Twyford Phil: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 22 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:179. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū):This is my first call in the 51st Parliament and I want to start with a couple of points. First I want to congratulate you Mr Chairman on your appointment as Deputy Speaker and I want to thank the good people of the Te Atatū electorate for electing me to do this job for another 3 years. I particularly want to thank my hard-working campaign team for all the work they did in getting the vote out.We have seen a branding exercise over the last few weeks as there has been a lot of very soothing talk about child poverty and housing affordability. But let us look at what the National members are doing not what they are saying. What are they doing? Well they are talking about fixing child poverty and making more affordable housing. They are taking us off to war in the Middle East. They are setting out to privatise $5 billion worth of State houses. And in this bill they are setting out to weaken the position of workers in this country to take away their rights.I want to talk about the duty to conclude provision and clauses 7 to 9 in Part 1. The duty to conclude is an obligation and a duty of decency. What it requires is that both parties have a commitment to collective bargaining; they are not allowed to just walk away from the bargaining table. What this bill does is it strips out that decent civilising influence of the duty to conclude and it replaces it with the law of the jungle. This bill the Employment Relations Amendment Bill may as well be called the “Ports of Auckland Bill” because this bill is dedicated to the Ports of Auckland. In fact the former Minister of Labour Simon Bridges pretty much put that on the public record when he said that this bill was a direct response to the Ports of Auckland dispute.I want to say a few things about the Ports of Auckland dispute. I am an Aucklander and I objected to an organisation owned by the ratepayers of Auckland behaving in the most despicable way to its employees. This bill sends a signal to employers like the Ports of Auckland. It says: “The gloves are off. Knock yourself out. It’s all on. You can smash the union. You can casualise the workers. You can drive down your labour costs and boys this is how you’re gonna do it.” That is what clauses 7 to 9 in this bill are all about.In March 2012 the Ports of Auckland and the Maritime Union of New Zealand found themselves in a dispute. The union was seeking to place some restrictions on the ability of the company to contract out its workforce. In March 2012 the Ports of Auckland announced that it was going to contract out all stevedoring work on the Auckland wharves and make all of its workers redundant. It then began to enter into negotiations with a number of stevedoring companies including overseas companies to bring in strikebreakers en masse on to the Auckland wharves to smash the Maritime Union of New Zealand. The union went on strike and the Employment Court ruled that the port company had acted in breach of good faith. It said that you cannot simply contract out your workforce in the middle of bargaining and effectively walk away from collective bargaining like that. The port company was ultimately fined $40000 for employing mass strikebreakers to come in to destroy and to take away the jobs of the members of the Maritime Union of New Zealand—the jobs of good hard-working New Zealanders.I want to say this: when we are talking about decency in the workplace let us remember how the Ports of Auckland behaved during this dispute. There is a guy called Cecil Walker who was employed by the Ports of Auckland. A couple of years before the dispute happened Cecil Walker’s wife died of cancer. He had two young kids whom he was supporting on his own. He was caught up in the middle of the dispute. He committed the sin of talking publicly about the effect of the port company’s actions in sacking its workers and bringing in strikebreakers. He committed the crime of talking in the media about how that affected him as a worker. So what did the Ports of Auckland do? It rifled through his personnel files in the human resources office and it leaked Cecil Walker’s personal information to Whale Oil the National Party’s paid attack dog. So Cameron Slater on behalf of the Ports of Auckland—a paid attack dog—launched organised character assassination against Cecil Walker.That shows what some employers will do when the leash is off. The Ports of Auckland thought this was its big opportunity to smash the union to end the collective contract and it walked away from it just as this bill will allow it to do once it is passed. But the decency of the current legislation with its duty to conclude backed up by the Employment Court brought the Ports of Auckland back to the negotiating table. The effect of that dispute—bringing in new workers on lower wages and setting up their own union to compete with the Maritime Union—was to weaken the terms and conditions of those employees. That is what this legislation is designed to do. You mark my words when this bill is passed it will send a signal to the worst employers in this country and invite them to smash the union to drive down the terms and conditions and to lower wage costs. This is not a good bill. It is not a sensible or pragmatic bill as the Minister said it was in his opening contribution. This bill is all about stripping out the decency from our employment laws.We have seen a series of disputes under this National Government. The Government first came for the actors with The Hobbit dispute. It took a whole group of workers in New Zealand and stripped them of their employment rights and their ability to negotiate a collective agreement. Then the Government came for the meatworkers and we saw the AFFCO meatworkers dispute. Just as this legislation will allow bad employers like the Ports of Auckland to smash the union and drive down conditions it will be a green light to employers like Talley’s with its efforts to smash the meatworkers union in 2012.This is bad law. It does nothing as Denise Roche said to address the productivity challenges that we have as a country to lift skills or to lift productivity through smart management and working with the workforce to raise productivity and to make things that the world wants to buy from our country. It reverts to a 19th century mind-set of industrial relations. It is all about driving down labour costs. That is what this National Government is all about when it reverts to type. It was elected in 2008 on a campaign about how our wages were lower than Australia’s. Why are our wages lower than Australia’s? They are lower because in this country successive National Governments have smashed the unions and weakened the power of New Zealand workers to collectively negotiate to get a fair share of the wealth they produce. This bill is just another chapter in that series.