Locke Keith: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading In Committee Speaker Recalled 
Locke Keith: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading In Committee Speaker Recalled 
[Volume:668;Page:15398] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The assumption behind Michael Woodhouse’s speech on Part 1 of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) is that the overwhelming majority of employers are good employers. They have the interests of employees at heart they will spend a lot money hiring and training them they will be very reluctant to let them go and all the rest of it. It is true that good employers think in those terms and they also think in terms of having good relations with the workforce and with the collective organisations of the workforce—that is the unions. But there are also a lot of employers who do not want anyone to be pushing for better conditions to be a member of a union or for a union to be active on the job. They think that they can make more money if that is the case. Sometimes that is not a rational calculation and sometimes it is just that they want to be the big boss but that does exist. 
The very fact that we have such a low rate of unionisation in New Zealand particularly in the private sector—and it is much lower than it was during the period of national awards before we had the Employment Contracts Act—is in part testimony to the fact that a lot of employers would rather not have the union on the job. Of course we have Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor who are prime examples of this. They are doing everything possible to keep an organised union force off their production of  
The Hobbit 
 and the other productions they have and they have been reasonably successful to date in doing that. That attitude is not unusual amongst employers. If that was not the case then I ask why we have this provision on union access to workplaces. We have the situation where union access has worked pretty well so far. The unions have walked on and off jobs all over the place. They talk to their members without any great problems. Of course any good union official is very sensitive to the fact that he or she should not disrupt the work process more than is necessary. There is often somewhat of a disruption of the work process by the very fact that union officials have to talk to workers who are on the job for 8 hours a day or whatever it is but that is minimised. 
Now we are putting in procedures that will seriously disadvantage unions in getting that access in that they can be delayed for up to a couple of days. The procedure that many union officials work on is to go to perhaps eight worksites a day and have a bit of flexibility as to when they arrive at the next worksite because they do not know exactly what the issues will be at the worksite they visited at say 10 o’clock. It might take them half an hour or 2 hours to work through the problems at that particular worksite. They have to have that flexibility and they operate in a situation of reasonableness and through notification of the employer in terms of access to worksites. But all of that will be thrown up in the air by putting all the power back on to employers and by allowing them to delay union officials for a couple of days. That provision will disadvantage the unions. 
Other provisions like the removal of reinstatement as a primary remedy in personal grievances will push things back against the unions too. A lot of employers want to get rid of particularly the more stroppy active union officials so what will they do? They will say that they will sack that union official. It will perhaps cost them a bit of money at the Employment Court but with reinstatement not being a primary remedy any more they will have got rid of that union official. They would value that result more than the $5000 or $10000 they might have to pay in compensation. That is biasing everything against the unions too. 
With regard to the 90-day provision I think Michael Woodhouse said that job applicants would have to agree to the 90-day provision in the employment agreement. But unemployed workers—and the unemployment rate is running at about 7 percent—can find it hard to get a job and they will not say: “I will take this job that you have kindly offered me but you need to cut out the clause that says there is a 90-day trial period.” If they do that an employer will thank them very much and say that he or she has not quite decided who to hire and will come back to the worker on that one but the employer will never come back. The 90-day trial is not really a voluntary arrangement and if that worker shows a bit of a disposition towards the union and perhaps even joins the union come the 75th day 85th day or 89th day the employer will just get rid of that worker.