Zero hours, minimum wage, the workers strike back

This week McDonald workers picketed some of the restaurants, demanding the end of Zero hour contracts, which stipulate that workers have to be available for work as the company demanded, without any guaranteed minimum hours offered. Last week the chains under the umbrella of Restaurant Brands, KFC, Starbucks,and  Pizza Hutt discontinued Zero Hour contracts. The Warehouse agreed to pay recommended minimum wages, some three dollars above the basic mandatory minimum wage. Child poverty and wage inequality is  subject of editorials and frequent debates. The book of the French economist, Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century, in which he argues that income inequality is bad for business, bad for the economy of the nation, is widely reviewed and discussed. It shows that countries with the least income inequality like the Scandinavian countries, have better records of economic performance than countries with large inequalities like the US and to a lesser degree, New Zealand . To me this does not seem surprising. Globalization that Roger Douglas and the Fourth Labour Government bought into and since then has become accepted as the ideology by both main political parties meant that the low wage economies of China and other developing countries were imported into New Zealand. New Zealand wages were depressed to compete with the wages of these countries, and a degree of unemployment was tolerated to endure labour competition. While wages were artificially depressed, to ensure that poverty does not reach a politically unacceptable level, wages were topped up with government subsidies, so the tax payer, that is wage earners, subsidized employers, including many large international corporations. While wages were kept low, corporates enjoyed public support. A bank that got into difficulties, was bailed out by the government. Multinational corporations could minimize their taxes by shifting profits from New Zealand where they were earned to tax havens where they paid little or no tax. Labour laws were altered to suit large Hollywood film corporations. The pickets outside McDonalds may be a small indication of the turning of the tide.  It may be the end of consensus politics with very little differences between the policies of the major parties nominally on the right and the left of the divide. We might yet see the interests of the working men, and the middle classes gain political traction and the accumulation of the wealth of those with capital come under the spotlight.