Beaumont Carol: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading 
Beaumont Carol: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) — Third Reading 
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CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 First let me add my voice to that of my colleagues Darien Fenton and Trevor Mallard in relation to the situation in Greymouth with the Pike River miners. Our concern and our solidarity are with those workers their families and their community. 
I stand to speak to what I consider to be one of the most disgraceful bills I have seen come before this House in my time as a member of Parliament the Employment Relations Bill (No 2). It is yet another piece in a concerted attack by this Government on wage earners and salary earners in this country and on their unions. There has been quite a bit of rhetoric about choice and flexibility. Somehow giving employers the absolute right to dismiss for any reason and without workers having any recourse will create jobs! This is just an unbelievable backward-looking archaic attitude to work. I intend in this speech to talk about what reasonable employment legislation—and in fact positive employment legislation—could mean in terms of the future of our workplaces. 
Let me start by talking about some of the particular aspects of this bill. Combined they are unbalanced unfair unjustified and unnecessary. This view was reinforced by many submitters and by the officials who advised the Government. Despite that the Minister of Labour decided to ignore them and to push on with this legislation. I start by saying that this bill is actually contrary to the Act it is amending and I find that a very strange thing indeed. It seems to me that the provisions in this bill do not recognise a fundamental object of the Act—that is that there is an inherent inequality of power in employment relationships. That is a fundamental object in the Act. It is an Act that is designed to build productive employment relationships. I just do not see how the provisions of this bill create productive employment relationships. I will come back to that point. 
Basically work is about relationships. Generally we work with others and we do so for a range of reasons. We go to work to earn money to live. We go to work so that we can contribute our knowledge and our skills. We go to work so that we have social contact with others and so that we are part of our community our society and the economy that then sustains us and our children. We go to work and we expect that we will be treated with respect there. In all my years as a union official money was always an issue for people as they did not necessarily feel that they were paid fairly. But often the biggest issue was about respect and wanting to be treated with respect at work. 
Employment relations legislation exists to outline our rights at work to give us a clear signal of what we as a society think are basic minimums to guarantee those minimum standards and to say: “Look it is not right to employ somebody for less than the minimum wage.” We do not accept as a country that it is right to do that. It is to establish processes and institutions with which to deal with employment relationship problems and it is to provide security and certainty to employees and employers. That is what our legislation should be about. 
Work has a very significant impact on our lives and our families. We want to come home safely and feeling that we have been treated fairly at work. I remember my father saying to me—I can remember this from quite a young age—that the idea was that one does a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay that that was part of the underlying fairness situation in this country and that we had the sort of country where that was a basic tenet. I think we also have a view as New Zealanders that things improve. We expect wages and conditions to improve and our history shows that that is exactly what has happened over an extended period of time. That came to a rapid halt under the last National Government when we went backwards. We reduced wages and conditions under the last National Government and we are doing it again under this National Government. This goes against the notion that I think we should all share: we want things to be better for our children and our grandchildren—better than what we experienced ourselves. 
This legislation is being brought forward by a Government that is supposedly ambitious for New Zealand and is bringing a brighter future to New Zealand but this will not bring a brighter future to our workplaces. This is bringing forth a whole lot of provisions that are most unfortunate most unfair and certainly unbalanced. How can it be part of a successful productive workplace to have provisions like having 90 days at work where workers have no rights not even the right to know why they were dismissed if they are dismissed and no right to challenge a dismissal if it is unfair? How can it be right to have barriers put in the way of workers’ access to union officials when they want them if they have a grievance or as Trevor Mallard said if they are being sexually harassed or if they feel there is a serious health and safety matter as Darien Fenton outlined? How can it be right to remove the right to reinstatement as a primary remedy to be argued for in situations of unjustified dismissal? It is the one remedy that takes workers back to the situation they were in before they were unfairly dismissed. How can any of those things be things we should aspire to in the workplace of the future? They do not create the sorts of positive productive employment relationships that we need as a country. 
The combined effect of these changes will mean that we have different labour markets for those who are skilled and unskilled for those who are new entrants to the workforce versus those who have been around a while and for those who are unionised and non-unionised. That will be really reinforced. It will also mean that the effects will be most strongly felt on those who are already the most vulnerable the most disadvantaged in the workplace. It will make it more difficult to improve wages and conditions. It will lead to increased disputation and it will continue the low productivity in our workplaces that is holding this country back. Low productivity is negative for both employers and employees. 
Overwhelmingly people did not support these changes. There were nearly 8000 submissions and most of the submitters did not support these changes. In response to a survey with a very straight question by the Council of Trade Unions 80 percent of New Zealanders said it was not fair that people should be dismissed in the first 90 days of their employment. Even Department of Labour officials and Treasury officials questioned the value of this legislation and the evidence behind it. 
I want to talk about the kinds of workplaces that we need to be looking at because they are where a Government that was ambitious and wanted a brighter future would be looking. They are workplaces that are more productive and innovative where they actually value people more where the wages are higher where the workforce has more invested in their skills and where as a consequence we get better outcomes that provide greater profitability to employers and sustain the higher wages and conditions that we all want. Those workplaces will need a really determined effort to encourage things like greater capital intensity investment in skills and changing our people management which is very poor. Evidence shows it to be very poor currently and of course we will reinforce bad management behaviour by saying that the worst employers can behave abysmally and sack at will. We need to encourage innovation in our workplace processes and practices and we need to have workforces that are well engaged. That requires unions. The bottom line is that that requires workers to have some sort of collective voice some organisation where they can participate and raise their concerns raise their ideas and negotiate with the employer. 
These unions that many on the other side are more than willing to vilify and use negative stereotypes about are actually key to changing the productivity and improving the productivity in our workplaces. To lift productivity in the workplace we need more industry standards and we need more industry collaboration but most of all we need productive employment relations. We cannot increase productivity by edict—we cannot say: “You will be more productive.” We cannot lift productivity by cutting labour costs or by treating our workforce as commodities. We must invest in improving skills and improving wages and conditions and we must give workers a greater say and commit to having an independent voice for our workforce. Not only is this bill unbalanced unfair unnecessary and unjustified but also it will not lead to the types of productive changes we need in New Zealand.