Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeEmployment Standards Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9450. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Employment Standards Legislation BillIn CommitteePart 1 Amendments to Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act 1987The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): We first turn to the Employment Standards Legislation Bill and the question is that Part 1 stand part. This is debate on clauses 3 to 81 and schedules 1 and 2.SUE MORONEY (Labour): Today is International Women’s Day and so it seems right and proper that we are here debating some positive moves on paid parental leave. We are doing that in Part 1 of this bill so I think that is very appropriate. Paid parental leave has been a bit like that in this House. It seems that every day that we are debating this in the House—whether the Government is for it or against it; it seems to flip-flop around a bit on it—seems to be on a day that is incredibly important to the issue that we are debating and today International Women’s Day is no different.For my initial contribution on this bill I would like to focus on replaced section 71DA. It is an amendment in clause 56 of this bill and it is something that I feel very proud to have had a part in bringing about because this amendment will make a big difference to many many families actually in New Zealand—the families whose baby has been born pre-term a prematurely born baby. What the Labour Party has been able to do is to drive a position where the whole Parliament is about to actually extend paid parental leave—give additional paid parental leave—to exactly those families.I particularly want to pay my respects to a woman by the name of Donnelle Belanger-Taylor because I actually think that if there is one person who is responsible for this—and I know the Government is going to try to lay claim to it and say that it is its idea and the ACT Party will say it was its idea but the parliamentary record will show that it was actually a Labour Party amendment that was the first idea around getting additional paid parental leave for families in this situation. So I talk about Donnelle Belanger-Taylor because she is a woman who came and gave a submission to a select committee which first put this issue on the table. I think this is a great story to be told because this is a story of how participating in democracy by making a submission to a select committee can make a big difference. And it can make a big difference to a whole range of families.So in this instance the simple submission that Donnelle Belanger-Taylor came along and gave to a select committee about the experience that she had as a mother of twins has ended up bringing about this change. She told her story. She talked about how traumatic it was and how difficult it was for her to be back in paid employment when her twins were 5 months old. The problem that it created for her was so big that she resigned from her job because she could not make it work. If she was not up feeding one twin or the other throughout the night—she was not getting much sleep then she was trying to go to work the next day dropping the twins off at early childhood education going back on two or three occasions throughout the day to feed them and then going home on public transport and doing it all over again 5 days a week. She simply found that she could not continue to do it and so she resigned from her job.She was back before the select committee when her twins were 5 years of age to tell us that she had still not made her way back into paid employment. She had lost her connection with her employment at that point in time because it was just too hard. This caused me to think about not only the plight of families where there is the joy of a multiple birth but the plight of families where there is a prematurely born baby or a baby born with disabilities. There is a need to have additional paid parental leave so that the bonding and attachment can be formed so that families under more pressure are able to actually sustain that and able to focus on developing that bonding and attachment with their babies. So that was the beginning of the story that brings about replaced section 71DA in Part 1.What happened next I think is pretty instructive about our parliamentary environment because I proposed an amendment along those lines to a bill I had before this Parliament in an effort to secure the Government’s support for that measure. Actually it was not much more than 12 months ago that I proposed that amendment—probably about 14 months ago. What did the Government do then? It voted against it—it voted against it just 14 months ago. And not only did it vote against this particular measure just 14 months ago but it also made sure that the amendment could not pass.What I did was I went to secure the vote of as many MPs as I could to get that amendment through for those families and I was one vote short. I knew that I could not look those families in the eye and say that I had done everything possible to get their needs addressed if I did not go and look at every MP and ask for their vote. That meant that I ended up in the office of David Seymour asking for his support. I want to say that in an MMP environment was this not a lesson? Actually David Seymour said “Yeah that’s an entirely reasonable thing to think about and to support.” and he said that he would support it. So suddenly that amendment had the numbers in the House 14 months ago to go through.So the truth is that if the National Government had not meddled and got in the way this provision could have been in 14 months ago and the prematurely born babies and their families for the last 14 months could have had exactly this provision in place. But the National Government played politics. It played politics instead and so here we are today with all those families in the interim period missing out on this provision.What is the provision? The provision is that if a baby is born before 37 weeks’ gestation—that is the medically accepted definition of full term; so a baby is full term if it is born at 37 weeks of gestation or beyond—they are technically pre-term. What this part of the bill does is it says that for every week that that baby is born prematurely the parents of that baby will be able to have an additional week of paid parental leave. And that is going to be a big relief for those families.Think about being in the situation of having sometimes surprisingly a baby born early. Sometimes people know their baby is coming early but often they do not and it just happens. Suddenly you have finished work when you did not expect to suddenly you have a baby earlier than you expected to and suddenly and quite frequently the prematurely born baby is in hospital for a prolonged period of time. Often the parent has to take time off work from that point onwards even though their baby may not come out of hospital for 3 or 4 weeks.What happens quite frequently is that under the provisions that we have currently in this country those families are forced to go back into paid employment before their baby is really at the age of 4 or 5 months with where the paid parental leave provisions are now. These are the babies that probably need a lot of support. They need that extra bonding time and certainly their families need additional time to prepare because in many instances they have not been prepared for this early birth and in many instances there are complications that come with the fact that this child has been born early.So it is great to see on International Women’s Day that this going to be addressed.In fact it will come into effect on 1 April. Should this bill pass through all its stages this week this provision will come in from 1 April this year.I am very proud of the role that Labour has played in making this happen because there is no doubt that this would not have happened if it was not for the Labour Party pushing this agenda of extending paid parental leave. In this instance it was joined by and informed by a fantastic young mum by the name of Donnelle Belanger-Taylor who came along to have her say in our parliamentary process and who has changed and improved the lives of thousands of New Zealand children as a result. It is a great celebration on International Women’s Day to think about how one woman made such a difference for children throughout this country and I really want to celebrate that.But the downside of this is that if it was not for the politics being played by National over paid parental leave and over families and the support they need for goodness’ sake then we would have had this measure a good 14 months ago. It is very sad for those families and there are many of them who have had prematurely born babies in the meantime.JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): It is a pleasure to follow on from Sue Moroney and her contribution on this bill because I think it is widely acknowledged that the huge amount of debate and discussion on paid parental leave that we are rightly having in this Parliament has in a large part been driven by Sue Moroney and the Labour Party which has supported her in that campaign. Even though we have been unable to reach consensus on elements of paid parental leave—most notably the Labour Party still believes obviously that 26 weeks is ideal. Actually to a certain extent I believe that National probably agrees that it is ideal—probably; maybe I am being a touch generous—but it has continued to argue that in its mind the cost-benefit analysis does not add up. Well that is where we have a definite difference in opinion.On this side of theHouse we believe that it is one of those investing-to-save things when it comes to investing in mums and babies and that we all benefit from that investment as a society. So as much as we are very pleased to see some of these amendments today I think it is still important to use the opportunity to say look we would have been happy if Part 1 had an extension of time and if we were at that ultimate ideal of 26 weeks because it is what the international evidence and advice suggests to us that we should be pursuing. As a party—Sue Moroney: And we have an amendment that does exactly that.JACINDA ARDERN: And of course because we fundamentally believe in that we will still be pushing amendments that make that point—you never know perhaps David Seymour might like to support that again—and perhaps also amendments on multiple births as well which is an issue that we still have concerns around.This is the point where I always pay tribute to my nana who had not just one multiple birth but two multiple births within a period of 4 years. I challenge anyone not to grimace at the idea of having four children of that age—two multiple births—and to keep your sanity at the same time. So there are obvious reasons why we continue to push. Although we have acknowledged again the need for support for those pre-term babies that is where we would like to see those extra provisions go in terms of 26 weeks as well.I want to come to some of the amendments. I am not a member of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee but in reading some of the amendments that it has made you can tell that a lot of good work has been done by this select committee. There was a huge number of submissions—12260 submissions—on this bill. A number of those of course would have related to the zero-hour contract elements of the bill which we will come to but Part 1 does not cover that. Part 1 is focused on parental leave and payment entitlements. You can see by that work that there has been thorough consideration.I want to come first of all to clause 16 in Part 1 where the select committee has considered the fact that this bill broadens out eligibility to include the term “primary carer”. Of course before this the test under the law has had some constraints in terms of who is able to access parental leave provisions—biological mothers spouses partners and formal adoptive parents. But the term “primary carer” does broaden the eligibility to individuals who assume primary non-temporary responsibility for raising a child. I think we have to acknowledge that in New Zealand now in our modern family structures we do often have a range of arrangements when it comes to the care of a child and we do need to make sure that those who are in that primary care role are able to access paid parental leave provisions. I can think of some constituency cases where children have been whāngai-ed. It may not have been a formal arrangement but it makes sense for that individual for instance to be eligible for these provisions.In fact the research now tells us that although biological parents have a significant role—obviously and by default—actually the most important thing for a newborn is the ability to form a bond with a consistent primary carer in their life and the label of that carer is not the relevant part in terms of the relationship that that child is able to form with that primary carer. So I do think that the select committee was right to broaden out that term. We would not want to exclude individuals but we have to make sure that we are careful that it does not become so broad that we are including people who are for instance home-care providers. For instance the PORSE Networks of this world would not want to be eligible in that regard. So I think probably making sure that that is not the case is certainly advisable. It is those who have that permanent carer role.I want to come to the additional entitlement for primary carers of pre-term babies. Of course as Sue Moroney has already laid out the additional leave payment entitlement for primary carers of premature babies born before the end of the 36th week of gestation is a welcome amendment to this bill for all of the reasons that she outlined. Of course that was at the point where we realised we were not going to achieve 26 weeks. At that point it was about trying to have the maximum effect for those who needed it most. So it really was the politics of Opposition—recognising that there was a difference that could still be made for those who really needed it even if we were not going to reach our goal.Just I think for the sake of clarity it is worth pointing out the way that the select committee determined that entitlement that should be accessed which is set out in new section 71DA in clause 56 and then consequential amendments. The way that that is structured will “allow primary carers one week of pre-term baby payment for each week that their child was born prematurely (to a maximum of 13 weeks). The payment would end when the primary carer returned to work or at the end of the week that would have been the 36th week of gestation (whichever comes first).”I think it is really important to note that a parent who has a premature baby is much more likely of course to experience longer periods with that child in hospital. I had a friend not that long ago who experienced that exact situation and the absolute chaos that then ensued for that family—it was extraordinarily difficult to balance both caring and being present for that baby while it was in hospital with care arrangements for the remainder of the family who were at home. Under usual terms that would eat into the ability of that parent to then have that longer period post-birth with the usual paid parental leave provisions.This is a practical measure that can be taken to assist those families who are not experiencing the same start in life for their family and their new baby as those that are going full term. It acknowledges that those babies are at greater risk and that there is that additional pressure for those families. So I think it is an excellent amendment that we are seeing and once again I pay tribute to Sue Moroney in particular and acknowledge that the role of MMP sometimes—well not sometimes; it should be all the time in this House. It is the ability of individual smaller parties to recognise when there is something—regardless of the coalition or relationship they might have with the governing party—that deserves support on the merits of amendments that are put forward in this House regardless of which party produces them.It would have been helpful if that could have just been done at the time that the bill came forward in the name of the member that it came forward with. Putting those politics aside if that individual member thinks that it is a good idea it should be backed. Putting that aside we are now in a situation where we have the ability to support that collectively. I would not want to add up the number of families who have missed out because of that little bit of politics though because ultimately there will be a number who will not receive the assistance that this bill offers them because a party who has been named chose not to support it at the time that it came up but to wait. So that is a shame.But ultimately we celebrate the progress that has been made whilst continuing to advocate for what the international evidence supports—that is 26 weeks for babies. Twenty-six weeks for babies because they are the ultimate ones who will benefit from the ability of that primary carer to be there with that child. Ultimately we alwayssupport the idea of that being mum of course for breastfeeding reasons. That is why we have always pushed for 26 weeks but we acknowledge the range of circumstances that come into play such as whāngai adoption. So we are very supportive of those amendments.DENISE ROCHE (Green): It is a great delight to stand and take a call on Part 1 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill the part that deals with paid parental leave on this International Women’s Day. I just also want to note that it seems incredibly appropriate that we are marking International Women’s Day with hopefully getting closer to the passage of this parental leave extension.The Green Party members are supportive of the provisions in this bill dealing with paid parental leave. We note that it increases paid parental leave to 18 weeks. Although our policy is to extend paid parental leave to 13 months we note that this is a step in the right direction and we are fully supportive of the 26 for Babies campaign that has arisen from subsequent members’ bills in the name of Sue Moroney. I want to pay tribute to Ms Moroney for raising the whole issue of parental leave in this House. I believe as do others in the House that it was her work with this member’s bill that meant that we have had a shift in the number of weeks that families are entitled to take with the birth of a newborn.I also want to acknowledge that it was her pragmatic approach to attempting to get her last member’s bill through the House that meant that she brought back to the House an amended bill that was to extend paid parental leave to families where there had been a multiple birth or a birth of a child with disabilities or a pre-term baby. It is great that the House has picked up the provisions around extending paid parental leave beyond the 18 weeks to those families where a pre-term birth has occurred and we support that totally. I will just put on record what that means. It means that if a family has an unexpected birth before 36 weeks’ gestation they can access a week for every week they are pre-term from then up to I think in total 13 weeks. It takes it to a total of 31 weeks if you include the 18 weeks’ paid parental leave.We are totally supportive of that but we are concerned that those who do have greater needs like families with multiple births and like families with babies born with disabilities are left out of this. So we hope that this will be addressed by the member’s bill that Sue Moroney is dealing with at the moment.We have had some concerns about the provisions in the Employment Standards Legislation Bill that were not necessarily part of the submission process—in fact I do not think anybody actually submitted on it in any great way. We are concerned about the whole area of keeping-in-touch hours. I