The NZ Recesson is Over?

[baais]

Dear concerns


Plz share the latest status of "recesson in NZ" and comment after viewing below URL?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=aOAt_hJ3d7g4


All The Best

[victoria24]

coming over from england this year, to me nz hasnt really felt like it was in recession. so if things only get better then happy days!

[Jolie]

The article states that NZ's current high unemployment rate of 6% will be “slow to come down.” This is probably true.

In the U.S. (and many other countries) employers are able to fire employees at will if the economy tanks – at no additional cost to the company. The fired employee generally has no legal recourse for compensation.

In NZ, many employment contracts and union agreements provide that the people losing their jobs be paid "redundancy fees" (severance payments) in addition to whatever actual outstanding wages they are owed. This can get quite expensive for a company, if a large number of employees are let go at once.

The laws also require that employers be able to evidentially prove that the severance is truly a redundancy – and provide legal recourse for employees to get compensation for unfair dismissal. Awards for this type of compensation are not at all uncommon in NZ.

The culture of NZ is also such that employers are very reluctant to sever employees because of the hardship it imposes on the people losing their jobs.

What these things mean is that NZ employers are slow to hire new employees as their business expands – because they want to be very sure that they can keep these employees long-term and will not have to let them go should the economy take a bit of a dive.

It also means that after a huge recession, employers will be slow to hire new employees for fear that the upturn is only a temporary one.

It is quite common right now (especially in IT) for companies to hire short-term contract employees rather than full-time employees, because the contract employees can be let go quite quickly if necessary, at no additional expense. This is certainly the case at my company right now. In the last 12 months they have hired only a handful of FTEs and are employing a number of contract employees instead – with the expectation that those employees will not be there for the long-term.

So whilst this may be good news for IT contract employees, it does not necessarily provide the security that a Skilled Migrant requires in order to retain their visa (and more importantly, to be able to afford to continue living in NZ). And the NZ hiring ethos is such that if recent Skilled Migrants lose their contract, they may very well be considered less desirable employees by other companies than people with years of NZ experience.

So yes, things are looking better for Skilled Migrants at this point – but the situation is far from being "out of the woods" as yet.

[Fern01]

I agree with the above comment, 'N.Z. is far from out of the woods yet.'

The strength of the currency will continue to be a concern and a risk to the forecast recovery

[ExitStageSouth]

Originally Posted by Fern01

I agree with the above comment, 'N.Z. is far from out of the woods yet.'

I'd extend that to "No country is out of the woods yet". The general chatter in the U.K. about it being over: "time to get back into housing" and "this Christmas shopping period will be a big one" seems to come from a place oblivious to the enormous national debt we've incurred and the fact that our employment situation is far from resolved. The same goes for the U.S..

[victoria24]

I guess my view was more about sentiment than statistics. as the markets are driven by a sentimental view of facts you can almost collectively create a recession and equally come out of one.