Your job's gone to India / Mexico / Italy - or just gone

ANZ National Bank

The ANZ National Bank has announced that 500 back-office jobs are going to Bangalore in India. Finsec, the bank employees union says these jobs are gone. The ANZ Bank CEO says the staff replaced will be retrained and allocated to alternative jobs.

I'm not buying it. There are 500 jobs not currently being done that need doing? The cost of retraining and supporting these "alternative" jobs is STILL less than the setup and running costs of moving the jobs to Bangalore? If not, why do it at all? Mayb this is just the opening move in a larger plan to outsource Kiwi jobs to countries where people work for next to nothing.

I am currently an ANZ customer and have been for 23 years. In light of ANZ's apparent (in my view)lack of commitment to New Zealand, when our mortgage disappears next Tuesday with the sale of our farm in Foxton, I'll be moving my accounts to Kiwibank.

Fisher & Paykel

I have always bought Fisher & Paykel appliances because I found them to be of good quality and they were made right here in New Zealand.

Today, Fisher & Paykel announced they are moving manufacturing ovrseas to Mexico, Thailand and Italy. There will be 450 jobs lost in Dunedin as a result.

I can understand Mexico. It's the cheapest country in NAFTA, the North American Free Trade area (Canada, the US and Mexico). Tens of thousands of Canadian jobs have gone to Mexico in recent years. The number of American jobs probably numbers in the millions.

I can understand Italy. That country provides access to the EU as a market.

I'd be interested to know what the advantages to F&P are of locating in Thailand.

I guess I'll be free to buy my whiteware from any company in future. I may stil buy F&P if their product is good and the price competitive.

Tamahine Holdings

In the third leg of today's job-loss treble, Tamahine Holdings, a knitwear manifacturer, also in Dunedin, is closing down. These aren't going anywhere. They're just going.

What now?

I can see that part of the problem is that our goods are priced in a rapidly declining US dollar. That's not our doing. It's was caused by the Bush administration blowing trillions of dollars down the plughole in Iraq, an invasion that caused oil prices to explode. The US fiscal debt "bomb" Bush detonated forced interest rates up, leading to the sub-prime credit crisis, resulting in a spectacular destructions of wealth. All of this has been inflationary.

It's all resulted in our manufacturers being uncompetitive in US dollar terms.

So what will the impact of this and future manufacturing losses be? I can see the companies that supplied goods and services to the manufacturers who have departed operating in a shrinking market. Let's be realistic. There will be no new manufacturing enterprise replacing these, or most other, lost manufacturing jobs. Otherwise, why would they be leaving in the first place?

Then the skills that were supported by the enteprrise being located here will not longer be supported. They may disappear entirely. No one will be starting a manufacturing business in a place with no skills to make it possible. They would bear the entire cot of educating their workforce as part of starting up.

Once the skills are gone, where does any future innovation in those areas come from?

If we keep crawling along the links of this chain, we see either a downward spiral or an ever-decreasing circle. Take your pick. Ultimately, will we be farmers, bankers, white collar professionals and their support staff, McJobs and shopkeepers? Yes, we'll need a basic maintenance crew to keep it all running. Unless it becomes, for example, cheaper to fly mechanics from India on 6-month contracts in NZ to do low-cost car repairs.

You might laugh now......

it seems to me that one of the few reasons NZ built up a diverse skills base in manufacturing and the engineering and design skills to support it, was the need to operate behind a wall of tariffs that meant the only option was to train New Zealand workers to provide all the things we needed to function as an economy.

To a considerable extent the New Zealand economy has continued to benefit from the legacy of skills and knowledge accumulated during the period of protection. Can that legacy be maintained? Is there a possibility of that legacy gradually degrading and slipping away should the manufacturing and design requirements of the NZ domestic economy slip below some critical mass that maintains their viability?

How does reducing the scope for employment in all facets of manufacturing, from start to finish, keep young people from leaving New Zealand in search of opportunity?

I'm having some trouble seeing a good future for us here while this trend continues to denude the economy of more and more manufacturing jobs and potentially, skills.