do not really have a clear understanding of where that came from except that it was raised as a good idea. The concern we have is essentially that with those keeping-in-touch hours there could be a feeling of coercion on the part of the parent who is taking leave to actually come back to work when they do not want to.We acknowledge that the keeping-in-touch hours are just 40 hours that a parent can elect to go to work and that will not be taken off their leave provisions. However we are concerned that there may be coercion or a feeling of duty that compels a woman—particularly a woman—to go back to work. I know from my own experience of taking paid parental leave—way back in the day when it was quite an unusual thing to have—that you do feel there is a real necessity not only to stay in touch but also to make sure that your bosses do not forget you. I hope that things have changed in the 20 years since I took parental leave but sadly I am not sure that they have.We support the parental leave provisions in the bill. We absolutely support the fact that they have been extended to casual and seasonal workers as eligible employees as we believe that paid parental leave is actually a right that all families should be able to access not just those who seem to be in permanent paid work. I guess we will get on to hours of work in the next part of the bill. So we absolutely support that.We would actually support increasing paid parental leave beyond 26 weeks to 13 months. The reason for that is not only about the establishment of a bonded family and/or breastfeeding for the first 6 months but it also ensures that women are in a position to feel that they are able to take the proper amount of time off without stress and then be able to go back to work. Currently New Zealand is 24th out of the 25 OECD countries in terms of the paid parental leave provisions that we have. I believe that we should be investing in families. And if we want to compete internationally for a skilled workforce then we should be ensuring that we have provisions that encourage women to continue working and that protect their employment while they are on leave for an extended amount of time.I will leave my comments to basically this part of this bill at this stage. I just want to reiterate that although we support this we do have concerns about the keeping-in-touch hours. We can see how they could work in practice and positively in some cases but we are also concerned that there could be an element of coercion involved and people feeling like they have to stay in touch.All in all this is a step forward and we will of course support it. We wish it would go further and hopefully we will be back here soon—preferably before the next International Women’s Day—to actually achieve further extensions to paid parental leave.CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to take a call in the Committee of the whole House on the Employment Standards Legislation Bill talking about Part 1 and specifically the paid parental leave aspect. Look I was not here last week when we had the second reading but I did watch with great intent the speeches in the House that day and saw the solidarity that I thought that all parties had with regard to certain sections of this bill—namely Part 1 to do with that paid parental leave.I do not think there is a single person in this Chamber or around New Zealand who would not like to see this go through the House so New Zealand First does support Part 1 with the extension of paid parental leave from 16 weeks to 18 weeks. I think also around this country we would like to see a change in the breakdown and the disconnect that has been slowly coming into families because of families being forced back to work early and because of people needing to get themselves employed—gainfully obviously—and working to get some money in for their families. We would love to see them spend more time bonding and connecting with their family which this bill does go towards doing. I do not think it goes quite far enough but it is a step in the right direction and New Zealand First certainly supports that.There are a number of things in Part 1 that I think are also very commendable. Despite the fact that there is a lot of support in what has been said already I believe and New Zealand First believes that the keeping-in-touch hours is a fantastic methodology to enable career mums or dads or primary caregivers to ensure that they can fulfil the requirements in their roles whether they be professional or otherwise. It is not an onerous amount of time for a family—we are talking about 40 hours spread out over that 18-week period—and for those premature babies the keeping-in-touch hours are unavailable after the 28 days or the first month of that baby being born. So this bill actually enables the connection between the mother or the primary caregiver and her child which is absolutely essential. Certainly I just go back to saying that we need to be doing more to ensure that one income is enough to sustain a family so that we do not have this disconnect and this breakdown through society that is endemic and is the start of a pandemic if we do not address that issue but I digress.The second part which I think is also very good is the clarity and the discretion that is given around the definition of “primary carer”. This I think has tidied up some areas that have been a little bit ambiguous. It is allowing the parent whether it be the birth mother or father or whether it be a nominated person to be the primary caregiver for that child. I think it just gives some freedom for some of the different family nucleuses if you like that do not have the standard situation of what we would consider to be a normal family model. So giving clarity to “primary carer” here certainly does tidy that up and it gives some determination around it.The introduction of the premature baby allowance is I think a great step in the right direction. It is acknowledging the fact that the parents are under some stress when it comes to babies who come early unexpectedly and that some changes need to be made in their everyday lives to adjust for this baby who has popped out and said: “Hello I’m ready.” So to enable those parents to be given the pre-term baby payments as well as allowing them to spend some more time at home without that encroaching on to that 18-week paid parental leave is I think a very very good thing in this bill as well.The paid parental leave is great when it comes to including seasonal and casual workers. There is a need for casual employment agreements—and we are going to get to that as we get to Part 2 and Part 3. We have certainly got some Supplementary Order Papers and some amendments to put forward and we hope that they get supported. We would hope that we can get this bill 100 percent supported by New Zealand First and as it progresses through the Committee of the whole House stage we will certainly be having some discussions about that.I now get to an area that I have some concerns about. We are talking about clause 34 which inserts new Part 3A in the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act which is about when it comes to negotiated carer leave. This is a final point that I am going to make with regard to primary carer leave and negotiated carer leave. When it comes to new section 30E “Grounds for refusal of request by employer” it sort of jumps out at me. It says here that “(1) An employer may refuse a request for negotiated carer leave only if the employer determines that the request cannot be accommodated on 1 or more of the grounds specified in subsection (2).” and the list in subsection (2) is: “(a) inability to reorganise work among existing staff: (b) inability to recruit additional staff: (c) detrimental impact on quality: (d) detrimental impact on performance: (e) planned structural changes: (f) burden of additional costs: (g) detrimental effect on ability to meet customer demand.”I think that would just about cover every single excuse that an employer could give to not allow the negotiated carer leave to take place. You have pretty much written a piece of legislation here it has been put in front of us and the employer has been given every single opportunity to say: “I’m sorry that leave is not going to be given.” I think that needs to be looked at.I look forward to taking further calls as the debate in the Committee of the whole House goes forward. New Zealand First does support the paid parental leave aspects in Part 1. Thank you.STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): It is a pleasure to stand and talk about this bill and I have not said that recently for a number of bills that have gone through this House because I think this bill makes a real difference to a number of people in society who need a little bit of a help up every now and again—not a handout but a help up. I take my hat off to Sue Moroney because she has championed this tirelessly against the odds and we are nearly there. We are not quite where we need to be at 26 hours.Hon Members: Weeks.STUART NASH: Sorry—26 weeks. We are not even close to where they are in Germany which has 156 weeks but we are slowly slowly getting there.One of the things I do like about the bill is the meaning of “primary carer”. I think well gone are the days now when the primary carer was thought of as the mother. It was the mother’s responsibility to do this that and everything else and the father did whatever fathers do like go out to work—that is an outdated model of my parents’ generation. I think now in this day and age when men and women are treated equally and there are a number of men and a number of women who play a very important role in a child’s upbringing it should not be primarily left to the mother. It has to be a discussion that is had within the family and whatever decision the family makes it is good to see that it is respected by law.The other thing I also like about this bill is it is not talking just about the mother and the mother’s partner or the mother’s spouse. Again we are talking about the 21st century reality where often aunties take the role of primary carer or grandparents and so they are also entitled to the leave under this bill which I think is good to see actually—it is good to see.I would like to talk about the keeping-in-touch days. The one thing I have just a slight concern about—I mean I understand it but I always have a slight concern and I will raise it here just as a point. In clause 55 subsection (2) of new section 71CE “Keeping-in-touch days” says: “An employee may perform 1 or more hours of paid work for his or her employer on a keeping-in-touch day …” if there is an agreement between the employee and the employer. What I would be loath to see is any pressure being put on an employee by an employer because it says in legislation that this is allowed to happen. I know there is no such word as “must” or anything like that; it is all about “may” and what is possible. In one respect it is good to cover off these situations in a bill to make sure there is no ambiguity—i.e. if a primary carer does go back to work for 1 day or a week or something like this then that does provide ambiguity if it is not dealt with in the bill—but conversely what it can do is it can set an expectation that an employee may feel pressured to have to meet.I just want to put that out there but again I think it is good to clarify this because it does deal with 21st century reality. I know that when my wife had my last two children she found this quite frustrating because although she obviously loved the children to death there were times when she did want to keep in touch but under the previous terms and conditions there was a lot of ambiguity that made it difficult to understand. I am pleased that that is there but I just do signal that—there is no doubt about that.Another thing that I am pleased to see—this is clause 68 new section 71N “Annual adjustment of parental leave payment rates”. What it does—which again is very important—is it outlines what will happen in terms of rate movements. What it says is that at 1 July—well there will be a percentage movement on which an adjustment is based. I quote from section 71N(2)(a): “the percentage movement on which the adjustment is based must be the annual percentage movement in the February average ordinary time weekly earnings (employees) immediately before the 1 July date …” butthe thing I do really like about this is that paragraph (b) says: “if … there is a downward percentage movement in average ordinary time weekly earnings … [then] no adjustment takes effect …”.In essence what it is saying is that if for some unknown reason the average employee earnings drop then we will not see a corresponding drop in the rates that caregivers on the 18 weeks’ leave will receive. I think that is really important because when you are planning to have a baby as many of us with families know it is quite an exhaustive process. It is not just about what we are going to do who is going to look after it; it is also about trying to budget. This is why I think this clause is most important. Thank you.POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): I want to concentrate my call on the extension of eligibility around some critical areas: seasonal and casual employees whāngai adoptions Home for Life parents and also extending paid parental leave to parents who have children who are born pre-term. On that note I would just like to welcome the newest member of our extended whānau Baden Pekera who was born about 4 weeks ago at the tender gestation of about 35 weeks. I understand from mum that he is just about due to go home any day now.I bring Baden into the conversation because had this bill been passed earlier his mum Phoebe would have been able to take advantage of the fact that he was born pre-term and have an extension of paid parental leave for the weeks that he was pre-term. He was around 5 weeks pre-term so his mum would have had access to 5 weeks on top of the increased eligibility to 18 weeks.I think that is an important thing to talk about. It is very stressful giving birth in any situation. Having a baby is a big deal but when baby is not quite through all of the cooking that is required it can—Jacinda Ardern: Not quite baked.POTO WILLIAMS: Yes not quite done—a little under-baked. It is quite a stressful time for parents and for mums particularly—and to be able to have that extra support and to know that you can support your child your baby through to the period of time when they are ready to go home.I talk about my own experiences many many many years ago when my own daughter was born 7 weeks early. The stress that is placed upon new parents to support pre-term babies is quite significant. You are often very vigilant around being there because baby will be in hospital for some period of time until their bodies are developed enough to be able to cope with being at home full time without the support of medical staff and nurses. So it is quite a stressful time for parents.I know that in my own experience being mindful of my daughter being so pre-term that she had not developed the ability to suckle we were tube-feeding her for a period of weeks. I remember getting the call at 11 or 11.25 one night after I had gone home after a day at the hospital with her to say that the reflex had come on. So I dashed into hospital—I can see you nodding Dr Reti; you know what I am saying—to take advantage of the fact that she had reached a developmental milestone. That is often what happens with pre-term babies. They are not fully able to function completely independently of some intervention so it is really important for parents to have the ability to be there to support their babies until such time as they are well enough to go home and be cared for by mum and dad at home. So I think that is very important.The other aspect I want to talk about is whāngai adoptions. I am pleased to see that they are being recognised because within Māori and Pacific families they are a very normal way of ensuring that children have the opportunity to be brought up by people who may not have the ability to conceive children on their own. So it really provides that every child has a parent who is appropriate and can take over the care of those children.Within my own family there are many many occasions where whāngai has been used to support children who may have parents who are unable to care for their children or who may actually have a lot of children and want to just share the love a little bit. It is not unusual in Pacific families particularly for parents to have children specifically to provide for a childless couple.I know of one case in particular where a friend of mine had been in contact with a couple who had a young child. They were having some difficulty in raising the child. There were some external issues placing some pressure on the children. I remember her coming to work on a Monday morning and saying to me: “Yesterday I went to lunch and came home with a baby.” My first reaction was: “What are you doing at work?”. Over a period of time we negotiated how she would be able to take some time out to bond with this child. These are not unusual situations and it is good to see that Parliament has recognised these unusual perhaps ways of supporting families through whāngai adoptions. I am very pleased to see that as part of this bill.I just want to touch on in the rest of my call some of the issues that have been raised around keeping-in-touch hours. I completely concur with the concerns that have been raised. It is and can be a very very useful mechanism for working mums who have established careers to have an opportunity to maintain contact not only with the workplace but with any new workforce development or training or professional development that is going on and to maintain contact with new ways of working new technologies and new people even who may be starting on a team. So I think it is an important aspect.I do also mirror the concerns about who should determine whether a new parent should actually have the keeping-in-touch hours. There has been some concern raised about the issue that it is done by negotiation between employer and employee. But I am of the mind that really it should be at the choice of the employee if they wish to do that because there may be some things that happen within that paid parental leave time that may mean that they are unable to take advantage of the opportunities of these keeping-in-touch hours.So I am concerned around this particular aspect that we do not lose sight of the fact that paid parental leave is primarily around supporting parents to be at home to care for their children and that must be the prime reason that they are taking the leave. Any perceived pressure that may be applied by employers needs to be taken out of the equation by ensuring that the employee is able to direct that completely themselves.Just in saying that there are very useful situations when keeping-in-touch hours can be used and can be prescribed and I think that it is a useful mechanism to ensure that when that parent is ready to go back to the workplace they are as ready to pick up their work as they can be. Thank you.