HP Development Centre in Chch - Will bring in $40M PA to local economy

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Wob

310 posts

Ultimate Geek

ID Verified

NBN Co

#40090 25-Aug-2009 11:35

NBR article: http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/how-christchurch-reeled-40-million-pa-hp-development-centre-108958

(I was actually trying to find out about the new burger McDs are launching tomorrow)

This is great news for the hi-tech community in Chch, and good news for the community as a whole.

Interesting comments about TCL in the article:

"Enable cable
But Mr Bouma also pointed to Enable Networks, the dark fibre network founded by the city council, and recently the subject of a $36 million upgrade funded by the CDC.

At the recent TelCon10 conference, TelstraClear chief executive Allan Freeth savaged Enable as a waste of ratepayer money and a dampener on private investment.

However, Enable has proved one of the key incentives for HP to pour money and high-tech jobs into the city. (And, one, could note, it hasn’t ultimately dissuaded TelstraClear, which a few weeks after his TelCon 10 speech announced a 100Mbit/s upgrade over the next 12 months for its Christchurch, Wellington and Kapiti cable systems)."

[Moderator edit (MF): moved to correct forum]

Now based in Perth WA.

Mark

1653 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 555

#250831 26-Aug-2009 21:23

You don't think it will be locals (as in New Zealanders) getting those jobs do you ? The current strategy for HP seems to be to fire .. sorry .. "work force reduce" ... local employees and then bring el-cheapo indians over via another company, the way around the whole immigration thing seems to be that the other company say they have a contract in NZ and need to send some of their people over for a little while to do the work ... no pesky immigration forms required it would seem.

Sorry annoyed at the moment because friends got reduced.

sjadd

61 posts

Master Geek

#250880 27-Aug-2009 01:00

Sorry Wob I know you probably weren't expecting these kinds of replies, but I too have major issues with HP from an ethical point of view.

In the US, where labour laws seem to offer little to no protection to the employee, some staff are about to receive their 3rd pay cut for the year, in some cases adding up to a combined cut of over 50%! And remember, this is a company that during a recession is still turning over net profits of $1.5+ billion each quarter, has $13 billion in cash reserves and paid the CEO $42 million in salary+bonuses last year.

(all this on top of the whole laying off tens of thousands of staff bit alluded to above)

It's quite staggering, I hope NZ laws never allow something like that to happen here.

Byrned

455 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 27

#250937 27-Aug-2009 10:19

From a financial point of view its good news - any company that does business here, even if it does import all its workforce (unlikely) is still another tax base for the country as well as being beneficial to the local community with salaries being spent there. As a whole the country needs more of this!

From an ethical point of view I have no comment as I don't know anything about HP's labour practices although doing what is mentioned above is only possible if the worker agrees to it in NZ, although they'd most likely be made redundant if they didn't. Labour laws do allow some protection around this but its not hard for a company to get around this.