Fenton Darien: Shop Trading Hours Act Repeal (Easter Trading)Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Fenton Darien: Shop Trading Hours Act Repeal (Easter Trading)Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:639;Page:9328] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 Thank you Mr Speaker— 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Here we go—comedy hour. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: Here we go? OK—well especially after that last speech! I will be voting against the Shop Trading Hours Act Repeal (Easter Trading) Amendment Bill. Although I understand why my very very good colleague Steve Chadwick is sponsoring this bill—and may I say she does a very fine job as the member for Rotorua—I support the more than 200000 workers in the retail industry who are opposed to this bill. I must say that I have not heard a lot of talk about them. Their views are very important in this debate because they are the ones who will have to do the work if this bill passes. They are saying a very loud no. If they are paid for it they are not paid anything extra. Why should they have to work on Easter Sunday when everyone— 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Oh come on! 
DARIEN FENTON 
: —and when Mr Henare gets a holiday on Easter Sunday. He gets time to spend with his family. Let us consider the life of a shop worker. Clearly the Hon Tau Henare has never worked in a shop. 
Lynne Pillay 
: He’s never worked anywhere. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: He has never worked anywhere—that is true! The life of a shop worker is not an easy one. Most shop workers work in supermarkets department stores or smaller retail outlets. They are low-paid workers; indeed many are paid youth rates. They can be required to work on any of the 7 days or nights in a week in the weekend and on most public holidays. Their start and finish times can be very different every day. They are highly casualised and they have low levels of unionisation which means they have little power to negotiate on an individual basis. Around 65 percent of shop workers are under the age of 18 and in their first jobs and they know little about their rights. That makes them particularly vulnerable and that is what I am concerned about. 
The problem with this bill goes further up the food chain as well. The bill affects not only shop workers but also distribution and transport workers. The pressure will go on them as well to deliver goods to shops for Easter Sunday. So I support retail workers in their determination to put a stop to the never-ending quest for increased working hours that has pervaded our working culture. 
Because of the debate around Jacqui Dean’s bill before Easter this year I took particular notice of what was happening around me where I live in west Auckland. Yes the retail shops were closed on Good Friday and on Easter Sunday. Did the world end? No of course it did not. I did not notice signs of major shopping withdrawals around the streets in Auckland. I did notice that it was easy to buy petrol to get stuff from dairies to hire a video to go to the garden centre or to go down the road for a latte because the law already provides for that. However I saw families not shopping but enjoying the day together—going to the beach walking around the waterfront and going on picnics. I want that to continue. If everybody is working that will not be able to happen. 
Other speakers have referred to the problem we have in New Zealand of an exceptionally long working hours culture. We all like to talk about work-life balance and it is good that the member Chris Auchinvole has work-life balance on the West Coast but may I tell him that we have it nowhere else in the country. It is something that is acknowledged as being important not only to individual workers and their families but also to employers and the economy. It is important that people find a good balance between paid work and other aspects of their lives and when this balance is not found people may suffer from stress or anxiety. Long working hours or non-standard working hours compromise work-life balance along with productivity skills development and the ability of employers to recruit and retain workers. This bill does nothing to address the never-ending demands for work intensification and longer hours. It is time we stopped for a minute and thought about that because it is creating community and family problems. 
A recently released work-life balance snapshot by the Department of Labour confirmed the trend of increasingly long working hours. Nineteen percent of workers said they work more than 50 hours a week. Hours of work vary for 40 percent of those workers: 18 percent do shift work and about a quarter work extra hours at work in their own time to get their jobs done often without pay. The 2001  
Thirty Families – Work Hours  
report commissioned by the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions also showed that the hours worked by many families are too long with many working an average of 45 to 50 hours per week and some working even longer hours. Almost all of those who were surveyed regularly worked more than 45 hours a week and they regarded those hours as long unreasonable and with significant negative effects on their own lives and the lives of their families. 
I acknowledge that the Commerce Committee endeavoured to address workers’ issues in the bill in particular the right to refuse to work on Easter Sunday. Although that is admirable I have to say that some of the contributions in the House tonight show that some members live in la-la land when it comes to the workplace. Members should imagine what it is like for young shop workers in their first jobs and what incredible bravery it would take to say no to employers who wanted them to work on Easter Sunday. As others have said when people are working in a team it is very easy to convey a message that they are letting down the firm and their workmates and that it means that their jobs could be affected. Whether that is right or wrong that is how people see it. Shop workers also know that if they say no some other poor sucker will have to cop working on that day instead. So we do need to be realistic about what life is like for young retail workers in this still very deregulated labour market. It is hard enough for older workers in more established industries to say no. 
I want to mention a couple of members’ Supplementary Order Papers that have been talked about tonight. I will consider Mr Brown’s proposed Supplementary Order Paper of course—if we get that far—but I think that once we have let the genie out of the bottle checking on whether workers are being treated fairly 2 years down the track will be a little hard. It will be really hard to put things back. I say in respect of MaryanStreet’s Supplementary Order Paper that it is better than what is being proposed. It will be good if it passes that workers will get Easter Sunday recognised as a public holiday. But I also think there are a whole lot of other workers out there—hospitality workers who will be working alongside shop workers in many instances and working in the cafeteria or the bar next door on Easter Sunday—who will not be getting time and a half and a day in lieu. They will quite rightly feel aggrieved and I think that will lead to a demand for Easter Sunday to be recognised as a public holiday for all workers. 
The problem I see is that we have few regulations around working hours. Regulations were done away with by those members over there who were in Government in 1990. The only thing that workers can rely on in terms of regulation is their employment agreements. If an employment agreement is a union agreement the worker will be fine; the agreement will have provisions for reasonable working hours and a health and safety requirement. But let us be honest: in small retail shops workers are not likely to be considered where pressure is on to deliver maximum profit. So I do not support any extension to working hours in whatever form and in whatever industry. 
The bill as reported back provides for territorial local authorities to allow shops in their areas to open after consultation with the community. I have talked to some territorial local authorities and they have said to me that this is not a responsibility they want to take on. The letters from the Auckland City Council and the Waitakere City Council make it clear that those bodies do not support the bill. They urge us to cherish the number of shopping-free days we currently enjoy for the sake of our families and communities and for the sake of shop workers and their lives. 
I note that there is a proposal—it was referred to earlier—to review how the Shop Trading Hours Act the Sale of Liquor Act and the Holidays Act operate over Easter weekend. I would welcome that. It may provide a way forward but I would not support any proposal that resulted in a blanket right to trade on Easter Sunday. We have a chance tonight to put a halt to the increasing demands that we see on workers for more and more hours to be worked. 
Chris Auchinvole 
: Oh yeah! 
DARIEN FENTON 
: That member does not do it so how does he know? It would be good if for once in this Parliament we could agree on 1 or 2 days of the year where we do not have to have shopping and agree that families should be put before commerce. It is time that members of this Parliament started to think about the people who do the work in the retail industry instead of themselves and instead of the commercial imperatives that drive the issues behind this bill.