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): It is a pleasure to speak in favour of Part 1 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill and also to note my support for the amendment in the name of Sue Moroney which I am sure she is looking forward to addressing with a call shortly.I see these changes to our paid parental leave scheme as being the natural evolution of something that was initially 15 years ago—back in 2001 when it was first being debated by this House—a big bold and some would say scary new programme that did not have the universal support that it enjoys in the House now. When one is introducing big bold audacious new programmes such as this in the way that the Labour Government was back in 2001 one has to start somewhere and one has to start with a programme that is going to garner the maximum possible support. I note that back in 2001 it was not just Labour and the Alliance that voted in favour of paid parental leave; it was also the Green Party and the New Zealand First Party. It is pleasing to see that those parties have been consistent in their support for paid parental leave over the years.Naturally these programmes do evolve. Labour extended the availability of parental leave to 14 weeks. We extended it to self-employed people. We felt over the last few years that it really is time to extend the provision of paid parental leave out to 26 weeks. That is what the science tells us we should be aiming for at this stage and it allows for greater opportunities for the child and their parent who is usually mum but often dad or—as we are extending it in this legislation—other primary caregivers as well. That is important and the science tells us we should be doing this so it is pleasing that the Government has seen fit to do this. The other broad comment I would make is that the reason we are doing this now—and other members have noted this—is the very effective campaigning that has been carried out by the 26 for Babies campaign that has been carried out by the Labour Party and that has been carried out by Sue Moroney in making sure that paid parental leave remains on the agenda and that the need to extend both its eligibility and the period of time for which people can get paid parental leave remains on the agenda.This bill does a number of things. One thing that has not been addressed too much in the debate so far is that it extends the entitlement to paid parental leave to workers who are in more precarious employment arrangements such as casual agreements and seasonal agreements. That is important and we on this side of the Chamberabsolutely support that—we agree. That was a natural evolution that was probably always going to happen and it is about time that it did happen.It is particularly important that it happens in the context of what is happening in our labour market right now. Over 25 percent of the new jobs created since 2009 are in fact temporary work. They are casual they are part-time or they are zero-hour contracts—and we will get to that later on this evening—but they are not permanent part-time jobs. So as more and more of our workforce finds itself in that type of precarious work we have to ensure that these types of entitlements are extended to that workforce or otherwise what actually happens is we get a shrinking number of people who are entitled to paid parental leave and to other minimum entitlements in our employment law if we provide those entitlements only to people who are in that traditional form—that very good form—of work which is the permanent part-time role as opposed to the more temporary and more precarious types of work. I think it is important that we make this change now as we are seeing more and more people moving into those types of roles.Part 1 of the bill does also allow for more flexibility in the way that paid parental leave is taken—in particular the concept of keeping-in-touch days. I really like this idea. I like the idea that people who are on paid parental leave and who wish to be able to come back into work every now and again to keep in touch to attend training days or just to keep their working brains fresh and maybe even dare I say it have a break from the work that is going on at home because goodness knows I think everybody in the House would agree that actually the work that goes on at home is often harder than the work that goes on in the workplace. I think this is a very good idea. Sue Moroney has an excellent amendment that just tweaks those keeping-in-touch days to make sure that the legislation does not create a loophole and does not create an opportunity to exploit or to put pressure on workers. I think it is a good amendment. That is an excellent idea and is a good way to improve the flexibility of this scheme.We have heard a lot this evening about the extension of paid parental leave to the parents of pre-term babies. Again it is a very very good idea but let it not be forgotten where that idea came from. It came from the fact that Sue Moroney was prepared to do absolutely anything to get this House to support legislation that would improve outcomes for parents and babies. Even when this House was prepared to support 26 weeks for babies but the Government was going to use its veto power on that Sue Moroney said: “Look if we cannot get 26 weeks and if the Government is not prepared to agree to that let’s at least apply that to the parents of pre-term babies.” The Government was not prepared to do it when it was sponsored by a Labour member but it is prepared to do it as a Government bill—so be it. We will support it. We on this side are not quite as churlish as those members on the other sideare. It is a good idea and this Committee should vote for it and it does not matter whose idea it is.This is a good extension of paid parental leave as I said. I personally see it as being nothing more than a natural evolution of this scheme. We have had paid parental leave—it is 15 years since we first started debating the concept of having paid parental leave in New Zealand. It has gone from something that divided this House. It has gone from being something that the National Party and the ACT Party voted against to being something that we are all in agreement about. Sometimes you have got to have Labour and the parties of the left actually being prepared to be progressive prepared to be the ground-breakers on this and prepared to take the slings and arrows that will be hurled in our direction. We know that the conservative parties always catch up on this and now it is great that this House is working in a united fashion to extend these provisions of paid parental leave. There is more work to do. We will get to 26 weeks eventually—not tonight but we will get there eventually—and this is a good step along that path.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I am going to hear Sue Moroney who has got an amendment. I will hear Sue Moroney.SUE MORONEY (Labour): Thank you Mr Chair and in fact I do intend to speak to the two amendments that I have brought forward under Part 1 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. I was hoping and waiting really for the members on the Government side to get up and talk about how important paid parental leave is to them but I think their silence on this shows that what we have been saying on this side of the Chamber is absolutely true—they have been forced down this path. It is not something that they would have naturally come to by themselves without an awful lot of pressure going on.So it is all kudos really to the people who have made submissions the people who have signed petitions and the people of New Zealand who have really got in behind understanding what a wise investment it is in this country’s future if we put a little bit of taxpayer funding into supporting those early months of a baby’s development. New Zealanders absolutely get this in a way that the Government does not really—we get to save money. The rest of us as taxpayers stop spending money on the bad outcomes on the bad stuff—on the children being admitted to hospital unnecessarily on the children going through remedial education processes unnecessarily and on building more and more prisons unnecessarily. We can stop spending money on all that bad stuff if we get this right. The Government is not quite there yet but look it is making a good impression of it.I have two amendments. The first is to do with—the first one I want to address at least—these keeping-in-touch hours. I have got to say that there is a bill in my name that is similar but not the same. Obviously it extends paid parental leave to what it should be—26 weeks—so that is the first difference in it. But the second one is that it introduces a concept like keeping-in-touch hours but it calls it work-contact hours. I have got to say that the title “keeping-in-touch hours” just seems a little icky to me. It just feels—you know going back to work and the touchy-feely thing—a little biticky. But anyway that is what it is called in this bill and the concept I do agree with if not the title that those members have given it.However I think it does need some protections around it. This is the ability for parents—mostly women in fact—to go back to work during the course of their paid parental leave period and to not suffer the consequence that they would today of actually having their paid parental leave payments stopped. That would be the impact if a woman today was on paid parental leave and she went back for let us say a training day. Maybe there is a training course that has become available in her workplace that is a once in a lifetime or a once-a-year opportunity and she does not want to miss out on that and she goes back and she is paid for the time that she is there for that training course which is up to 40 hours under this provision.I want to ensure and the Labour Party wants to ensure that it is at the worker’s request at the employee’s request and at the mother’s request because it is the mother—or the parent who is on paid parental leave—who we believe will make the assessment as to whether it is in her best interests the best interests of her family and the best interests of the child. Because that from the Labour Party’s perspective is the lens through which we see every piece of policy and every piece of legislation: is this in the best interests of the child?We firmly believe that what the bill currently says is that it is just by this mutual agreement between employee and employer. In the real world what we know is that the power imbalance that exists between employee and employer is such that we could see the occasion when this might be forced upon the parent where the parent does not want to go back and do those keeping-in-touch hours but the employer puts a lot of pressure on. Those of us who have been working parents know the guilt that is already associated with being a working parent. It can be very difficult at times. You sometimes feel that you are not doing 100 percent what you need to be doing at home and sometimes you do not feel that you are doing 100 percent what you need to be doing at work.So in this environment with that guilt that already exists we in the Labour Party believe it needs an additional protection. The amendment that we are proposing—and we look forward to other parties supporting this—is not a hard thing to do but it is the right thing to do. It is to ensure that the application for keeping-in-touch hours comes from the parent because we know that they are going to be the person in the best position of the decision making that is going to have the best interests of their child at heart and that is what is of most importance—[Bell rung] Mr Chair.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I am going to call Stuart Nash.STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): Sorry Sue.Sue Moroney: That’s all right. It’s OK. I’ll get another one.STUART NASH: Yes I am sure you will. I would like to reiterate a little bit of what Sue Moroney is talking about—the keeping-in-touch days—because I think that employees need to be very careful about how this is managed. I am talking about new section 71CE in clause 55. It is called “Keeping-in-touch days”. What it actually says is and I am going to quote new subsection 71CE(3) “An employee is treated as having returned to work”—and this is the important bit—“and all parental leave payments received by the employee in respect of a period after the date on which the employee is treated as having returned to work are recoverable … as an overpayment …”. It talks about what constitutes having returned to work. Paragraph (b) of new subsection 71CE(3) talks about if the person on paid parental leave: “performs more than a total of 40 hours of paid work for his or her employer during a period of paid parental leave.”The reason I want to highlight this is where the person on paid parental leave says to their boss: “Look I’m going to be away for 16 weeks and we know this but what I will do is when the baby’s asleep I’m going to check my emails. I’ll just check them once a day so I keep in touch and if anything important comes in then I’ll forward it on. Well I will do the responsible thing.” If a person on paid parental leave checked their emails for just 1 hour every day then after 8 weeks they would have worked more than 40 hours a week probably unbeknownst to that person—because they are trying to do the right thing—and probably unbeknownst to the employer as well. They would come back after 16 weeks and they could well get a knock on the door saying: “I’m sorry. We’ve just checked the records and you have worked more than 40 hours during this period. We note this from the employer’s records and we note from the email transactions. Therefore we see this has occurred.” and the employee now owes 8 weeks’ back-pay.I just want to reiterate that that 40 hours is up if the person on paid parental leave works only 1 hour a day. Even if they decided to work just 4 hours a week—you know which is not much at all—that is 10 weeks. So there is a little bit of a fish-hook in here for those who are conscientious who want to do what is right for the company and want to do what is right for the employer and who say: “Look I am just going to check my email.” So the person on paid parental leave needs to understand that in effect if they take the full 18 weeks which is about 2 hours a week that is all they are allowed to work—2 hours a week. Anyone on paid parental leave does need to be aware of that because if they work over those 40 hours over that 18-week period then they will receive a knock on the door because they will be deemed to have gone back to work.The thing about this is not only will they be required to pay back all the money they have received when they were on paid parental leave but also they will not have been receiving any income when they had believed in their minds that they were on paid parental leave if you know what I mean. I can just see a couple of situations where the potential could be catastrophic to say the least.There is one other thing that I would like to query and I am not too sure why this is here. This is new subsection (6) in section 72B as inserted by clause 76(2). What it actually says—it applies to the armed services—is: “This section applies to a member of the Armed Forces as if the member of the Armed Forces were an employee of the Chief of Defence Force”—yes it makes sense—“except that a member of the Armed Forces may not succeed to the member’s spouse’s or partner’s entitlement to [paid] parental leave.”The way I am reading that—and I may have this wrong because I was not on the select committee—in this case obviously is if a woman gives birth then her partner or her spouse is not allowed to colloquially sub into that. I am not too sure why that exists. I think that maybe if someone is on active duty and they want to get out of active duty then they would make a call on this and that may create problems but I am not too sure whether there are—well I can think of circumstances where that may be the case. The Minister may have something to say on that but it just seems a little strange that the men and women who are actually putting their lives on the line to keep New Zealand safe are not actually entitled to the requirements under this bill.PEENI HENARE (Labour—Tāmaki Makaurau): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. I rise to take this short call during the Committee stage on the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. I am reminded of a great piece of work done throughout the 1980s that led to Pūao-te-ata-tū. I have spoken about it plenty of times in this House. Pūao-te-ata-tū refers to matua whāngai and I think the great thing about some of the amendments that have been made to this particular bill really are in the vein of matua whāngai. However through the wise words of my colleague Jacinda Ardern I do want to put to this Government that well if these kinds of changes can be made around the definition of a “primary caregiver” perhaps adoption laws in this country can be reviewed—looked into—so that perhaps the term “matua whāngai” can apply there around the primary caregiver.But to the bill the meaning of primary carer—and in the Māori and Pacific Island communities that I represent in Tāmaki Makaurau it is well-known that it does take a village to raise a child. In this particular amendment it is fantastic to see that we will be able to stretch what that means out of the realm of the traditional which Mr Nash has spoken about regarding mum and dad. In the nature and the make-up of family today we find in a heck of a lot of Māori families that I speak to and indeed that I belong to that there are step-parents and there are other caregivers in that family—grandparents aunties uncles—who play a pivotal role in raising the children for the future.I will take this opportunity to quote the Rt Hon David Lange and his work—which I am sure Jacinda Ardern is familiar with—around the Before Five policy in which he talked about how improvements in this sector are an investment in the future. That is exactly what this particular piece of legislation is. To that one I want to congratulate and echo the sentiments of my colleagues and congratulate Sue Moroney on the fine piece of work that she has done in advocating for the needs of parents and families.I turn to section 30H in new Part 3A inserted by clause 34 which provides: “(2) The employee may refer the non-compliance with section 30D—(a) directly to mediation;”. This is a new provision in this bill that I think is a step in the right direction. I think it is a good thing. We know just how often and how much the labour inspectors in that particular sector struggle just to make sure that there are a lot of employers out there who do comply with the laws that we set here in Parliament. Although I applaud this step in the right direction to make it possible to go towards direct mediation or to a labour inspector we will be keeping a keen eye on this particular Government and the resources it gives to ensure that it is able to enforce that and that it is able to give the capacity to those labour inspectors to those people and to the arbitration courts and processes so that these provisions can be carried through to the letter of the law as stated in new section 30H.I think it is a good move in so far as that it is not always just about the employee. We are considering the employer here. Quite often there does not need to be the intervention of a labour inspector. Maybe that particular employee and employer feel that they are in a position and in a healthy working relationship where they are able to deal with it themselves. I think that is a positive move in the right direction but I do want to reiterate that we will be keeping a close eye on the capacity issues so that the labour inspectors and—I was about to say the labour department—all of those who are involved in the mediation processes do actually receive the support and the resources from this particular Government to make sure they can do that.Just to close this particular part of my contribution on what will be a long evening I do want to say that although we applaud these particular changes in Part 1 we have said—and we maintain this view—that tinkering around the edges is not going to solve the problem. Although we applaud the move to 18 weeks’ paid parental leave we will be looking at making sure it is extended to 26 weeks when we can. We will be keeping an eye on this Government. Kia ora.Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): I move That the question be now put.CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I am very pleased to take the first of what I am sure will be many calls in this debate on the Employment Standards Legislation Bill and particularly the part that deals with paid parental leave. I want to strongly support all of the comments that have been made so far that support the extension of paid parental leave. I particularly want to turn my attention to the typescript amendments tabled by Sue Moroney that deal with the length of time that paid parental leave is provided for.We in New Zealand as a result of this bill will have 18 weeks of paid parental leave. That puts us on a par with Australia but still well behind many of the countries that we would normally compare ourselves to in terms of social support provision. Many people might look at this and say “Eighteen weeks. Gosh that’s a significant improvement on the 12 weeks that it was when it was introduced.” but it is still a drop in the bucket compared with the historical levels of family support that we used to supply in New Zealand. I think that is one of the things that we often forget—that the welfare system in New Zealand has evolved and changed significantly over quite a period of time. Compared with the level of financial support that families in New Zealand used to get 18 weeks of paid parental leave is not actually that generous. We could provide a heck of a lot more.I support the amendment to change it to 26 weeks. Why 26 weeks? Well let us look at what parents are asking for and let us look at the benefits to the child of extending it to 26 weeks. One of the first things I attended as a member of Parliament relatively early on was a presentation by the Brainwave Trust. I am very interested in the educational implications of paid parental leave. The Brainwave Trust did some fascinating presentations on attachment theory—which I can see Paula Bennett is nodding her head towards me about. One of the things it showed was that if a child develops a positive attachment to a parent or somebody else early on—very early on—and it is a stable attachment then the child’s likelihood of succeeding in education and not ending up in some form of delinquent behaviour later on in life or ending up in prison is significantly increased. It is in those first critical years of a child’s life that the attachment is so vital. They are developing the fastest that they will ever develop their brains are at their most active and that attachment is so vital. So by extending paid parental leave to 6 months—26 weeks—we would really promote that and really foster that.I think there could be no better investment if you consider that in the short term it might cost more money but in the long term it is potentially going to save us a lot of money. It would improve educational outcomes. It would decrease the cost of social services which we spend money on to mop up the failures that we have. Let us prevent the failures in the first place. Extending paid parental leave to 26 weeks just makes financial sense.Then we think about what parents are asking for and what indications there are that parents would like to spend more time with their kids. One of the things that has interested me is the huge growth in early childhood education in the home-based area. What that says to me is that parents are looking for something else other than wanting to put their kids into childcare centres full time. I think one of the drivers behind the growth in home-based early childhood education is that parents would rather be staying at home with the kids themselves but because of the financial decisions they have to make they are not in a position to do so. Extending paid parental leave to 26 weeks would I think help to address some of that.I still think 26 weeks is not long enough. If you look at some of the other countries—I mean let us look at the UK. It is 39 weeks in the UK. Let us go to Germany. It is 156 weeks in Germany. When you think about it we are talking about 18 weeks under this bill and we are talking about a very modest increase under the proposed amendment put forward by Sue Moroney that would extend it to 26 weeks. No it is not going to happen all at once. The amendment staggers that increase. It says that from next year we would move up to 22 weeks’ paid parental leave and then from 2018 we would extend it to 26 weeks. I think that is a very financially responsible decision. There is the fiscal headroom in the Government’s accounts for this if you believe what Bill English says. He has allowed for fiscal headroom for future spending. It could be done within the existing Budget constraints. So there really is not in my view a reason why we could not extend it to 26 weeks’ paid parental leave when we consider the enormous benefits that might come from that. I have yet to meet a family who would not like to spend more time with their kids when they are very young. Why would we not do this?The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Sue Moroney has two amendments. I will hear from Sue Moroney.SUE MORONEY (Labour): I did want to take the opportunity to speak to the second of my amendments which I did not get around to in my last call. It is in fact the amendment that Chris Hipkins has just addressed and he has done so very well.It is the view of the Labour Party that it is financially affordable and in fact a financial necessity for this country to extend paid parental leave to 26 weeks. As Chris Hipkins has pointed out my typescript amendment does not attempt to do it all in one hit but takes a fiscally responsible way of staggering the implementation so that we know that it is affordable.Yes on this side of the House I think we do have agreement that 26 weeks’ paid parental leave is the least that we should be doing. For the Labour Party we do see the sense in extending paid parental leave beyond the 26 weeks but what we know is that 26 weeks is what is affordable right now. We know that. We know that because yes the Prime Minister has confirmed that in Budget 2016 there will be an additional $1.5 billion of new spending. What better provision on which to spend a tiny proportion of that $1.5 billion of new spending—which National has already committed itself to—than getting it right in these early months of a child’s life.You know this is where the Kiwi Dream starts. It starts when these children are born. If we get it right then not only is it the correct thing to do but it is actually the economically smart thing to do: investing in families and taking that financial pressure off those families by allowing them to focus on the needs of baby and not have to think about getting back to work before they are ready to making sure that they do not suffer financial stress as a result of that and making sure that they can focus on building that attachment that the Brainwave Trust has done some excellent work on informing us about.When I had my children there was no availability of paid parental leave. My children are just 18 and 16—that is how recently it is that this country started to understand about the importance of paid parental leave. So it is a relatively new phenomenon for us but we cannot pretend and we cannot un-know what we now know. Back in the day we did not necessarily have the research that told us exactly how important this is but the Government knows because it too has had the presentations from the Brainwave Trust and other very good organisations that have done research in this area that states that the brain development that is occurring in those early months is the most critically important brain development. That is what is going to give that child our fellow citizen the resilience that he or she needs for whatever may come at them in life. That is the way that we make sure that we do not continue to spend money on bad outcomes as we are as a country at the moment.So I want to fully recommend that the amendment in my name that extends paid parental leave in two tranches to 26 weeks be accepted across the board. I hope that the Government will not continue to play political games over paid parental leave and actually does the right thing when it comes to this amendment coming up for voting. It does so in two tranches. It does so by increasing paid parental leave next year on 1 April to 22 weeks and then finally in 2018 to 26 weeks. It is done deliberately that way because we want to ensure that it is affordable for the country. And I take the lead from a country like Ireland because Ireland already has 6 months’ paid parental leave. But you know that country came out of the global financial crisis in much worse shape than New Zealand. What was the first thing it said it wanted to do? It made a commitment to extend paid parental leave to 12 months over the course of the next decade. So that is the sort of thing that progressive countries do.I like to think that New Zealand is progressive although at the moment we sit 26th equal in the OECD when it comes to duration of paid parental leave. That is not acceptable in my view. We can do a lot better than that. And you know for goodness’ sake we have only just caught up with Australia. We used to be ahead of Australia in this field—we used to have 14 weeks’ paid parental leave when it had none. Now we are dragging our heels a couple of years behind them by getting to 18 weeks.I am pleased that this bill does get us to 18 weeks on 1 April. But we can do an awful lot better and we should and we have the opportunity to do that.SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): Thank you very much for the opportunity to rise and take this call on Part 1 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. And it is very much a pleasure because of course this part primarily extends paid parental leave from 16 weeks to 18 weeks in April this year.I understand that the Labour Opposition must beat its drum and say that paid parental leave was its idea and that it is pushing the Government to accept this change but I want to put it on record that there is support on this side of the House for paid parental leave and that when you are in Government you do have to balance competing priorities under different portfolios and you have to be fiscally responsible. The Government has looked at this and in a very considered way decided to extend paid parental leave to 18 weeks and I am sure given the benefits of paid parental leave—it gives more time to mothers and primary carers to bond with baby and it allows time to increase the probability of success in breastfeeding and all of those wonderful things that are associated with raising a child and increasing that bonding process—that it will continue to be on the minds of Government members. But we will look at that in consideration of balancing our competing priorities and will continue to govern this country in a responsible way.I want to turn particularly too to the extension for mothers and primary carers of pre-term babies which is something that is dear to my heart obviously as the mother of two premature children. That extension will be a very good help given the hurried nature of having a premature baby. You are not expecting it of course. It happens all of a sudden and rarely are you prepared for a pre-term baby. In fact I was myself seen as a high-risk fast cooker of babies in my time and so by the time my second came along at 36 weeks I was somewhat more prepared. But it still is a shock even if you are waiting for it and to have that extra financial support will be of great help when you are in places like neonatal units trying to balance getting things ready for when you bring baby home and dealing with the emotional stress of medical conditions or whatever it is that you are dealing with when having a pre-term child.So the extra financial support of an extra week of payment for each week prior to the 37-week gestation mark that the baby is born prematurely is going to be an extreme help for those families who have pre-term babies as well as the extra extension to 18 weeks for those with a more normal birth at post - 37 weeks. It will certainly help families get that extra financial support and help baby during that time.The other thing that I think is fantastic about this part is the keeping-in-touch hours. I am a strong advocate for keeping-in-touch hours—40 hours to allow employees to stay in touch with their work their place of work and their career to keep their hand in while they are on paid parental leave. It really plugs the gap to allow people to come back to work. There has to be mutuality obviously between employer and employee but it allows those primary caregivers to stay in touch with their career and maintain confidence in their role.There are lots of different times that the keeping-in-touch hours would be brought into play—for training extra data entry or handing over a case. In my case in a prior life to being a politician obviously I was a lawyer. Sometimes you do need that ability to go back into work for a short time to hand over a case that may have raised its head and that you had not prepared for prior to leaving to have your baby. And especially in the case of having pre-term babies the—Su’a WILLIAM SIO (Labour—Māngere): I want firstly to congratulate my colleague Sue Moroney on championing this issue because her championing of this issue with the wider support of the New Zealand community has enabled this debate to be here right here and now. It has forced this Government to recognise that there is a need and therefore it was important the work that Sue Moroney did.Yes we applaud the Government and I think many New Zealanders will think “Eighteen weeks OK. We accept that.” but the reality is we do need to look long term and recognise that this is not something to be playing politics with. This is something that is important for our country going forward.I want to refer my comments to clause 4 in Part 1 with regard to the purpose. The amendment that is in this part of the legislation basically just deletes a couple of words and replaces them. I want to say—and I was not part of the discussion—that I think we have missed an opportunity. I do not know whether the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety would agree but I just felt that there should have been a complete purpose clause written in this piece of legislation as to why it is important for this Government and future Governments to entrench paid parental leave.You see most young people today will not know that this is a basic human right. It is an internationally recognised human right. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes reference to the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of workers and families. Subclause (2) of that article says: “Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children whether born in or out of wedlock shall enjoy the same social protection.” So I think there should have been a specific purpose emphasising the reason why this Government has deemed it necessary to have paid parental leave. I think that is something that we probably need to work on because I think many many young people do not yet realise that this is a basic human right for the protection of children and the protection of women as well. I think it is timely that it has been raised on International Women’s Day.I want to refer the Committee to the regulatory impact statement at page 6 where it makes reference to the benefits of why it is important to have paid parental leave. It will “reduce long term fiscal costs (for example costs that may arise from poorer health and social outcomes)”. I will give you an example: 2 weeks ago Caden Wong Singh turned 1 year old. His mother was forced to go back to work—they literally cannot have just one person working to sustain and support their family with rent etc. Caden is my grandson. A couple of weeks ago I saw Caden and he had some sores around his cheek that concerned me. When I asked his mother what had happened it occurred at the day-care centre where Caden was left by the mother who goes to work.I make that point as an example—most mums would want to be able to stay home and take care of their children. It is to the benefit of our country if we have mothers staying home to support the raising of young children for as long as they can. Everybody benefits from it. This is not about how much it is going to cost the country; this is about the benefits that arise if we are able to protect women and protect children long term.Another benefit according to the regulatory impact statement is that it enhances the retention of skills and institutional knowledge if women are protected and know that they can take time off have the time to have their child have the time to recover from giving birth to a child and know with confidence that they can return to the workforce. That does not only benefit women; it benefits the workplace by retaining the skills and institutional knowledge that that business requires. Another benefit that is recognised is reducing recruitment—MEKA WHAITIRI (Labour—Ikaroa-Rāwhiti): Tēnā koe Mr Chairman. Tēnā tātou katoa. It is my pleasure to take a short call on the Employment Standards Legislation Bill and like all speakers we are talking about Part 1 here. We have obviously pushed for more than 18 weeks but here we are passing a piece of legislation that is lifting paid parental leave from 16 to 18 weeks. For many of us in here it is just a commitment that we have to keep pushing for that particular commitment from this Government. I want to draw your attention to the commentary in the report back by the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee where in the introduction it says: “The overarching policy goal is to make workplaces fairer and more productive for both employers and employees.” I would say that there is not anyone in this Committee who does not support workplaces that are fairer and more productive for employees and employers. I guess the question is one of balance.My short contribution on ensuring that we meet this overarching goal is reflected in new section 30B—and if I have got time down to new section 30F—inserted by clause 34 in Part 1. That is where we talk about the mechanics of how an employee or a caregiver goes about applying for the leave the process that they need to adopt the time they need to get their request in and then the role of the employer to either approve it or not approve it and the reasons why an employer will decline. When I read through new section 30B particularly subsection (3)(a) it talks about 3 months prior to the date of delivery. The negotiated carer would require 3 months before the expected due date. Then we go down into subsection (3)(b) where it says that in all other cases it is 14 days prior. Essentially I am flagging that probably we need some more clarification of when the 3 months apply and when the 14 days apply just so that we are very clear as to when things need to be triggered. I will just leave that there. Maybe the Minister can clarify when 3 months apply and when 14 days apply.If I go to new section 30C I look down and it talks about what is required in writing: the employee’s name the date and then a statement in respect of care for the child during the specified period and the period that entitles the negotiated caregiver to parental leave payments. I guess that calls to mind the question of what happens in a shared leave application. This part here I thought would actually talk about potentially the option to have shared leave. It may be somewhere else in the bill but it does not speak volumes in that part.I move to new section 30E and it talks about grounds for refusal and that is where in subsection (2) it specifies all the reasons why an employer can refuse the request for a caregiver to take leave. It is listed there: “(a) inability to reorganise work … (b) inability to recruit additional staff: (c) detrimental impact on quality: (d) detrimental impact on performance: (e) planned structural changes: (f) burden of additional costs: (g) detrimental effect on ability to meet customer demand.” I guess it goes to the point that my colleague Peeni Henare talked about and that is the resource to ensure that these points on which an employer can refuse an application for leave are actually monitored and monitored fairly so that an employer does not invent a reason to inhibit or decline a paid parental leave application. When I look at that the question is who would monitor that and who would ensure that an employee’s request for leave is treated in a fair way.When I go down to new section 30F it talks about the employee not being able to challenge once the employer has made their determination. Again as I stated at the start of my contribution it is ensuring that the workplaces are fair and accountable and that everyone is given a fair go. These clauses particularly throw up a whole lot of questions.Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): I move That the question be now put.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the question be now put.Ayes 63New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 58New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12.Motion agreed to.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 154 in the name of the Hon Michael Woodhouse be agreed to.Amendments agreed to.The question was put that the following amendment in the name of Sue Moroney to clause 55 be agreed to:in new section 71CE(2) replace paragraph (a) with the following new paragraph:the employee has requested to perform paid work on a keeping-in-touch day with the agreement of the employer; and.A party vote was called for on the question That the amendment be agreed to.Ayes 58New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12.Noes 63New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendment not agreed to.The question was put that the following amendments in the name of Sue Moroney to clause 65 be agreed to:add the following new subclauses:(2) In section 7IL replace “18” with “22”.(3) In section 7IL replace “22” with “26”.A party vote was called for on the question That the amendments be agreed to.Ayes 58New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12.Noes 63New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendments not agreed to.Part 1 as amended agreed to.Part 2 Amendments to Employment Relations Act 2000Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): I am pleased to take the first call on Part 2 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. This is the part that among other things goes to the heart of much of the debate that has been going on around this bill pretty much since it was introduced and that is in the matter of zero-hour contracts. I am very pleased and appreciative actually to note that for all the hyperbole around the concerns about the clauses and the various amendments we have actually landed in a place that I think and I hope the majority of the Committee can support.There are a number of people who I think can take credit for that—and I know that there will be a number of people who will claim credit for that but the people whom I want to acknowledge in my first intervention in the Committee stage are actually the officials because they will not say it and they write my speeches and they never mention themselves. It has been a notoriously challenging task to take what we know in principle—and what I think we can all agree on is that the concept of zero hours and those punitive elements of provisions that were creeping into our employment relations landscape should go. The question is what words we use in the legislation to give effect to that that are effective without having unintended consequences and I can tell the Committee and those listening that I have spent countless hours with officials and with others to ensure that we get that right.I acknowledge also the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee as I did in the second reading and others including the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and Mr Lees-Galloway for working towards being as close as we can get to that common goal. I think we will all agree that there were punitive aspects of employment agreements that needed to go. I just want to put on record my thanks to the officials for the work that they have done.One of the difficulties that we did have through this process I think was in coming to a shared understanding about what zero hours actually meant because it has no formal legal definition—it is not set out in any statute. It is a nomenclature that has crept into a lot of Western jurisdictions particularly the United Kingdom and certainly more recently in New Zealand. So I think it is important at least in framing the debate to inform the Committee of what I think we are talking about when we talk about zero hours.I want to acknowledge Dundas Street Employment Lawyers which in my searching on its website came up with the most succinct definition of what I think we were trying to deal with here. I am paraphrasing from its website effectively in having no legal definition but what we tend to talk about is the engagement with an employee without any reciprocal guarantee of work. In many cases those employees are required to be available for work. I will come back to the question of availability soon. But it is the lack of that mutuality of obligation that is the most punitive aspect of zero-hour agreements. It is the quid pro quo that if I do not commit why should the other party?Too many examples were being brought to the attention of unions and MPs where there was no obligation on the employer to commit any number of hours but an expectation that the employee be available for work often to the exclusion of other opportunities to seek work elsewhere. Apart from being pretty poor and stupid this was actually bad for business in my view. These were businesses that had extremely high levels of turnover as a consequence. As one who has had to run an organisation that has quite uncertain throughput and a 24/7 operation I know it is not that easy but it is not rocket science to roster a workforce that has the right mix of full-time part-time and casual staff and other staff who can be available if necessary in an emergency without resorting to these.So it was with that in mind that we came to what I think was a very strong start point with the bill as it was introduced—and even stronger when it came out of the select committee—but there were still concerns and I acknowledge those concerns. For all of the noise around the fact that there were some who claimed that we had not removed zero hours but rather we had entrenched them—for all of that I did not think we were that far away. I do want to acknowledge the Council of Trade Unions and the Labour Party members of the select committee who were prepared to work together to come to an arrangement that I think strengthens the bill even further.I want to come to the issue of availability because Mr Lees-Galloway does have an amendment to the bill that reflects the question of availability and effectively what it does is it says that an agreement should not have an availability provision unless there is a commitment to hours. Just to reframe that the zero-hour agreements have two dimensions: one is the lack of a commitment to hours and the second is the expectation to be available with no compensation. So when the bill came back out of the select committee it had the second part.I would suggest that at least one of the limbs of those two things needs to be fixed in order to get rid of the zero-hour agreement. So for example it is possible to have a casual employment agreement. Regardless of concerns about the casualisation of employment that some hold I still maintain that casual employment agreements have a place in the employment relations landscape. On the other hand it should not be an expectation that someone on a casual hours agreement be waiting by the phone—that is the availability expectation. The bill as it came out of the select committee allowed for there to be no mutual commitment of hours but it did say that if you want your staff member to be available there has to be a compensation for that.Mr Lees-Galloway’s amendment which I am sure he will speak to—and I do not want to steal his thunder on this; I just want to put on record my views on it—did I think eliminate zero hours. If one of the things that we needed to do was to take away one of those imbalances then effectively requiring the employer to compensate for being available even if there were no hours of commitment in the agreement did that. However I was open to the view that a minor change to the availability provisions that says you can have an availability provision only if there is first a commitment of hours still preserves the goal that we are trying to do and may strengthen it at the margins—I am not convinced but I do not think it harms things. So for that reason the Government is prepared to support Supplementary Order Paper 155 in the name of Mr Lees-Galloway.There are some other changes minor changes—again I think at the margins—that provide better clarity around what the expectations are for reasonable notice for example. This has been another area of complexity because both the availability provision and the reasonable notice provision for cancellations need to make sure that we do not in our efforts to eliminate these punitive aspects of employment agreements have the unintended consequence of ruling out that which is necessary and appropriate in our employment landscape.For example in terms of the emergency helicopter ambulance pilot we do want that person to be available. We do not want him or her to be actually deployed but we should compensate that person for being available. The New Zealand Police obviously needs availability provisions for things like the armed offenders squad and Special Tactics Group and so on. So to suggest that we could get away from the availability and on-call provisions which are an important part of our industrial-relations landscape is not I think what anybody would want. What we have to make sure is that in framing these availability provisions we do not leave ourselves with unintended consequences.I just wanted to put on the record what my understanding of zero-hour agreements are. I am very happy to have that elaborated on or nuanced from other members of the Committee. But I remain convinced that this will eliminate those quite punitive aspects of agreements that are known as zero hours. I think that will be good for employees. It will actually be good for employers too—those who may have been a little lazy in their rostering practices. I think the effect of this and I expect and hope the effect of this will be more in the prevention than the prosecution because this will prompt those who have been a bit tardy with their rostering practices and a bit lazy in their expectations on employees to be more diligent. It is not rocket science; it is good business practice and I think that is what we have got here.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): Before I embark on my contribution to Part 2 of this bill can I also like Minister Woodhouse make a couple of acknowledgments. The first is to the Unite union. If it were not for the Unite union this issue would not be a political issue. We would not be considering this issue this evening. The second is to the Council of Trade Unions which was there at the beginning of this legislative process and which has been an enormous source of information and knowledge and support in the period of time between the select committee consideration and now and before the select committee consideration as well.Assuming all goes well tonight and going by Minister Woodhouse’s comments it sounds like things are going to go well tonight I look forward to the opportunity to make a few more acknowledgments during the third reading. Can I also acknowledge the officials. The Minister is absolutely right—they have worked extremely hard on this legislation and ought to be acknowledged for that.I have a definition of a zero-hour contract. It is not unlike the Minister’s. It is “a permanent part-time agreement with no fixed hours”. “Permanent”—i.e. not casual. It is permanent in that the employee does have to come to work when they are told to come to work by the employer. “Part-time”—not full time. “No fixed hours”—no guarantee of work. That I understand is the term that was actually used particularly in the fast-food industry for what we term a zero-hour contract: a permanent part-time agreement with no fixed hours. The result of that is people are literally stuck at home waiting for the phone call and then must go into work when the phone call comes.The result of that is people cannot plan their lives. They cannot get a loan from the bank because they do not know how much income they are going to have. They cannot get hire purchase agreements to buy a fridge or a bed or anything else like that. They cannot join sports clubs because they do not know when they are and are not going to be at work. They cannot be available for their children sometimes—you know if their children have got a sports game on a Saturday morning but they are suddenly called into work or likewise if the children have got a school play or something. Zero-hour contracts just stop people being able to live an ordinary decent life. That is why we have got to get rid of them and that is why I am so hopeful that tonight will go well and the result will be that we will get rid of them.There is certainly a difference of opinion about how significant the changes are that we are talking about making tonight. The Government says they are minor. I am less convinced about that. To start with I would like to go to the first change made on my Supplementary Order Paper 155 which makes changes to new section 67E in clause 87 because this is what changes this bill from a bill that entrenches zero-hour contracts to a bill that eliminates zero-hour contracts.I understand—I absolutely understand—that in the public’s mind that is a difficult concept. It is that a bill that we have been saying—and we are quite right in saying this—entrenches zero-hour contracts could actually be changed significantly by changing only a couple of clauses and be changed so significantly that we actually do a 180-degree turn and end up with a bill that eliminates zero-hour contracts. It might be difficult to believe—I can barely believe it myself—but it is true and that is what this amendment will do.So the issue we had with new section 67E when it came back from the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee was section 67E(2) which said “an availability provision may relate to—(a) all work performed under the employment agreement;”. In other words all the work you did under that employment agreement would be subject to an availability provision. In layman’s terms you could be on call all the time with no guarantee of work. That is a zero-hour contract. That is the very definition of a zero-hour contract. That was the fatal flaw in the legislation and that is the bit that we have desperately wanted to change.The other changes are important—there is no doubt about it—but the change to section 67E(2) is the linchpin. Without that none of the rest of it really matters all that much but with that it changes the context for the rest of the bill and it changes the context for the rest of the amendments that are proposed both by the Government and by the Opposition. So this is the important one. For everybody out there who desperately wants Parliament to eradicate zero-hour contracts this is the one that changes this bill from a bill that entrenches zero-hour contracts to a bill that eliminates zero-hour contracts.Instead of the availability provision relating to all work performed under the employment agreement the availability provision may in my Supplementary Order Paper “only—(a) be included in an employment agreement that specifies agreed hours of work and that includes guaranteed hours of work among those agreed hours;”. It also must relate only “to a period for which an employee is required to be available that is in addition to those guaranteed hours of work.”What does that mean in real terms? It is the classic on-call situation that most people in this Chamber will have experienced and a lot of workers have experienced. To be asked to be on call—because that is essentially what an availability provision is to be asked to be on call; in other words when the phone call comes you have to go to work—can happen only if you have guaranteed hours in your employment agreement. So you will have your guaranteed hours and then in addition to that you may be on call.In my younger days I worked at a medical laboratory. I worked a shift during the day and every fortnight or so I was on call overnight. I got an allowance for being on call because you do have to put your life on hold. You certainly cannot drink and you cannot go and play a game of football or whatever because the phone call comes and you have to go into work. If you went into work then you got paid for the actual work that you did. That is a situation that we recognise well and that is what is now going to be the case under this availability provision.So people have previously been required to be available with absolutely no guarantee of work; now if you are required to be available that comes only on top of guaranteed work. That eliminates zero-hour contracts when taken in the context of all the other provisions that are included in this legislation.In the time I have remaining in this call I want to address a question that I have been asked and I really want the Minister to address this one as well. The question that I have been asked is: what is to stop an employer giving someone 1 guaranteed hour and then putting them on the availability clause for the rest of the time? It is a fair question and we have to answer that. The answer to that comes in new section 67E(3B)(c) which says an employer must have regard to “the proportion of the hours referred to in paragraph (b)”—which is “the number of hours for which the employee would be required to be available”—“to the agreed hours of work.” So it would be disproportionate for someone to have 1 guaranteed hour and 39 hours when they have to be under an availability clause.Obviously what is reasonable will have to be tested but that would be disproportionate. That would be an onerous contract. Let this Committee be clear: that is not what we intend at all. If a judge has to look back at this debate and has to figure out what our intention was I want it to be absolutely clear: we do not intend that employers would be able to give people a very small number of guaranteed hours and then require them to be available for a much larger number of hours. The weighting should be such that the majority of time is guaranteed and a few hours—the fewer number of hours—are under the availability provision.That has to be our clear intention from this Committee and I really want the Minister to contribute at some point in time this evening to make it clear that that is the Government’s view as well because without that really we are potentially window dressing. We really need to ensure that that intention is the case. I am confident that it is the case; I just think we have to be absolutely clear in this Committee that that is our intention. Mr Chairman—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): No you’re right.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: I thought you were going to cut me off there for a second Mr Chairman.So there are certainly other aspects of Part 2 that I am very keen to speak on but not being able to see your clock Mr Chairman I have got no idea how much time I have left—1 minute OK. Well I will talk briefly to the cancellation of shifts because that is the other thing that my Supplementary Order Paper does. Actually you need some bits from my Supplementary Order Paper and you need some bits from the Government’s Supplementary Order Paper 154 to deal with the cancellation of shifts issue completely. But what we do not want to have happen is the situation where employers can cancel a shift at the last minute. That was another aspect of the whole zero-hour contract regime that was inequitable and it was exploitative of workers.We want to make it absolutely clear that workers must have a reasonable period of notice for cancellation and if they do not get that reasonable period of cancellation then compensation must be paid. Furthermore that notice period of cancellation must be included in the employee’s employment agreement so they know up front what the situation is and what the period of cancellation is and that must be a reasonable notice period.