When Ministers appear before a Parliamentary Select Committee we do not expect them to make false assertions about factual matters.

That is why we were shocked by what the Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety told the Employment and Workforce Select Committee last month.

He told it that he “entirely disagreed” with the main facts in our submissions on the Fair Pay Agreements Bill. He even asserted that our statistics were “at odds with virtually every credible organisation”.

Since our statistics were solely from official sources, he essentially asserted that Statistics New Zealand and the OECD are not credible.

To add insult to injury, he dismissed us as ideological.

This week we published a short Policy Note rebutting Minister Michael Wood’s claims that:

• Labour’s income share has fallen since 1991, and
• Productivity growth since 1991 had been poorer, and 46% below that in Australia.

As we had made clear in our submissions and in the Policy Note, the second assertion is wrong, and the first assertion is wrong in respect of employees.

What is this all about? It seems to be little more than a power grab by the CTU.

To achieve a move back towards pre-1991 centralised wage negotiations, the CTU needs to discredit the Employment Contracts Act 1991. That Act empowered the unthinkable – bosses and workers could negotiate directly with each other as adults.

To claim that labour’s income share has fallen since 1991 is to suggest that employers have benefited at the expense of employees.

Yet our official national income statistics show that employees’ share fell markedly before 1991, not on average afterwards. Did the Minister fail to acknowledge that out of ignorance, or was it something worse?

The Policy Note also clarifies a related technical issue. Labour income is employee income plus the portion of self-employed income that Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) attributes to work effort.

For the portion of national economic activity for which SNZ makes that split, labour income has trended down since 1991, but employees’ share has weakly trended up. Even that is not a case for the measures in the Bill.

In short, the Minister’s rejection of inconvenient official statistics on employee incomes and labour productivity does him no credit. It is a disservice to the select committee and the public. And it is no way to treat serious submitters.