Fenton Darien: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFenton Darien: General Debate[Sitting date: 02 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19153. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DARIEN FENTON (Labour):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. I have to say it is just as well that Labour has a positive plan for New Zealand that goes beyond a few roads. We have got a positive plan that is about decent work and decent jobs. Yesterday this piece of information was released and it is the Hays worldwide recruiting experts’ report called Temporary Workers: A Permanent Solution? A final solution—the 84000 jobs that this Government boasts about growing last year. I bet there is not a member opposite who can tell me whether they are well-paid secure full-time jobs. Is there? No I did not think so. I bet they cannot tell us whether they are part-time casual temporary or contract jobs either. Can you? No of course not. How many of those jobs are so miserable and where the hours and wages are so pathetically low that a worker cannot make a living let alone pay donations to schools. Thank goodness again that Labour has come up with a plan for that.This report is very interesting. It shows that 64 percent of employers use temporary or contract staff and 18 percent intend to increase the use of temporary or contract staff in the coming year. It also says that the demand is going up so 35.8 percent said that their demands have increased. Well they are increasing the numbers of workers they are using on a temporary or contract basis. And 83 percent say that temporary or contract workers constitute up to a quarter of their entire workforce—a quarter of their workforce. So that means that 25 percent of all jobs in New Zealand are temporary. The members opposite may not understand what a temporary workforce looks like. A temporary job is one where you are employed by a labour hire company and you are sent off—you are loaned—to go and work for another company. You might have work for a day you might have work for a week or you might have work for a month if you are lucky but then it is gone and you are back to the dole queue. Many of the jobs that are being added to the New Zealand economy are those kinds of contingent insecure jobs—temporary and contract jobs. That is about 635000 workers in New Zealand are in that kind of insecure work. This Government is doing nothing about it. What it means for those workers is worse conditions less security less say and they are more vulnerable.There are all kinds of new devices being used for temporary work. Some employers employ workers quite legally on fixed-term contracts—they are allowed to do that—to replace a worker on extended leave or parental leave. That is fine; everybody knows what the deal is there. But what is not fine are the temporary work arrangements that are employed through labour hire firms to replace good well-paying permanent jobs. We are seeing that in manufacturing. We are seeing it in fish processing. We are seeing it in food services in banking in construction and in the Public Service. We are seeing it even in teaching. The teaching profession is riddled with fixed-term contracts. This is a Government that claims it cares about kids and about kids’ education. How can they be having good education when people do not know whether they have got a job from one week to the next? It is seasonal work. It is casual work. It is growing and it is being ignored by the National Party. So it boasts about jobs but these are not good jobs. These are not good jobs where people can earn a living and feed their families. What is more National plans if it is re-elected—and God forbid—to implement its employment law changes which it could not get through thanks to John Banks.This is another example of a recovery that is not delivering for New Zealanders and why we are seeing an increased gap between the haves and have-nots and a growing income gap between the top 10 percent and the rest of us. This is bad news. This sort of report this Temporary Workers: A Permanent Solution? kind of report is something that the Government should be ashamed of. It is bad news for secure and decent work in New Zealand. Temporary workers have no rights to ongoing employment and no defence against arbitrary dismissal. Contractors have no employment rights at all including no minimum wage no holidays and no rights to protection against unfair dismissal.