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): I do promise the Committee that we will not turn this into the “Lees-Galloway-Woodhouse Show” but Mr Lees-Galloway has raised some very important points that I think probably bear addressing now and that will help frame the rest of the debate on Part 2. Actually in doing so my view is that in starting his intervention he suggested that new section 67E(2) inserted by clause 87 was so so important because without it we would entrench zero-hour contracts and he then went on to explain why that was not the case. I will explain what I mean because he has actually raised a very important concern that some listening will have which is that if we came out of the select committee with a bill that allowed people to have an availability provision but no commitment of hours why is it such a big improvement to have the commitment of even 1 hour of work and a provision for an availability of hours? Why does that make such a big difference?He did allude actually to the answer to that question because it is not appropriate—and he did not do this—for anyone to read the amendment in his Supplementary Order Paper 155 in isolation from two or three important clauses in this bill. With respect Mr Lees-Galloway actually articulated the position of the bill without the amendment implying that the availability provision would not be without fetter and that is simply not true. There is no expectation that somebody should be available without other things happening and I want to go through what they are.Firstly in new section 67E(3)(a) an employer cannot just make an employee be available. They need to have reasonable grounds to do so—genuine reasons based on reasonable grounds. I would suggest that saying “I might be busy on Friday night or I might not.” is not reasonable grounds because that is actually what has been happening particularly in the hospitality industry. Then he went on to quite rightly point out the key to this regardless of his amendment which is new section 67E3(b) which states: “the availability provision provides for the payment of reasonable compensation to the employee for making himself or herself available to perform work under the provision.” It has to be in writing—that is what new section 67E(3A) says underneath it. It is not enforceable unless it is agreed in advance. That too is a significant change. These are all changes the select committee has made to strengthen the issues around availability.Then Mr Lees-Galloway quite rightly points out the issue of proportionality and that is the key to this around the guaranteed hour question. There will be a concern perhaps from union members and delegates that there is a risk that an employer makes a commitment to 1 hour of work and then has an availability provision. Firstly it has to be on reasonable grounds. I cannot imagine for the life of me how that could be reasonable but it would be open to them to demonstrate that. And secondly it has to be compensated for. But thirdly as Mr Lees-Galloway says it has to be proportionate. So it is simply not lawful once this bill has passed to say: “I will give you 1 hour but you have got to be available for 39 hours.” Even if that compensation is reasonable it is not proportionate and therefore it would be ruled unlawful under the Act when it is passed.So I think that is really important. I do not want to labour the point about availability or about whether this is a big change or a small change because I think we are going to get over the line anyway but I do encourage members when they are considering these clauses—these crucial clauses—to look at them holistically both with the reasonableness the proportionality and the requirements to compensate for availability and now Mr Lees-Galloway’s expectation that it should be a mutual commitment of hours.I will just finish what I hope will be my last intervention—unless there are some quite specific technical questions—which is around the cancellation of shifts because I think this is a very important issue that requires in advance again there to be very good reasons. We have worked quite hard again with officials to make sure that although we do not prescribe every situation where that might be appropriate we do give broad guidance not just to the employers but to employees as well about when it would be appropriate in the circumstances. I am thinking about the horticulture industry where weather disruptions are pretty normal but the key to this is actually the commitment of hours. So with the cancellation of a shift if you have a mutual commitment of say 16 or 24 hours they would then have to be automatically put into the next day if you have got a commitment to work those hours of a week. There is also a requirement for compensation even if they are extra hours.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I call Grant Robertson.GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): Thank you—Hon Ruth Dyson: Good choice.GRANT ROBERTSON: —yes and thank you to my colleague Ruth Dyson for that support. Can I also begin my contribution with some acknowledgments. I am not a person who has been on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee or been close to this bill but I do want to acknowledge my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway for the work that he has done from our point of view on the Opposition benches on this issue.We went into this discussion deeply worried that we had a piece of legislation that was going to entrench what all of us know have been some of the most discriminatory and exploitative practices that I have seen after hearing from people coming into my office and I am going to return to a couple of cases in a moment. To now be sitting here tonight with a piece of legislation that will effectively outlaw those contracts I think is a real achievement and I want from our side to acknowledge Iain Lees-Galloway for that.I also want to acknowledge the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety for that because I think the Minister has entered into this in the spirit of trying to find a way through getting rid of those most exploitative of practices. So I want to acknowledge the Minister for doing that as well. As he has noted what is big and what is small is often in the eye of the beholder—maybe a topic the member knows about; I do not know—but it is a change that we think is important and valuable on this side of the Chamber.I want to talk about the same clauses and I do not think there is going be any difficulty in a number of members talking about these same clauses because they are the critical clauses within the bill. It is within clause 87 around the topics of availability and cancellation of shifts. My colleague Iain Lees-Galloway said that his definition of zero-hour contracts was “a permanent part-time position with no fixed hours”. I think that is a nice clear concise definition. But for me it is the people I have met who have been in these circumstances who define what a zero-hour contract is. I have two cases that I have dealt with and I want to use them to explain what I think is being changed here and why I think it is important particularly in new section 67E(2) set out in clause 87 around availability of hours.A young woman who is a retail worker—or who is actually a student but was a retail worker over the last two summers—found herself in the position of being on call. It was precisely like the point that Mr Woodhouse made just before where the reasonable assumption of her employer was: “I might be busy or I might not be busy but I want you to be ready at a moment’s notice for me.” This person who wanted work over the summer period who needed work over the summer period and was struggling to find it accepted a contract that quite frankly she should not have. Had she had advice from a union right off the bat she probably would not have either but she did—this woman did do that.She found herself in almost exactly the position we have just been discussing in the last two interventions of being told to come in the employer would let her stay for about an hour sometimes if it was not busy and—this is literally true—if it was raining or if there was a forecast of rain she would be told to go home because people would not be coming out to shop. That is as bad and as ridiculous as it got for that worker.My understanding of reading the availability provision here is of the vital importance of the linkage between availability and guaranteed hours. Agreed hours of work and guaranteed hours—that is the absolutely critical connection that has been missing. The ability of an employer to exploit a clause that did not link those two things together is the concern that we have had on our side of the Chamber. I take the point that there will be some employers who have just been a bit slack. They have not really tightened up on how to do this. That is a fair comment. Unfortunately as we always find in employment legislation there is that very small minority of employers who actually do this deliberately. They go out of their way to find the loopholes and exploit them and exploit the employees who work for them. We have to have law that stops that.It is not about judging all employers as being bad—it is not; most employers want to do the best by the workers in their firms—but we have to make law that deals with those who have the worst intent. It is the sad thing. It is about what we have to do in this House from time to time and tonight is one of those examples.So new section 67E(2) in clause 87 is the provision—I do agree with my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway—that makes that connection and makes it understandable I think for people. I do take the point the Minister has just made which is that the employer has got to have a good reason—[Bell rung] Mr Chair.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Grant Robertson.Hon Ruth Dyson: Mr Grant Robertson.GRANT ROBERTSON: Ha ha! That is good. There was so much competition I am so pleased you chose me Mr Chair. The employer must have a good reason for requiring the employee to be available for work and I do respect the fact that those two things go together. So the availability clause is not only about linking the guaranteed hours and the availability provision but also about making sure that the employer has that good reason.That will be tested I suspect in time but I think we have heard already in the debate tonight from the Minister and my colleague that the intent of what is being put on the table here is that it is quite a high threshold. I just want to reiterate that the point the Minister made is a very accurate one about—you know the employer says: “I might not be busy.” I think we have got to make the point that that is actually not going to be acceptable in the future and that is a very very good thing.I want to talk in the second part of my call about the question of cancellation of shifts. This relates to a different area of where someone came to see me which is around the area of home care and those people who have contracts to do home care. The example that was given to me was around what happens to a home-care worker when the person whom they are looking after spends time in hospital and what are they contracted for. This will be an interesting case to follow through over time with this new law because the current status of the home-care worker if the person whom they look after is taken into hospital under emergency circumstances is that that worker is not paid. That is actually a direct result of the contract that is awarded to the provider who then passes it on to the person who delivers that care.The person who came and saw me about that really was struggling to make ends meet because our home-care workers are paid so poorly but she was finding that the inconsistency of income and the cost on her was very very high and what that fundamentally comes down to is a question around the cancellation of shifts. I am not pretending today to say I know exactly what the outcome will be for that worker but what I can see in the new section 67G in clause 87 and the various amendments to it from both the Minister and Iain Lees-Galloway is that there is now a much more clear process and a series of steps that should in most good contracts—and that will be the critical element for the case of the person I was dealing with—be able to eliminate people being exploited by cancellation of shift issues.So let us be clear: we have not gone through this yet so far. The new section 67G now reads that “(2) The employer must not cancel a shift of the employee unless the employee’s employment agreement specifies—(a) a reasonable period of notice that must be given before the cancellation of a shift; and (b) reasonable compensation that must be paid to the employee if the employer cancels a shift of the employee without giving the specified notice. (3) In cancelling a shift of the employee the employer must—(a) give the employee the notice specified in the … agreement …; or (b) if that notice is not given pay the employee the [specified compensation].” That is a critical change. It is a change that puts in place a regime that means there can be none of the last-minute cancellations because the weather changes or whatever else it is. We will find that as this goes through I am sure in the cases that will come we will understand what “reasonable period of notice” is and what “reasonable compensation” is but those words are critical in avoiding those problems.So when we put together the availability provisions and the issues around cancellation of shifts we cut to the heart of the big problems that the Labour Party had when this legislation came forward and that was why we were concerned that it had actually become a charter for zero-hour contracts rather than the other way round. I respect the Minister’s different point of view on that but that is certainly how it felt from our side.These provisions mean that as a Parliament we are making a very important statement tonight about what constitutes decent work in our country and that means a lot to those people who work in the hospitality industry and the service industry in particular. They do important work for us. We hear a lot from the Government at the moment about the importance of tourism and about how important tourism is. These are the people whom tourists see. If they feel that they are valued—if they feel that they have got decent work that they have got guarantees that they will be valued and their contribution will be valued and that they will be paid properly—they will be even better ambassadors for our country. In the same way those who work in the service industry looking after older people and looking after the disabled—these are the people whom we charge with looking after the most vulnerable in our society and we are giving them a chance at decent work tonight.JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): Before I make my contribution on Part 1 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill I also would just like to acknowledge the work and the support of the officials not only to the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety but to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee as we went through the process of analysing this bill and heard from submitters from right across New Zealand—employers and employees. I was away when the second reading was heard last Thursday so this is my first opportunity to speak after the select committee process. I just want to acknowledge the members of the committee both from this side of the Chamber and from the other side as well as we have worked to come to a place where we want in particular to protect some of the more vulnerable employees in our country.I want to speak just briefly on the definition that has been articulated here this evening. I think the member opposite Iain Lees-Galloway made the comment that a zero-hour contract was a permanent part-time contract with no fixed hours. I would like to add to that as well because I believe that a zero-hour contract is more than that. It is a permanent part-time contract with no fixed hours and a requirement to be available to the exclusion of other employment opportunities. We need to understand and recognise that right across this Committee every single one of us opposes that definition of what it is. As we went through the select committee process the very principle of this bill that it sought to strengthen was the mutuality of obligation. If there are contracts with no fixed hours that are permanent and part time but have the requirement that the employee be available to the exclusion of other employment opportunities then that is not a mutual obligation committed by the employer to that person.As a committee we looked at these measures and we came back and as the Minister has alluded we strengthened the obligations of the employer and some of these have been spoken about this evening. They have been such that the employer must have a genuine reason based on reasonable grounds for including an availability provision in a contract. In fact if they do not even put an availability provision in an employment agreement they cannot ask a worker to do such. The availability provision provides for the payment of reasonable compensation to the employee for making himself or herself available to perform work under the provision. It is good that we are going to come to an agreement through all of this with the different Supplementary Order Papers that are coming through. I believe that as the Minister and other speakers have said if there are agreed hours and guaranteed hours it is going to do no harm and potentially good in terms of this bill.What I am saying is that all the work that we did in the select committee process that is now in the billin clause 87 new section 67E(3B) and (3C) onwards in terms of putting far greater obligations of reasonable compensation means that an employer cannot expect somebody to be available without a mutual obligation towards that person and that there would be compensation—and reasonable compensation—made available if they ask that employee to do that work. Then the number of hours for which the employee would be required to be available would have to be proportionate to the agreed hours of work. All of these measures are there. They are strong measures and I believe they are achieving some really good outcomes in this area which we understand is called zero-hour contracts.My view is and I am sure that as we come through this whole process of working through the Supplementary Order Papers we will come to a happy place of agreement. We will see that there will be minimum standards of employment that are reflected in what is written even now in the bill before the Committee and then the added Supplementary Order Papers will add to them as well. We will see that there will be opportunities for people to work with flexibility—with the employers; with employees—but that there will not be that ability for the vulnerable to be exploited. I believe that that is a good thing and is a thing that members in this Committee would all agree with. Thank you.JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I want to start in a similar vein to my colleague Grant Robertson. I remember watching some time ago a long form interview with Minister Michael Woodhouse around zero-hour contracts and I did at that time detect a genuine concern about