Among the raft of changes proposed by the government in its ACC bill (currently being considered by Select Committee), is a miserly provision that injured workers who lose their jobs have to use up their holiday pay before weekly compensation is paid.
So, in addition to losing your job – usually because of the injury or redundancy – you lose the holiday pay that you earned before you were injured.
How mean is this? And what’s the point? The Cabinet paper recommending these and the other changes to ACC says that the estimated savings would be just over $1 million – most of it in the earners account. Savings yes, but paid for by workers’ hard-earned money. The stunningly dumb risk assessment says that :
“Claimants may think its unfair to have weekly compensation abated because of annual leave accrued while they were earning or accrued in a previous financial year but was not paid until termination of employment.”
Even Treasury warned that the relatively small savings didn’t seem to justify the unfairness of the provision.
So, if you take your holidays, you get ACC. If you don’t, because you’re too busy (or hardworking) to take the time off, or you are saving the holiday time to be with your family, forget it.
The truth is that this is just one example of the government’s ACC changes that will shift the cost of the injury to the worker (and the health and welfare system).
After all the debate on this blog in the past few days about so-called welfare bludgers and keeping your own money, I wonder what people think of this one.
