the Bill as the select committee have amended it

1. The Bill leaves in place the ability to make age-based “minimum wage orders”, including for 16 and 17 year olds. That means that any Government could make an order that continued the current difference between the youth wage and the adult wage or worse still made that gap wider. The gap is currently 20% but 7 years ago it was 40% and a future Government could make it that wide again.

2. Rather than scrapping discrimination for 16 and 17 year olds (as the Bill originally intended) the select committee’s amendments to the Bill give Government the option of a half way house “new entrant” rate. Under such an order 16 and 17 year olds could become entitled to the full adult minimum wage only if they meet work experience requirements set in the order itself. Their minimum wage before that time could not be lower than 80% of the full minimum wage (which is the current level of the 16/17 year old rate). Problems with this concept include:

• the assumption that 16 and 17 year olds are less productive or reliable than 18+ workers. There is no evidence to support this theory. A similar argument was made in relation to young people by Wayne Mapp when he introduced his Bill to remove personal grievance rights for all workers in the first three months of employment. That Bill was soundly defeated
• even young people who supervise other young workers or those over 18 could be paid less than the people they supervise (as is common now)
• work experience gained before the age of 16 does not have to be taken into account
• most importantly, ongoing discrimination between workers who do the same job and have the same amount of experience on the basis of their (younger) age (workers who can’t be discriminated against on the basis of their older age, gender, disability, race, nationality or other grounds)
• the failure to recognise that new entrants are the group most in need of minimum wage protection – they have less bargaining power, are less likely to be in unionised jobs and are most vulnerable to exploitation. A lower minimum wage for any group of “new entrants” to the workforce (age-based or otherwise) undermines the purpose of the minimum wage itself (which should be primarily to protect new entrants) and will make it harder to achieve results above the full minimum wage in those industries with a high level of youth wage employment

3. The Committee has suggested that the first such order set a “new entrant” rate of 80% of the full minimum wage for 16 and 17 year olds for their first 200 hours with one or more employers (but not include young people in supervisory roles who should get the full minimum wage rate). Time worked before the age of 16 would not be counted. Even if there was to be a new entrant rate for 16 and 17 year olds there are a number of problems with this particular proposal:

• The majority of young people in youth rate jobs work part-time in supermarkets, other shops or fast food and entertainment venues. Union workforce statistics show that 50% of the 16 and 17 year olds on youth rates work 10 hours or less each week – this means that it will take most young people 5 months or more to get off the new entrant rate onto the full minimum wage. During this time their work requirements are exactly the same as for all other workers doing the same job
• it is very common for young people to get their first job before the age of 16 and yet their work before that age would not be counted
• Most young people on youth rates are students – setting a 200 hour target to get to the full minimum wage will be an incentive for them to work longer hours in the workplace and impact negatively on their study