what was happening in the labour market. But of course it was our role as the Opposition to make sure that any expressed concern was translated into very explicit legislation and that is where I join my colleagues in highlighting again the really important role that the Opposition and particularly Iain Lees-Galloway has played in making sure that we allow not one crack of light to be available for zero-hour contracts to remain in New Zealand legislation.On first blush that is exactly what this bill did initially allow. It allowed enough loopholes to remain so that zero-hour contracts as we know them would still exist in New Zealand but this of course was the vehicle we needed to use. If we had simply voted against the bill we would be leaving the situation to hang and that would mean that those contracts would still exist as they do now. So we were as constructive as we could be through this process and Iain has done a fantastic job of getting us to the point where with the support of the Minister we now have amendments on the Table that will bring these contracts to a close. So Iain that is fantastic work but obviously having the Minister come on board with that has been critical to this process as well and we acknowledge that.I want to come back to some of the really excellent points that have been made in the regulatory impact statement around the clauses in Part 2 particularly around new section 67C “Agreed hours of work” in clause 87. It is quite difficult to size the number of employees who will be directly affected by this clause but in the regulatory impact statement the officials have made an attempt to size the problem. We do know as has been touched upon that those workers most affected by new section 67C are likely to be those who are working in the service sectors—so the retail trade accommodation and food service sectors. There are 314000 people roughly working in those industries. We can drill down a little bit further than that though. The centre for labour employment and work found that 61 percent of the collective agreements in the food retailing sector did not state ordinary weekly hours of work—61 percent of collective contracts in that space. So that gives an indication of the scale of use in particular service sectors.The reason we should be doubly concerned by that of course is the level of vulnerability for people who are working in those sectors and the regulatory impact statement touches on that. But what baffles me is that although we are talking about retail trade and particularly food retailing there is a certain level of predictability around those sectors in terms of demand.I myself have worked in that sector. I was a checkout operator for a number of years. We knew when the busy times were and anyone in this Committee who has been to a supermarket in Auckland on a Sunday knows there is a certain level of predictability around trade in that sector. I would say the same for the food retailing business particularly fast food. Again I had the dubious honour of being a worker at KFC for about 6 months. Interestingly I was not employed directly as a KFC worker but I was a contractor who job-trained people with intellectual disabilities. So I was there at KFC to job-train a young man with autism. I was in that place long enough to know the predictability of trade in that sector as well. So you cannot tell me that it is impossible to give a certain degree of certainty for workers in those industries and that is obviously what this legislation will now require and that is absolutely reasonable but why is it that we are seeing that happening in these particular sectors?Why is new section 67C so necessary to weed this out in those particular sectors? Well I think what is interesting—and it is brought up in the regulatory statement—is the use of part-time employees over casuals as a way of securing employees. So it is a way of putting dibs on individuals and securing them for your business but then giving them really uncertain shifts and hours. All that does of course is shift the uncertainty from an employer who has the ability to make greater judgments about those ebbs and flows for their business and who is obviously in a more powerful situation than the employee—it shifts that risk from the employer to the employee who is the more vulnerable in those situations absolutely. Of course where there are extremely tight margins or where there is extremely tight competition in a sector that is where we are seeing these contracts being used and that is utterly unfair because that is where the power imbalance is so strong.So in the regulatory impact statement around the problem definition I believe the officials are absolutely right to say that the root cause of this problem is an inherent power imbalance but even having said that to claim that where there is a more powerful employee—that is such a subjective thing to determine whether an employee has the power to push back on an employer around guaranteed hours. It is very hard to distinguish when someone is in a situation where that is going to be an easier position to negotiate from. That is why regardless of the sector and regardless of the power relationship it needs to be removed because it is inherently unfair—it is inherently unfair.I think it is also useful though that the problem definition around why we have come to the point of having new section 67C is fleshed out even further in paragraph 18 of the regulatory impact statement. To anyone who has not read it I really recommend it. It talks about the fact that actually this becomes problematic for the labour market generally. A labour market is not able to function efficiently if employees and their extra capacity are locked into an arrangement with a singular employer who then is not giving guaranteed hours. That may—and I would be interested in this because I am not sure whether it is true. To what extent is our increasing figure of those who are under-employed courtesy of this kind of practice in the employment market?Of course the figure that we see for the underemployed which is growing is people who would like additional hours but who cannot find them in the market place. To what degree are those people unable to find those additional hours because their employment arrangement basically means that they are unable to go out and seek that additional work? They are locked into an arrangement that gives all of the power to an employer which deems them unable to fill the unknown quantity of work because they are essentially constantly on call without any compensation for that. So if we did not have new section 67C redrafted the way it is it would contribute ultimately to a labour market failure.But I do think it is also interesting to see that there has been some analysis to say that these unfair provisions have been used in place of proper due process where an employer has performance issues. So instead of sitting down and working through those performance issues and using the process that is set out in legislation employers were using these powers that essentially pushed people out of work without having to go through due process. Another reason—because it was never the intention of this Parliament that rather than have due process someone would simply be forced out in almost a pseudo-dismissal process.Another point that I think is really important to make is the impact that this will have currently on people who have an interface between their work hours and their income support from Work and Income and who have such uncertainty about their work. How do they get their income support from Work and Income if that is required to be topped up when they have that level of uncertainty?Many of us will have seen this in our offices. I have had an individual come to me at one point who had total uncertainty around their hours—absolute uncertainty. The hours for that individual were not guaranteed and they required a top-up from Work and Income. Work and Income told them to quit—it told them to quit. That is what that individual employee was eventually driven to do because they could not support themselves and Work and Income found it too difficult to work around the uncertainty of their contractual arrangement with their employer.That is the flow-on effect of legislation that we are amending today and why it is so important. Absolutely we support it.SUE MORONEY (Labour): It is a pleasure to rise and take a call on Part 2 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. It is kind of hard to take this call without starting it off by saying “Well we told you so.” because on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee we on the Labour side tried very very hard to convince the National Party members. We hoped that they were talking to the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety at the time to actually do the right thing and tighten up the provisions so that zero-hour contracts were gone from legislation. I think Minister Woodhouse to be fair if that was just a small amount of distance then we ought to have been able to sort it at the select committee. It should not have been reported back to the House needing all these Supplementary Order Papers that were negotiated afterwards if in fact it was just a small divide.The truth is that the things that have been subsequently agreed to make all the difference in terms of a level of job security and the ability of people to have certainty over some guaranteed hours of work. Having the provision in here to have guaranteed hours of work is no small matter for those people who have been sitting on these zero-hour contracts with no option otherwise. For them to have guaranteed hours of work that will be proportional to the hours of work that they are to be available for is the crux of the matter. That makes all of the difference in terms of how vulnerable they are their ability to plan their ability to be involved not just in paid employment but also life—because that is important as well—and their ability to be able to go to a bank and talk about their guaranteed hours of work and to talk about what their salary will definitely be as a minimum every week or every fortnight.Those things matter. They make a big difference to people’s ability to be able to participate fully in society. For the Labour Party having people being able to participate fully in their society is a very important thing. In fact we go further than that and say that we want everyone to have access to the Kiwi Dream. Certainly sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring because that is your only opportunity of getting any income at all that week is not elevating for this country.In fact I will just say very honestly to the National members that they are lucky that they had Iain Lees-Galloway to be dealing with over this to help them through it because Iain Lees-Galloway tried that once before with the Health and Safety in Employment Amendment Bill. The Government failed to take our advice on that count and that turned into a complete and utter shambles. So perhaps those members learnt something through that exercise but I am going to say that they are very lucky that they had Iain Lees-Galloway to work through this issue with. Of course I have been one of the other two members from the Labour Party on that select committee. I am still in the “never trust a Tory” category after having been done over by them once when I took them at good faith around paid parental leave so they are very fortunate indeed to have Iain to be dealing with.The loopholes that have been used by—and I will call them lazy employers—lazy employers to not roster work appropriately and therefore give people some certainty and some security will be closed down by the provisions that we are recommending here for Part 2. Should those lazy employers—well you know that is probably being nice about them actually because there are lazy employers. Sorry I will start from the big group. The big group is the good employers actually who understand that people’s livelihoods and the way they earn those livelihoods is a huge part of their lives but it is part of their lives and they have another part of their lives as well. Most employers get that.In fact the fascinating thing about the select committee process was when employers came to do their submissions. I have got to say almost all the questioning of those employers was happening from the Labour Party side of the equation to find out exactly what was going on. Those employers—almost all of them told us that actually they did not need zero-hour contracts. They did not want them.Phil Twyford: They didn’t like them.SUE MORONEY: They did not like them and they do not need them. They said “What we need is the ability to have a permanent workforce for the work we know is permanently available. We need the ability to have fixed-term contracts for the occasion when there is a particular project that we want to take on or there is a seasonal need for increased work. And we need the ability for properly casual work to”—I was going to say “to deal with the peaks and troughs” but it is actually the peaks that is the reality—“to deal with the peaks.” That is what they said they needed. Those are the good employers.What was surprising about that in a good way was that the employers who were most clear about that were the employers from the home-care sector which a few of my colleagues have raised already. They could have been the employers whom we expected would need the maximum amount of flexibility in their labour market but what they have learnt over the years is that if they require that level of flexibility from their employees they end up not being able to guarantee getting the quality work done that they need for their clients. So they have gone through a process with unions and are working out how to actually maximise the most guaranteed hours that they can for their workforce and I commend them for that.But we did have the odd employer who came in—and the one that sticks in my mind I have got to say and perhaps it is because I did once work for them a long time ago in the past is McDonalds which said that it did not use zero-hour contracts. But what it ended up describing to the select committee—under intense scrutiny from the Labour Party I have got to say—and in fact what it was using was the definition of zero-hour contracts that both sides of the House have used which is permanent part-time work with no fixed hours.Jonathan Young: And?SUE MORONEY: Despite the fact that it knows—end of story. Despite the fact that it knows that its restaurants are going to be open for a certain number of hours that they are going to be open on certain days and that there will be a minimum number of employees it needs to staff those restaurants on those days and in those hours that they are open for it would not even guarantee those permanent shifts as being available for employees. That keeps people vulnerable—that keeps people vulnerable.People listening to this debate may be starting to get concerned about the complexities of some of the amendments that are being made. I have a simple message for those people: join a union—join a union. That is the best way to get job security because it is the unions that will be able to negotiate their way around all of these issues. It was the unions that raised the zero-hour contracts issue at the outset and so that this Parliament could deal with them. In order to get work that is decent work that people can have certainty about where they will know that they will get the good provisions negotiated into their employment agreement for availability and for cancellation of shifts join a union. That is going to be by far and away the best way that people can make sure that this piece of legislation works for them.I want to put on record that the position of the Labour Party is that we believe that this will deal with the zero-hour contracts issues because it guarantees people minimum hours of work. That is incredibly important. That will change this situation for thousands of these workers. I also want to put on record that should those lazy or unethical employers find loopholes around that Labour will find those loopholes and it will close those loopholes if they ever present themselves. So that is the commitment that we give from this side of the House.People might be surprised to learn of the types of submissions that we heard on Part 2. They might be surprised to learn that yes it was some of the hospitality sector and some of the accommodation sector employers who came to see us but it was also lawyers. We actually had a submission from a female lawyer who told us that she was on a zero-hour contract. She described the situation as one with lots of law graduates looking for work where employers were taking advantage of that situation by using the skills experience and the education that the graduates had invested in for themselves. Graduates were using their law degrees but employers were not prepared to give them permanent hours of work even though those permanent hours existed. We have got more work to do on this.CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to take a call on Part 2 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. I just want to start my contribution by saying that there have been a large number of fantastic contributions in the Committee tonight. I do have to say I had a smile on my face on the news tonight with regard to the Māori Party Labour and the National Government all trying to take credit for fixing this problem up. In actual fact credit really needs to go to the people of New Zealand who have clearly stated that they actually want zero-hour contracts removed from legislation and not to have them legitimised. So well done New Zealand—well done for speaking up. