Wall Louisa: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWall Louisa: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7156. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]LOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. It is my pleasure as a member of the Health Committee to speak on this first reading of the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. To begin can I say: ka pai E tū. E tū as part of its membership includes the Service and Food Workers Union. It was the Service and Food Workers Union member Tamara Baddeley who with the support of her union—and I want to acknowledge John Ryall—filed a case against Healthcare New Zealand. To support the Service and Food Workers Union we also had the Public Service Association. (PSA). So I want to acknowledge our unions which actually fight for the rights of our workers and highlight the inequalities in legislation.In fact this bill is the result of an inequality in the legislation which was the Minimum Wage Act of 1983. That is in fact the legal opinion that the then human rights commissioner the Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Judy McGregor obtained. So she supported the Service and Food Workers Union. She supported the PSA. In addition to her support she got Russell McVeagh to write a legal opinion that basically said that there was a legal argument that travel between clients constituted work under the Minimum Wage Act of 1983.That is incredibly symbolic because what it does is it highlights that the people who work in the home and community-based care and support sector—and that is 28000 New Zealand workers who work in the sector who service over 40000 New Zealanders and we have heard today about whom this particular care and support service sector provides services to. We are talking about older New Zealanders. We are talking about New Zealanders who have disabilities. We are talking about New Zealanders who choose to be careful in their homes. We are talking about a vulnerable population that in fact is supported by vulnerable workers.A lot of people have talked about the context of this legislation and the fact that the people involved in this piece of legislation are not paid sufficiently. Hopefully as other colleagues have alluded to in the debate this afternoon this provides the impetus for the Government to not only address this settlement that was reached between the Government and the PSA and the Service and Food Workers Union in August last year which was then ratified by those union members but also recognise and acknowledge that the 28000 people in particular women who work in the sector deserve a living wage. So we will put that on the table today. They deserve a living wage.They deserve a living wage because—actually we should not rely on the fact that they qualify because they are paid the minimum wage to care for the people whom we have talked about in the House today who deserve to be serviced with best-quality support. Well part of being serviced with best-quality support is making sure the workers who are undertaking those tasks are remunerated appropriately.If we look at the progression of this piece of legislation it was started in November 2012 when the Service and Food Workers Union the PSA and Tamara Baddeley went to the Employment Relations Authority and asked it to refer the matter to the Employment Court. The progression from this issue being referred to the Employment Relations Authority then gave rise to a period of negotiation. From November 2012 we come to April 2014 when the Government decided in earnest that it wanted to negotiate with the Service and Food Workers Union and with the PSA.What I want to note is that prior to that decision being made the Government’s position was pretty clear. I will quote from the Minister of Health at the time Tony Ryall. He said that this matter between home-care employers and home-care employees was for them to resolve it had nothing to do with the Government and it was not the Government’s responsibility. So it is good that we are in the House today and the Government is taking responsibility for ensuring that our home and community-based care and support workers are compensated appropriately for travelling between jobs. That is the context of their work. Actually their car is their office. So I am glad that the Government has changed its position and that it is actually now supporting the unions and what the unions are trying to achieve.From the negotiations which started in April 2014 they reached a resolution by August 2014. I want to commend the leadership of the unions. Also I commend Judy McGregor at this time for standing up for the workers and then for transparently presenting that settlement to the workers. The ratification of that settlement has enabled the bill that is before the House tonight.One of the interesting things that I have found in looking at this particular piece of legislation this afternoon is that actually they are having the same arguments over in Europe at the moment. The headline is “British trade unions welcome ruling against Spanish company saying home care workers could see benefits”. This particular article was published on 10 September 2015. In the European Court of Justice a Spanish trade union took a case against Tyco which was a multinational fire and security company that closed its network of regional offices in Spain in 2011. The interesting thing about that is that the staff were not paid to travel from their homes to install these security systems. Sometimes they had to travel for up to 3 hours away from their homes. So the finding of the European Court of Justice—and I want to read the judgment—is: “During the necessary travelling time—which generally cannot be shortened—the workers are therefore not able to use their time freely and pursue their own interests. The fact that the workers begin and finish the journeys at their homes stems directly from the decision of their employer to abolish the regional offices and not from the desire of workers themselves.” So it is kind of a different rationale but actually it is the same logic.Of interest to me is that Dave Prentis who is the general secretary of the UNISON union in Britain said that he thought the biggest impact of this ruling is going to be on home-care workers—“Tens of thousands of home-care workers [who] are not even getting the minimum wage because their employers fail to pay them for the time they spend travelling between the homes of all the people they care for.” So what I am hoping for from the legislation that we are enacting here today is that actually workers around the world who are working in the care and support sector are going to be recognised for the contribution that they make to all of our societies to care for those most vulnerable particularly.We have all been very clear about how supportive we are of the care workers because of the people whom they are serving—older New Zealanders. We know through the demographics of our country that New Zealand is ageing but what I am hoping is that the Government does the next step and actually progressively increases the wages of this sector so that they do not continue to be the minimally paid workers in New Zealand. The value that we place on those workers is actually the value that we place on older New Zealanders. I think that is the challenge not only for this Government but actually for Parliament in the future.So I see this as the beginning of having appropriate compensation for our workers. What I am hoping is that this is not the end of the story and the Government has not done this just as a settlement because it was taken to court but that actually it takes this sector seriously and it remunerates this sector appropriately and that we value its contribution to New Zealand. The way that we value it is by ensuring these workers are paid sufficiently. Kia ora.