Lees-Galloway Iain: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9497. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): I would like to speak to Denise Roche’s Supplementary Order Paper 151 because I do not think anybody other than Denise Roche has had a chance to speak to her Supplementary Order Paper. I particularly want to speak to her proposed amendment to clause 89(2) which is to delete new section 130(1C).Section 130(1C) has to do with the wages and time record-keeping. Keeping good wage and time records is really important particularly for people who are salaried and whose salary is effectively very close to the minimum wage because if those people end up working more hours than their employment agreement indicates that they are supposed to be working there is a very real risk—and this does happen—of people actually ending up earning less than the minimum wage. They work more hours do not get any more pay for it and end up earning less than the minimum wage.I appreciate that there are amendments in the bill that are designed to address this issue but Denise Roche has raised the issue of section 130(1C) which says that “an employee’s usual hours include any reasonable additional hours worked in accordance with the employee’s employment agreement.” So that is actually leaving the door open a little bit to saying that an employee’s usual hours actually include any reasonable additional hours—just a few extra hours here and there and they are reasonable and they probably often happen or they often happen under certain circumstances. It does just leave the door open a little bit to the exact kind of exploitation that the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety and the Government are trying to clamp down on with the other parts of clause 89. So I agree with Denise Roche and Labour will be voting to support the deletion of section 130(1C) from clause 89.It seems contrary to the purpose of clause 89 to have section 130(1C) included in there. Yes that probably means a little bit more record-keeping for some employers but I think it is the kind of record-keeping that is actually valuable from the employee’s point of view because it is the kind of record-keeping that helps us to prevent exploitation of workers and I think that is worth doing. I appreciate that getting the words right around this has again been something that the officials have taken great care over: to make sure for instance that for the chief executive officer of ANZ—who let us face it is nowhere near in danger of being on the minimum wage—there is not loads of record-keeping having to be done around his or her hours.But we do need to make sure that the people whom we are trying to support—the people who we are trying to make sure are prevented from being exploited—are genuinely protected and that we do not leave loopholes. Let us face it. What we are doing with Part 2 of this legislation is closing a series of loopholes that were exploited by bad employers and resulted in zero-hour contracts.So let us not leave any more loopholes. We sometimes do that by error but in this case we have noticed one and we can get rid of it. I will certainly be supporting Denise Roche’s Supplementary Order Paper in that regard.