Boyack RachelRACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's always a privilege to take a call in this House but I don't do so today with any great pride to be honest in this House having heard some of the debate this afternoon.I want to put on record that I come from a place of privilege and there are a lot of people in this House who do come from a place of privilege and I think it is incumbent on all of us to be able to recognise that and recognise that our job in this House is to do the work and to do the mahi for the people who are the most vulnerable in our community. That is one of the reasons why I've come to this House.Across the other side of the House whenever the word union" is mentioned there's a lot of scoffing. So I'm going to talk just a little bit about some of the work I did as a union organiser—wait for the scoffing—the real work like sitting in the office of a supermarket manager with a woman close to retirement age. Yeah it's interesting watching the people across on the other side laugh. It's not funny the story I'm about to tell here Katie Nimon—it's not funny. Hon Kelvin Davis: It's just their white privilege kicking in.RACHEL BOYACK: Oh this is where the privilege does kick in.I'm talking about a woman in her sixties working for a large supermarket chain being threatened with losing her job. Do you know why? Because while working for close to the minimum wage she wasn't stacking shelves fast enough. Now this is actually an Australian company that she worked for making millions of dollars of profit and they were saying to this woman "You are going to lose your job because you're not stacking those shelves fast enough."This was the sort of thing I saw in my role time and time again. I'm proud of that work. I'm proud of the fact that even though I studied employment relations at university even though I studied this and I could have gone down the HR track I chose to stand on the side of people who are often the most vulnerable.So I want to take members opposite and just remind them of the Employment Relations Act 2000 and one of the sections contained within that wasn't repealed by the previous National Government. If you look at section 3 "Object of this Act" you will see that one of the things it states is "(a)(ii) by acknowledging and addressing the inherent inequality of power in employment relationships;" and furthermore to promote collective bargaining.Having actually studied the subject at university—and one of the things that I hear this Government often talking about is wanting to be evidence-based. Well let's talk about the evidence. The evidence says particularly for women that if you negotiate as a group you get higher wages than if you do it on your own. That's particularly true for women.There's an amazing woman called Marjorie Corman Aaron who actually found through research that a woman who went in and negotiated aggressively for higher pay was the least likely to get hired. But a man who went in and aggressively negotiated the pay was most likely to get hired. This is real research—this is the truth of the matter. So women in particular by negotiating together as a group end up doing better for all of them. And that's one of the reasons I'm so proud to stand on this side of the House—because it's not about me; it's about we. It's about all of us and that's one of the values that we hold. It's not about what that one individual gets; it's actually about what we do for all workers.So I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the work I did in the supermarket industry and a particular woman who used to vote for the other side of the House but doesn't now because she saw what they are really like. I'm talking about a wonderful woman called Jenny Wells who was a delegate at Pak 'N Save in Nelson. Jenny has had strokes recently and even though she had a stroke she still had to keep working because she wasn't earning enough money. She hadn't earned enough money working at that supermarket to have decent savings. She went back to work because her husband was sick and couldn't go to work. She went back to work. The business was sold from one owner to another and she actually lost terms and conditions through that sale. She lost her time and a half. She lost other penal rates and other extra pieces of annual leave when that business was sold. Now that's a multimillion-dollar business—multimillion-dollar business.And what we saw during saw COVID was a lot of people wanting to congratulate our supermarket workers. But do you know what they did? They sent them cards they sent them chocolates but actually what those supermarket workers need especially when the supermarkets absolutely creamed it is decent pay. And we even saw some supermarkets temporarily increase pay by 10 percent and then at the end of the lockdown say "Oh no sorry you're not worth that anymore. We're going to take that away from you." and there was community outrage about that.So one of the issues with the duopoly in the supermarket sector is that we have Countdown which is an Australian-owned company. They do have a collective agreement in place and the workers in that supermarket normally earn around $2 an hour more than those in a Pak 'N Save or a New World which are New Zealand - owned. That profit from Countdown—well it's now called Woolworths—goes back to Australia. We don't see it in New Zealand. It goes back across the Ditch. The profit for those locally owned New Zealand supermarkets which seriously print millions of dollars of money each year goes back into the pocket of an individual owner. But for those workers who work their butts off—and I think every single one of us can walk into a supermarket and know that those people in that supermarket are working their absolute butts off—there has been an enormous amount of difficulty getting collective agreements into Pak 'N Save and New World. Part of the reason is that the law does not support that to happen.Even in my patch—I had an email from someone working in this area who'd been trying to get a collective agreement for up to eight years. So for people to say "You can just work it out." eight years of just trying to work it out hasn't worked. The person wrote to me and said that the Fair Pay Agreements Act was built for cases like this where employers who subvert the intent of the law in bad faith are surface bargaining in order to create a protracted process and undermine the collective will of the workers. A fair pay agreement (FPA) would mean that these workers would get an actual increase in wages better working conditions penalty rates for giving up family time on nights and weekends and much better health and safety provisions. That the Government is attempting to repeal them in haste under the cover of urgency and without due process is a failure of their responsibilities to the working people of Aotearoa.This pre-Christmas move would make the Grinch grin to ear to ear as the Government steals FPAs out of the pockets of hard-working Kiwis. I thought that was an excellent email just demonstrating—I see people are laughing again and I honestly can't believe that people are laughing. I've known supermarket workers who well before we had challenges around the cost of living were having to go to a food bank—a food bank. So for people to think this is funny—you know they laughed before when my colleague Camilla Belich was talking about security guards who die on the job. They die on the job—they get stabbed. People again are laughing when I talk about security guards.Hon Member: It's really inappropriate.RACHEL BOYACK: It's really inappropriate and it really really bothers me. But here are some other words I've had from supermarket workers today. A man who works for a New World told me today that "a fair pay agreement is important to me and my co-workers because it gives us financial stability to pay bills for our kids and our homes. We shouldn't struggle to make ends meet when supermarkets profit more each year." Another one said "I work night fill often six nights a week. I start at 10 and usually finish around 7—it's very unsocial hours. The job involves heavy labour and we are often made to work at a fast pace. It is very tiring. Having a fair pay agreement will allow me a much better work-life balance and allow me to spend more time with friends and family to work fewer shifts for the same money."On Friday I spent some time with early childhood education workers who are one of the groups that have a fair pay agreement in train. There's been much said about the pay of early childhood workers for many years. They have also worked towards pay equity pay parity with other teachers but also the importance of having enough qualified teachers within that sector so that we have enough good quality teachers earning proper wages who are able to then look after our youngest. This is the type of worker that the repeal of this law is going to undermine. So I remind members across the whole House that we are here for all New Zealanders but particularly for the most vulnerable and I do not commend this bill to the House."