Never mind if this is a pitch for much of what the National Party would consider its natural constituency. It simply recognises that a concept of a worker that is rooted in the factory floor or lifetime employment is hopelessly out of date.
We live in an economy where three out of four employees earn their living by providing services to one another, rather than producing something you can hold in your hand.
And one where young businesses - which tend to be small and financially precarious - provide a disproportionate share of the new jobs.
Research conducted as part of an OECD study found that between 2001 and 2009 in New Zealand, young firms (those five years old or less) employed about one in every five workers.
Between them they generated 53 per cent of the new jobs in that period. They also accounted for 29 per cent of the jobs lost, reflecting the high attrition rate of fledgling enterprises, but even so their net contribution of 24 per cent to job creation was disproportionately positive.
So it is essential that the two-year process Little announced this week to consult and craft policy for creating more and better jobs is open to taking on board advice about what is needed to nurture that dynamic entrepreneurial culture.
It might, for instance, require swallowing some dead rats like accepting the 90-day rule - the trial period when new employees can be fired without the normal recourse against unjustified dismissal.
The international context is challenging.
Real wages have been stagnant across much of the developed world for years.
Globalisation over the past 25 years has added billions of people to the world economy and trading system, mainly in Asia, who otherwise would have been part of some little village economy of no importance to anyone else, and who are willing to work for a fraction of what people in the West need to be paid.
This makes a difference to where stuff gets manufactured and increasingly to where services that can be delivered from a distance are provided from.
Digital technology is transforming work practices and challenging, sometimes lethally, traditional business models in any number of industries.
The technology, combined with value chains which criss-cross borders, cuts costs by replacing expensive labour with cheap labour at a remote location. Or sometimes by replacing it with a machine.
American economist James Galbraith, in The End of Normal, describes the mixed blessing of the digital revolution in these terms: "At one level living standards do rise ... Music, film, reading, writing, talking and flirting - around the world, instantly - have been rendered universally available and practically free of marginal cost." But for large numbers of people once sustained by the now displaced activities - like checkout clerks, TV repairmen, booksellers, photo lab technicians and reporters - living standards decline when they lose their jobs and their incomes, he says.
Galbraith challenges his fellow economists' fundamental assumption that there is an underlying trend of rising output and incomes, which the cycle will wobble around but revert to when nudged with the appropriate policy adjustments.
That conviction, he argues, embeds the particular experience of the post-World War II decades, when the pent-up demand from years wasted in depression and carnage met the great enabling technologies of the internal combustion engine and electrification, and apparently unlimited natural resources.
After that had run its course, rising living standards rested on the brittle foundation of ever-mounting debt, until the days of reckoning in 2008-09.
That may be too bleak and Luddite a view.
But six years since the global financial crisis began and despite massive monetary and (in some countries) fiscal stimulus, global unemployment has risen by 30 million people to around 200 million, including 74 million young people. The average jobless rate in developed economies stands at 8.5 per cent, compared with 5.8 per cent before the crisis.
That monetary stimulus - also known as really cheap credit - has seen asset prices soar to gravity-defying heights. The Auckland housing market is part of that trend.
Meanwhile, as Little said, "It is becoming harder to find secure, well-paid jobs. It is becoming harder to buy a home, harder to afford to start a family or retire ... People are feeling the squeeze, even though they are working their guts out."
His speech - appropriately when launching an open-minded process of consultation - contained no clues to what he thinks can be done to remedy that.
He did say too much investment capital is going into speculation instead of into supporting the next great business that is going to create jobs.
But he also wants Labour to face up to the fact that the electorate, in his experience, has taken to the policy of a capital gains tax like a cat to water.
So what other changes to the tax system would address that debilitating distortion?
We will have to watch this space, I guess.
5.8%
Average jobless rate in developed economies before the crisis
8.5%
Average jobless rate now
