Seymour David: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9494. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Mr Chair thank you very much for your patience and indulgence. I think it is a sad thing that these Supplementary Order Papers we are debating tonight and these changes to clause 87 are built upon sadly a falsehood.I want to join with my colleagues who say that it is lamentable that we see employment arrangements with enormous power imbalances in New Zealand: people who find that their options for jobs that people offer them that they can do are very limited and on the other hand employers who find that there are conversely quite a large number of people who wish to do the jobs that they are offering. That does lead to the situations that we have heard about tonight and that have been reported widely in the press. If we were to very quickly try to diagnose why that is we might say that it relates to first of all globalisation the collapse of communism better technology bigger economies of scale in various industries and much more competition for jobs around the world—and low-skilled jobs in particular.Let us be very clear that if we accept that diagnosis nothing in these Supplementary Order Papers is going to change that basic balance between the number of jobs that the people we have all been talking about have at their availability and the number of people whom employers find trying to get those jobs. In fact sadly this particular series of Supplementary Order Papers around clause 87 is actually going to further restrict the range of jobs and opportunities available to precisely the people whom so many have stood up tonight to try to defend.It is sad because there will be a couple of winners from the Supplementary Order Papers being debated tonight. The first are the people who have stood up and lauded often in a sort of circular way themselves and those who have helped them get this particular series of changes over the line politically because although the conditions faced by the people they purport to help will not fundamentally change the people championing these changes of course will no longer have to worry about the circumstances they have lamented tonight. They will not exist anymore because this House has used its power to ban them. So bully for them. Will they not feel better about themselves for having done it!The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): The member will resume his seat when I stand and I am now going to ask him to address the part and the amendments thereto. This is a detail discussion not a broad discussion.DAVID SEYMOUR: I would conclude my statements because I think I am being as specific as I need to be about these particular clauses except to say in reference to the debate that we have heard throughout this evening that there are real uncertainties about what will be a reasonable basis for cancelling a shift for instance. I hope this is being specific enough now Mr Chair. Several members many in favour of the amendments have gotten up and said: “Well of course that will have to be addressed by the courts and interpreted by the courts.” We may ask what a reasonable level of proportionality is between guaranteed hours and hours where the worker is required to be available.There is another set of winners from answering those particular questions who I am sure are popping champagne corks all over New Zealand tonight and those are the employment lawyers who will tell you that new rules always mean new opportunities to help their clients. Not only will they benefit from the uncertainty that those proposed amendments introduce but they will introduce a dead-weight loss of uncertainty into the New Zealand labour market once again that is most concentrated on the employment opportunities of the very people that these amendments were designed to help.So it is a sad day first of all for the problem that the amendments sought to solve but also and all the more so for the ineffectual nature of the amendments and the dead-weight costs that they are going to introduce into New Zealand’s labour market by introducing new uncertainty sadly all necessitated by a political cop-out. Thank you.