Press Release: 23 March 2008

ACC Floods Job Market with “Stock Clerks”

We find if you are male, employed in medium to heavy type work and suffer an injury that prevents you returning to that employment then chances are ACC will rehabilitate you into being a Stock Clerk. It is a relatively low paid job and usually means a significant drop in income for a claimant who was a former builder, fisherperson, forestry or construction worker.

The New Zealand job market must be awash with ACC claimants who have lost their entitlement to weekly compensation because ACC has decided they can now work as a Stock Clerk. Time and again unhappy claimants from around New Zealand are coming to us with these types of decisions after undergoing what is termed a “Vocational Independence Assessment”.

Stock Clerk is not a job we see advertised very often but we imagine if an employer does advertise this position they must be inundated with exited ACC claimants on a Work and Income benefit. Even National’s spokesperson for ACC, Pansy Wong, is beginning to ask questions of the new Minister for ACC about this.

We urge ACC to now look at rehabilitating claimants into other types of employment, rather than continuing with low-income job types where claimants do not have realistic chance of the gaining employment once their weekly compensation stops.

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