Gosche Mark: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Gosche Mark: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:633;Page:5304] 
Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) 
: 
 That last part of Wayne Mapp’s speech was quite astounding. What he was actually saying was that people on this side of the House are guilty of caring—of listening to the lowest paid most vulnerable workers in the New Zealand. The people who clean Dr Wayne Mapp’s office every night and the people who feed him in Bellamy’s every day are the privileged workforce of New Zealand because they get to do that for him. The fact is that their employer might change tomorrow—a new employer might come in the next day—and if this law is not passed those people could not be guaranteed the same wages and conditions for doing the exact same job. It does not seem to strike Dr Mapp and his colleagues that it is unfair for that to happen just because an employer has changed. Well we on this side of the House and all the parties who support this legislation believe that the arguments about productivity that Dr Mapp rehearsed are utter nonsense. It was years and years ago when those things were done. 
I explained in my second reading speech about the Auckland Hospital situation where there was one cleaner per ward. The ratio was dropped so that there was one cleaner per two wards then conditions dropped further so that the cleaners did not even get a whole day to do their work in. What better productivity gain could be expected without getting to the situation where the hospital was unsafe? Would cleaners have to keep on giving blood before the members opposite were satisfied? The next stage in the regime—which is of a kind that National wholeheartedly supports—after dropping the number of workers cleaning the hospital then dropping the number of hours they could take to clean it was to pay the cleaners even less. They now work for roughly the same amount of take-home pay as they did in 1990 because their penal rates have gone their overtime rates have gone and their allowances which actually built up their earnings have gone. As a result even though they have had hourly wage rate increases through the last 15 years many of them are still earning the same as they did in 1990. They are the parents of the future. They are the Maori Pacific and Asian workforce who have come to this country—or in the case of Maori who have been here for ever—and actually make our economy survive. But National’s recipe for them is to punish them some more—to not pass this law to not protect their rights as workers. National would allow those multinational companies—and there are about four or five of them; all are multinational—to screw those workers harder. That is National’s recipe which we reject. 
Labour says that if a worker turns up to work tomorrow and his or her boss has changed because the contract has changed that worker should not lose money or conditions. If workers are working hard and doing the job why should they not get the same pay tomorrow as they do today when they are doing exactly the same work and to the same standard? If they are not doing the job they can be disciplined and the workforce can be changed. 
But this is not the case. The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee heard from workers who had been at Wellington Hospital for something like 15 or 16 years and they had been through six different employers. Many of those employers were absolutely hopeless at doing the job. Their management was so bad that the hospital kept flicking them out. But the workers remained there stock standard every year. The promise of better management techniques and greater productivity was a lie told to those people. 
We do not want a country where our most vulnerable most hard-working and most reliable people are actually punished under law as National would have it. That is why I am extremely proud to be part of this Government and to repay those people who keep us healthy in hospital who look after us when we are old and who clean our schools so that our children have clean schoolrooms. They certainly require a payback from this Government for the work they do and they are getting it with this legislation.