Mother Mary. I’ve heard more inventive excuses for blatantly ignorant bullshit from 5 year-olds

I don’t have that much imagination….

Damn straight . Get with my old mate LigherStandard over at the Standard – he’s another purported “doctor” who needs lessons in how to apologise for outright bullshit.

Maybe that kind of situation is alright with you too Mac – hardworking boss with a lout of an employee. Why should that employee have any rights? Why should he have any recourse if his liberal sensiblities are offended by his good ole boy boss?

It’s the threat of arbitrary termination, and the denial of statutory law (getting around the wages act) that will allow labour cost cutting.

Anyhow, you’re just not being imaginative enough.

I was being sarcastic about the 29%, but obviously too subtle for you. If you wish real statistics, you will find that a 2.9% rate of complaints will translate into a 74.5% chance of having no unsuitable employees in a pool of 10 people and a 2.2% chance of having one. But it still means that about one in every four business (with ten employees)will be affected.

Roger: Your view of the evil nature of employers is laughable. I have never met an employer keen to remove employees in order to make more money. This makes no sense in the business world at all.
PS. I have no problem with “rouge” employees (I don’t care what makeup they wear). It’s the rogue employees that cause problems…

Maths not essential for a medical degree any more? (wish I knew where you practise, Macca – you’d have a less than 0.0000000000029% chance of having me as a patient, that’s for sure……… )

Not at all. It means that one in 30 employees in small businesses are going have cause for taking an employment dispute to mediation. What’s the bet that in most instances that’s because the employer has been trying to screw them out of their statutory employment rights, because it suits their bottom line? Say one third of mediated employment disputes are due to an employee having difficulty getting rid of a “misfit/uncooperative” employee – then it becomes 1 in every hundred employees.

In that case you will be taking away hundreds of thousands of people’s statutory employment rights, just so you can punish the very occasional “rouge employee”. That just isn’t fair on the vast majority of employees, who need to have their rights protected in these industries where “labour costs” make up a huge portion of operating costs (meaning there’s huge incentive for employers to try and gain a competitive advantage by reducing labour costs.

Ahh, don’t you just love statistics? So easy to hide things in them.

It only takes one bad employee to cause enormous problems, as you would know if you had ever been in business, Roger. 2.9 problems per 100 just means that you have a 29% chance of having a crap employee if you assume an average of 10 people per small business. Now, granted, most of these are just poor at their job and the ERA makes it relatively easy to remove these people. The 5% personal grievance rate probably indicates the type of employee I am talking about – reasonable at his job but unable to work with others. I suspect this rate is substantially higher in small business which have far less ability to shuffle an abrasive employee into a less sensitive position. And the $3900 the ERA will cost you is the tip of the iceberg in terms of lost revenue and good employees resigning to get away from the twit you employed.

And I love the statistic about only 10% involving employees who have been there for less than 3 months. It obviously does not occur to you that a divisive employee can take 18 months to get rid of under the ERA because you can’t fire him for being a prat. You have to wait until his pratishness involves his work, which usually takes a great deal more than 90 days. In the meantime, your business is substantially damaged by the rogue employee and you can do nothing about it.

“Under the current ERA, these people are practically impossible to remove until the damage they cause spills over into their work. By then the damage is often irreparable, with good staff resigning and contracts lost.”

You want to use a nuke for a problem that barely exists. You’ve got no justification.

Secondly, a study shows there are 1.5 employment related problems per 100 workers a year in the private sector (2.9 for small businesses). The median cost was $5000 ($3,900 for small businesses). Of these ERPs, most were handled quickly and cheaply by agreements between the employer and the employee; only 5% went on to become personal grievance cases. Only 10% of disputes involved employees who had been employed for less than 3 months.

http://www.thestandard.org.nz/?p=2505