Bradford Sue: Minimum Wage and Remuneration Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Bradford Sue: Minimum Wage and Remuneration Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:633;Page:4821] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 This is a good bill and on behalf of the Green Party I would like to offer my congratulations to Darien Fenton on introducing it to the House. I am very pleased to hear that the Maori Party supports it and very disappointed to hear what Peter Brown has just said as surely as a member of New Zealand First of all the parties and as a gentleman who has talked a lot about the need to support and improve the lot of casual and low-paid workers I think it is a disgrace that he has taken the position he has. 
This bill closes another loophole in the Minimum Wage Act a loophole that sees some workers being grossly exploited and being paid less than the minimum wage provisions of the Act. This bill could be called the “Minimum Wage (Abolition of Employment Status) Discrimination Bill” and as such it is a good companion to my Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination) Amendment Bill. Given the concern over recent weeks by a number of parties at the remuneration paid to individuals working on a contract for service on properties owned by a member of this House I would hope vainly I know that this bill would receive unanimous support from all parties to go to the select committee. 
It is anathema that in today’s world young people and those on contracts for service do not receive the full protection of the Minimum Wage Act. Such gross exploitation cannot be allowed to continue. My Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination) Amendment Bill will stop this gross exploitation by removing the ability arbitrarily to discriminate on the grounds of age when minimum wages are set. 
This new bill will address the gross exploitation of those workers who work under contracts for service. This includes not only the pamphlet deliverers mentioned in the explanatory note of the bill but also people such as painters builders pizza drivers security officers commission sales people and many others. It must also include homeworkers—a growing but very vulnerable group of mainly women workers who attempt to stretch the family income through taking in work such as clothing manufacture other light manufacturing computer-based work childcare and so on. The exclusion of these people from minimum wage legislation simply on the basis that they are not employees in the legal sense of the term is wrong and simply adds to the growing underclass that exists in this country. We have only to look at the recent  
New Zealand Living Standards 
 report and S 
ocial Report 2006 
 for confirmation that the gap between the well-off and the very poor is actually intensifying at the moment. 
In many cases these people on contracts may even be employees within the meaning of the law but low awareness of employment rights allows unscrupulous employers to convince them that they are contractors rather than employees. This is an increasing problem as more employers seek to escape their employment responsibilities by renaming employees as contractors. This small but growing group of employers is not only grossly exploiting those working for them but also putting better employers who play by the rules out of business by undercutting their prices. 
I would expect employer groups to strongly support this bill to protect their own members. However I was disappointed to see the other day that the Employers and Manufacturers Association (Northern) is unfortunately once again opposing progressive employment legislation—and in fact turning its back on its own members who are law abiding on the whole—and instead siding with the exploitative employment practices of the undercutters and fly-by-nighters. With this amendment to the legislation in place there will be less temptation for workers to be called contractors when they are not or to be paid under the table rather than by proper wages taxed at source. I would think that the parties to my right would actually support that notion. 
This bill will throw more light on the underground economy. It will see the regularisation of employment relations that are very much in the grey area at the moment and we will all benefit by seeing a greater tax take that can fund our health education and social services. 
Before I finish I would just like to note a few concerns. Firstly the proposed new section 4A(2) in clause 7 still provides for age discrimination. The Green Party believes that age discrimination is not acceptable in either contracts of service or contracts for services. Secondly there does not appear to be any amendment to section 5 of the Minimum Wage Act to require an annual review of minimum remuneration for contractors. That might just be a drafting oversight. The real detail will come in the regulations prescribing minimum remuneration for contractors themselves. These will not be easy to draft and will not come under select committee scrutiny prior to their being promulgated. However I hope Darien will give an outline of the proposed regulations to the select committee. 
The Greens will support this bill and expect National especially to be a strong supporter of it. I also expect Darien Fenton and the Labour Party to continue to strongly support my Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination) Amendment Bill as I believe these two members’ bills belong together in helping to implement fundamental and much-needed reform of our minimum wage framework.