Living Wage madness and the BOM explosion

The LW proposal, applied to indirect staff, runs headlong into the bill-of-materials-explosion issue.  An illustration:

The policy:  every contractor to a LW-signed-up organisation must pay LW to staff.  Sounds simple, right?

- LW organisation hires a contractor (the head contractor, HC) to extend a car-park.

- HC sub-contracts (SC) five contractors to do digouts, gravel cartage, kerbing, sealing, landscaping.

- the SC for dig-outs blows an excavator hose and contracts a hydraulic hose repairer to come on site and replace it.

- four of the five SC's have diesel delivered to machines on site, by 4 different small-volume diesel retailers

- the sealing contractor sub-contracts a bitumen supplier to supply the hot-mix

- the kerbing contractor sub-contracts a concrete pre-mix supplier to deliver concrete into the kerbing machine

So does the LW apply to:  

- the HC (they employ only 2 people to supervise this job, yet have a staff of 100) - LW 2, 100 or something in between?

- each of the five SC's (same distribution - 2-4 people on site for this job, 20-50 off site, employed by those SC's, on other work)?

- the hydraulic hose repairer (a contractor to one of the SC's)?

- the four diesel suppliers (contractors to each of the SC's)?

- the bitumen supplier's staff?

- the concrete pre-mix supplier's staff?

The example could be expanded almost infinitely (the lunch contractor to the SC's?  the food suppliers to the lunch contractor? The processor. packer, transporter, grower of those foods? The truck maintenance firm for the concrete premix supplier?)

It's the most impractical suggestion one could possibly conceive.....

The LW proposal, applied to indirect staff, runs headlong into the bill-of-materials-explosion issue.  An illustration:

The policy:  every contractor to a LW-signed-up organisation must pay LW to staff.  Sounds simple, right?

- LW organisation hires a contractor (the head contractor, HC) to extend a car-park.

- HC sub-contracts (SC) five contractors to do digouts, gravel cartage, kerbing, sealing, landscaping.

- the SC for dig-outs blows an excavator hose and contracts a hydraulic hose repairer to come on site and replace it.

- four of the five SC's have diesel delivered to machines on site, by 4 different small-volume diesel retailers

So does the LW apply to:  

- the HC (they employ only 2 people to supervise this job, yet have a staff of 100) - LW 2, 100 or something in between?

- each of the five SC's (same distribution - 2-4 people on site for this job, 20-50 off site, employed by those SC's, on other work)?

- the hydraulic hose repairer (a contractor to one of the SC's)?

- the four diesel suppliers (contractors to each of the SC's)?

The example could be expanded almost infinitely (the lunch contractor to the SC's?  the food suppliers to the lunch contractor? The processor. packer, transporter, grower of those foods?)

It's the most impractical thing - CCHL is perfectly right to advise against it.The LW proposal, applied to indirect staff, runs headlong into the bill-of-materials-explosion issue.  An illustration:

The policy:  every contractor to a LW-signed-up organisation must pay LW to staff.  Sounds simple, right?

- LW organisation hires a contractor (the head contractor, HC) to extend a car-park.

- HC sub-contracts (SC) five contractors to do digouts, gravel cartage, kerbing, sealing, landscaping.

- the SC for dig-outs blows an excavator hose and contracts a hydraulic hose repairer to come on site and replace it.

- four of the five SC's have diesel delivered to machines on site, by 4 different small-volume diesel retailers

So does the LW apply to:  

- the HC (they employ only 2 people to supervise this job, yet have a staff of 100) - LW 2, 100 or something in between?

- each of the five SC's (same distribution - 2-4 people on site for this job, 20-50 off site, employed by those SC's, on other work)?

- the hydraulic hose repairer (a contractor to one of the SC's)?

- the four diesel suppliers (contractors to each of the SC's)?

The example could be expanded almost infinitely (the lunch contractor to the SC's?  the food suppliers to the lunch contractor? The processor. packer, transporter, grower of those foods?)

It's the most impractical thing - CCHL is perfectly right to advise against it.

Getting stuff Built

David Hargreaves writes: If you can't make builders put a spade in the ground, and the bankers give them the money, it ain't going to work

Darn tootin' right.

It looks to me like some sorta Compulsion is gonna be needed to get anything moving, because the current modus operandi won't, and for perfectly clear reasons:

1. The Planning is local, and incompetent at that, but the economic drivers - immigration, banking, building standards, materials costs are all central, not to say Cartelised
2. The building industry would be quite familiar to someone from the 19th century, plonked onto a building site. A couple of days to come up to speed with nailguns, glues, portable power tools and materials, and they'd be clonking frames together in the rain along with the best of 'em
3. The price of land screws up everything on top, so that';s why it's only worth building large footprints, and for the upper quartile of the market
4. TLA's, desperate for non-Rates revenue streams, charge for everything they possibly can and, like the financiers, are adept at inventing ever longer chains of tickets to clip. And as a local monopoly, fat chance of getting any competitive behaviours to sort That out.

So the way forward will have to involve some combination of the following:

• Remove TLA's incompetent hands from the Planning Tiller by simply nullifying all local Plans, and letting the effects-based RMA handle the lot
• Remove BRANZ etc control and simply adopt whatever international standards seem appropriate for materials. We don't use BRANZ to certify materials for boats, caravans or planes, Why do they need to be in the loop for Houses?
• Hosuing factories - lotsa them. Everything CNC, fitted out in QC conditions, under cover. Litmus test: that 19th-century builder should be totally, utterly lost on the factory floor.
• Land, of course. So compulsorily acquire everu scrap of greenish land wherever thought appropriate, use Kiwisaver investors to finance it as there will be a return as it's developed and sold, and develop/sell it using the usual PPP approach. But, and importantly, the CG thus invented has to stay largely in the public side (KS returns, Gubmint's General Account) and applied largely to the replacement aspects noted above - getting factories, standards, etc up and humming, and a bit of trust-busting amongst the Cartels.

A thought experiment, of course - the safest kind....but at least it is Relentlessly Positive (unless yer a Planner).