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Dear Editor
The Commerce Commission this week filed criminal charges against two construction companies and two directors for alleged bid-rigging of publicly funded projects, calling it “the country’s first-ever criminal prosecution for cartel conduct”.
Cartel conduct or bid-rigging occurs when bidders collude amongst themselves to fix the prices each will bid.
This is quite rightly illegal and, as the Commerce Commission notes, it “loads extra costs on to taxpayers and the New Zealand economy” and “undermines fair competition”. The charges carry a sentence of up to seven years jail, and a $10 million maximum fine.
In the same week, we see Labour and the CTU throwing hissy fits over the demise of the ironically named Fair Pay Agreements. This legislation, as Roger Partridge of the NZ Initiative has noted, was Labour’s attempt to introduce “compulsory collective bargaining agreements whose aim is to increase wages above market rates”.
If unions and their members collude among themselves to agree on a fixed price for their services, to be charged to all employers across the country, then how can this be different from the “cartel conduct” that the Commerce Commission is currently prosecuting in Auckland?
If it is wrong for businesses to fix prices because that “loads extra costs on to taxpayers and the New Zealand economy,” then surely the same must be said of unions and governments that attempt to do the same.
Disgruntled of Eskdale.
