Davis Kelvin: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDavis Kelvin: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 28 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:308. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau):Thank you Mr Chair and I appreciate the call. I would like to talk about clause 1 of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill. I would just like to say that I agree with a number of the names that have been raised by members of both New Zealand First and the Greens—in particular the “Undermining the Rights of Kiwi Workers Bill”.In fact there is an area that I have a bit of passing interest in and that is education. I believe that this bill may have the potential to undermine the rights of Kiwi teachers. You see new section 44A inserted by clause 11 allows employers to opt out of multi-employer collective bargaining. I would like to know exactly the effect that this will have on education. When teacher contracts are negotiated the representative organisations of teachers are the New Zealand Educational Institute or the Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA). The Ministry of Education represents its own interests.The anomaly here though is that the employers of teachers are actually the boards of trustees of which there are over 2000. Those boards of trustees from my understanding of how this is written have the potential to opt out of the collective bargaining. I ask whether this means a board of trustees if it wants to could refuse to offer a union-negotiated contract and offer instead only the individual contracts it may wish to offer. Hence I say that this could be the undermining of Kiwi teachers’ rights. If that is the case I ask what the relationship is then going to be: between boards of trustees and their employees the teachers; between the boards of trustees and their employees the principals; or between principals and teachers. Principals are actually in a really strange situation where not only are they part of a board—i.e. part of the employer group—they are actually an employee of the board of trustees as well. So this has the potential to impact quite significantly on the relationships between the employers and the employees in a myriad of ways when it comes to schools.My big fear is that this may be a bit of a stalking horse for that old National Government policy of the 1990s: bulk funding. If boards of trustees can opt out of offering the collective contract then they can basically offer what they want to teachers in terms of wages and conditions. Of course we know that education is woefully inadequately underfunded. The first thing that goes when schools or organisations or businesses are running low on funds is workers and their salaries. In the case of education if salaries or wages were to go then teachers would leave. Normally the first teachers who will go will be those who can go—the best teachers. This may then compound achievement because what they will be doing is narrowing down the pool of teaching talent in schools.As I say not only is this undermining the rights of Kiwi workers; it could potentially undermine the rights of Kiwi teachers which in the end will undermine achievement for our children our most vulnerable people in society. This bill could actually go so far as to have a negative impact on educational achievement across schools.I would like the Minister in the chair Nathan Guy to answer these questions around new section 44A. Does this mean that boards of trustees can opt out of multi-employer collective bargaining—boards of trustees which are the employers of teachers? The New Zealand Educational Institute and the PPTA are the groups that actually do the negotiating on behalf of teachers but the Ministry of Education is the Government’s representative. That of course is strange because boards of trustees are actually the employers of teachers. So it is a very strange situation that does need to be answered on behalf of all the teachers out there who are listening and all the principals and all the members of the boards of trustees. We certainly do not want the spectre of bulk funding to arise again in education in New Zealand.