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank a number of the people from the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions which has worked with New Zealand First along with some of the other parties to come up with better ways of addressing some of these problems particularly around zero-hour contracts.I have to say just finishing off what Ms Sue Moroney has just been speaking on about one of the submitters who came into the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee to talk to us about her concerns—what Ms Moroney was saying was not actually 100 percent correct. It was actually a casual employment contract that the submitter was on which was turned into a zero-hour contract. She was basically in a casual employment agreement with a law firm and as a very intelligent woman who is a solo mother looking after her young people she found herself exposed to being vulnerable in that there was no guaranteed number of hours and she was pretty much just a casual—as and when required. It just shows the vulnerability of even our educated sector because we stereotype people so that if they are vulnerable they have got to be uneducated or they have got to have low-earning jobs but that is not the case.So my question to the Minister in the chair Mr Woodhouse—if you could indulge us to stand up and take a call on this I would very much appreciate it—is what are we going to do about the people who are vulnerable under casual employment agreements? Because we understand that in a modern-day workplace the importance of having casual agreements—we understand part-time and we understand full time. We have heard the commendable result in today’s discussion with regard to the outcome of getting rid of zero-hour work contracts and to that end New Zealand First is in a position of support—so that has changed from where we have come from. But we are still very concerned about the involvement of casual employees being exploited not through zero-hour availability clauses but through just being sort of as and when needed and as required.As we step into Part 3 I would urge you to take a look at Supplementary Order Paper 150 put forward by New Zealand First with regard to that because we believe that that will clear it up. We have support from Labour—it has been given to me today that it will be supporting it—the Greens will certainly support it and we would love to see Government support for that because it is very important. We will get to that in a moment but Minister if you could explain what steps the Government is going to take to indemnify if you will those vulnerable workers under casual employment agreements.I could not speak more positively than on this change—this much-needed change—in our working environment. I think we have seen over the years a direction that is getting towards having a better working place where there is a balance for workers and bosses employers and employees—whichever way you want to say that. A real balance of relationship in any relationship—whether it be a personal relationship a supporting relationship or one with a friend but certainly in an employment agreement—is when both parties have equal power. I think what this employment agreement amendment does is it actually restores the balance of power for the employees to empower them to be able to stand up and rightly say: “This isn’t fair. I am not happy about that.” That takes me into some other parts of the bill because I do not want to readdress what has already been strongly spoken about which is the removal of those zero-hour contracts.What I also think is that Part 2 has got some very very positive aspects and one is that the inspectors and the individuals now have the power to enforce. Once it was just down to the labour inspectors; now individuals can actually take umbrage and take action towards an employer if they feel there has been some injustice or an imbalance in their agreement. I think the higher penalties that have been put forward are another huge incentive for employers to act more responsibly in their working environments towards their employees—those penalties for an individual are now going to be up to $50000 and for a body corporate up to $100000 or three times the amount of money that has actually been sought or lost by the employee. I think those are certainly some good punitive penalties coming through there.We have got declarations of breaches in new section 142B in Part 2 of the bill and compensation orders made by the court. What I like to see are these banning orders that have been brought into Part 2 with some very very hefty penalties of $200000 if there has been a breakdown and a continual abuse of these parts. The parts around the requirements to keep records are I think very very important and I do actually look to support the Greens’ Supplementary Order Paper 151 with regard to that because even salaried workers can find themselves in a position where they do a little bit extra here and they do a little bit extra there and all of a sudden it becomes normalised—it becomes just what they have always been doing. So for salaried workers there is a potential loophole there coming from employers not keeping a record of the hours that they work where the employer could actually take advantage of them. We do support the fact that all records of employees should be kept and should be available for scrutiny to make sure that there is not a disadvantage for anybody salaried or otherwise. It is not an onerous expectation.I also like the fact that there is no ability to indemnify the employer by insurance to let them get away with malpractice of employment. I think that as opposed to parts of the Health and Safety Reform Bill which did not allow this to happen this is a completely different situation where I think it is necessary to take that availability to indemnify themselves with insuranceaway from employers. Again another part of Part 2 that I think speaks very very strongly of the new direction is the inability of employers to take unlawful deductions from employees. We have heard many many cases where staff have had deductions taken whether it be a restaurant worker with a table doing a runner or whether it be a fuel station worker—or a petroleum dispenser as they like to be referred to—where somebody has run off without paying and then those deductions have been taken away from their wages which is unreasonable. Certainly this new piece of legislation addresses that.I would also like to say to wrap up my contribution that Part 2 shows some very very positive changes. It has certainly been a long time coming and we look forward to Part 3 and a contribution from the Minister in the chair himself with regard to casual employment and how that is going to minimise any exploitation of those workers. Thank you.Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): It is a pleasure to rise and speak to the bill before us. I want to start first by congratulating my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway on the excellent work that he has done in getting this bill across the line. It speaks to basic Labour Party values of course. The course of action needed was clear. But actually it is often hard to achieve the kinds of things we would like to achieve from the Opposition benches.I got a little taste of that with my Mondayising bill to Mondayise Anzac Day and Waitangi Day which became law eventually but against the Government’s will. When the Government did not want to make those changes it took a great effort to get the smaller parties together to recognise the importance of making the change and perhaps even more important than that to get the public of New Zealand behind a change and to enable them to understand the complex laws that get put through Parliament in a way that boils it down to the basic stuff.What we have got here in terms of zero-hour contracts has been put out there into the wider realm and 56000 people I understand signed the petition to bring an end to them. Iain Lees-Galloway has led that work and we now have this positive change before us. So I congratulate him and others who have worked towards this end.How does this come to pass? How does it come to pass that we are in a world where we have this kind of insecure work? There were submissions made to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. I have flicked my eyes over a couple. I have also seen the submission which people carried and used as a resource from the Council of Trade Unions on vulnerable work. Part of it is of course around the fact that we live in a globalised economy. Labour’s Future of Work Commission project is designed to deal with the issues that that presents in terms of shifting to a higher value diversified economy; the research and development tax credits that we know would make so much sense for our economy; the investment incentives to grow businesses that are in the weightless sphere; and capital debt.But I come back to this particular aspect in terms of the zero-hour contracts that are no longer going to exist as a result of the excellent Supplementary Order Paper in the name of Mr Lees-Galloway. That is there to protect the downsides of globalisation which we know will be there in the transition to this higher-value economy that we want to have. It is to look after the vulnerable workers to make sure that those who are in the position that they cannot negotiate against a global trend are protected. So in the Supplementary Order Paper there is a very clear set of provisions that will be put into law to make sure that those people are protected that the vulnerable workers are looked out for and that decent wages and decent working conditions can be guaranteed over time.Let us face it. Nobody wants their kid or their workmate or their family member to be on a contract where they cannot guarantee to pay the rent or the power or for the food every week. Nobody actually wants that for anybody they care about. I do not believe that the majority of New Zealanders want that and that has been shown in the incredible support for these changes that have been brought through in Part 2 of the bill in the wider social movement that has supported that and in the support within this House eventually for getting rid of zero-hour contracts.So again my congratulations to Mr Lees-Galloway. His Supplementary Order Paper amends clause 87 to ensure that there are guaranteed hours to start with to make sure any contract that has flexibility within it does actually have those guaranteed hours. You cannot start with zero hours guaranteed. And then if you are going to have some on-demand aspects of a contract the employer is now required through the changes being proposed to be specific about when and how those changes would take effect. So they cannot just pluck something out of mid-air. They cannot pluck something unreasonable out of mid-air.Most employers we all know and would acknowledge in this House would not do that. This legislation like much of the legislation we put through this House is designed to guard against the worst abuses that can happen when employers who are not good employers and often are not very effective or profitable in their businesses resort to the weaknesses that they can see in order to make ends meet. That ends up harming people and stopping them meeting their ordinary everyday commitments such as their ability to commit to a mortgage. We know we have got the lowest homeownership rate in New Zealand since 1951 and that problem is just getting worse every year. It is because of labour provisions like this that people cannot commit to that future expenditure. That is why this Supplementary Order Paper from Mr Lees-Galloway is so important.The second thing his Supplementary Order Paper does is ensures that there are genuine reasons. There must be reasonable grounds for having an availability provision at all in an employment agreement. So they have to meet a test of reasonableness. They have to have specific provisions. There cannot just be provisions that they can vary. They must specify why and for how many hours. That is clearly specified in Mr Lees-Galloway’s Supplementary Order Paper. The third thing that is very clear to me is that a shift cannot be cancelled at all unless the employee’s agreement specifies it. It must be done with a reasonable notice of cancellation.STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): First of all I would like to congratulate Iain Lees-Galloway on the fantastic work he has done on standing up for those who do not have a voice who are disenfranchised or who are unable to stand up for themselves—I say very much congratulations. The interesting thing is I put a post about this on Facebook. There was one negative comment. The reply to those comments from a whole lot of different people was astounding. The reason I say that is that you do not have to be on a zero-hour contract to think that they are simply unfair. I think the foundation of New Zealand is built on fairness. We do not like to think that we are being treated unfairly; nor do we like to see others being treated unfairly.Back to the bill. I would like to talk about clause 83 which amends section 3. Replaced section 3(a)(v) inserted by clause 83(1) states: “by promoting mediation as the primary problem-solving mechanism other than for enforcing employment standards;”. I am a huge fan of mediation for a number of reasons. It saves costs. It saves time. It does not clog up the courts. It is non-binding. It is different from arbitration. Arbitration is binding; mediation is not. So if you really do not like the outcome there are other remedies you can seek. But it is an incredibly effective way to solve disputes and nip them in the bud.But one thing I would like the Minister in the chair to talk about is how this is going to take effect. We have a very effective organisation within the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and it is called Employment Mediation Services. The problem we have is that on 1 December last year Employment Mediation Services put out a proposal saying it was going to restructure: “The location of our offices does not always correspond to where the demand is which means we are unable to respond to regional challenges over time.” The thing about this though—at the moment there are mediation services in Auckland Palmerston North Dunedin Hamilton Christchurch and Wellington. These are widely used. It shows that clause 83 is actually very relevant because mediation services are a very important part of the whole employment process.But what the proposal put forward by Employment Mediation Services outlined was that it is going to do away with the Palmerston North office it is going to do away with the Dunedin office it is going to do away with the Napier office and it is going to centralise these services in Auckland Manukau Hamilton Wellington and Christchurch. In terms of mediation let me outline the importance to the regions of effective mediation. In Napier for example in 2010 there were 256 mediation cases heard. In 2014 there were 332. In Palmerston North last year there were 232 cases heard Hamilton 615 Dunedin 266 and in Auckland there were 1541 cases heard. The point I am making here is that mediation is an incredibly important way to resolve disputes between employers and employees. This is not always an employee with a grievance against an employer. It can be that an employer has a grievance against an employee. Either way we need to retain these mediation services in the form and the locations they are in at the moment.According to the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment website the restructuring was going to be known in mid-March 2016. If I look at my watch mid-March 2016 is about now. So let us hope the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety can actually tell us what is going to happen to Employment Mediation Services especially in light of this. And this is the first clause in the amendment to the Employment Relations Act where it talks about promoting mediation as the primary problem-solving mechanism—the primary problem-solving mechanism. And what the initial proposal put out by Employment Mediation Services said was that it was going to contract services out. So this was a further hollowing out—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): OK I am now going to interrupt the member. He has been very repetitious when he is not being irrelevant. So I want to encourage the member in the 10 seconds he has got left to try to stay within the rules.STUART NASH: Thank you Mr Chair. I suppose—and you are right Mr Chair I have been repetitious but the reason I have is that I want to make a very clear point: mediation services are vital not just in the big city centres but right across the regions.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Tēnā koutou e Te Wharenui ko tēnei pō. I really want to congratulate the people outside this Chamber tonight as well as the people inside this Chamber who are making this work. I want to stand up for the value of organised labour because without the organisation and the challenges put out by the people on the streets through this campaign I doubt that we would be here tonight. So I think it is a matter of congratulations due to the organised labour to the union organisations that took this to employers and said before it even came to Parliament: “We don’t need this in this country; this is not what we’re about.”And so Part 2 is an example of sensible policy responding to the leadership of the people on the streets. For example when the Unite union went to Restaurant Brands and said to them “This is not good. We do not need these multinational food chains to take advantage of vulnerable workers.” it was actually really encouraging to hear Russel Creedy say that when the union approached the company about providing better certainty over working hours he immediately saw that change was needed. So to quote him: “Having permanent staff who stay with us—loyal long tenure—is part of a successful business model for our industry”.So that is leadership on both sides: the people who organised the workers and approached the unions and then went to the employers and got that kind of buy-in and then there are the people who have had to go further. For example although Burger King and Restaurant Brands which owns KFC Pizza Hut and Carl’s Jr—I do not know these companies because I do not eat this kind of food—actually they were good but McDonald’s was a problem and Wendy’s was a problem. There had to be protests and demonstrations. There had to be an international day of strike action by fast-food workers. And that is a tribute to the fact that people need to be organised.One of my fears about this country is that young people do not understand at the moment what a union is and do not understand the value of it until they have an experience like this. Many young people are responsible for this bill and for Part 2 because they got involved they stood up for themselves and they pointed out that being on minimum wages with uncertain hours—people who walked into these places coming to all shifts but not given any more hours. These people stood their ground protested loudly and slammed zero-hour contracts. So they helped us do the right thing.We do not live in this magnificent moralistically pure ethical bubble where we make great decisions on behalf of the country. That is actually not how change happens in this country. It happens because people will not be silent because organised labour will represent them because they join unions and because they stand up.I also want to pay tribute in part particularly to the work that a number of people across the Chamber have done on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee but also to Denise Roche for putting up her earlier member’s bill which had some very clear provisions related to Part 2 that again were a serious contribution that needs to be acknowledged. It would have guaranteed employees a contract with fixed minimum hours for employees who are in the practice of working regular hours after a period of 90 days of work unless the employee opts out of the arrangement. Notice where the power lies: it lies with the employee having the ability to opt out.Denise’s bill which she withdrew when she saw that the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety was making public statements in support of getting rid of the zero-hours contract bit of this bill also had a part in her bill that said “remove the ability from employers to put in exclusivity clauses in casual contracts which forbid workers from seeking other employment from other employers.” And I have heard good speeches tonight from right across the Chamber about why that is anathema. And so all credit to Denise Roche and to everyone else who put up Supplementary Order Papers but also put up bills during this process in response to the great work of the people on the streets saying: “This is not good enough.”I just want to make the hair stand up on your head or the back of your neck or wherever a bit. In the United Kingdom where this legislation went through some time ago the Office for National Statistics said that last year the number of people reporting they work on contracts with no minimum hours has risen to 744000. It has increased by almost a fifth in the last year spiking concerns that employers are turning to this arrangement to cut back workers’ pay and conditions. So it is great that these Supplementary Order Papers on Part 2 will not allow this to happen.DENISE ROCHE (Green): It is my pleasure to take a call on Part 2 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. I have no doubt that the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety when he first mooted this bill was absolutely genuine in wanting to address the whole issue of zero-hour contracts and the other areas of employment where workers were being exploited. Other people have spoken about those things like where garage attendants were having to pay when people had run off with the petrol without paying for it and it had come out of their wages. All those sorts of issues were indicative of an industrial relations environment where the power was skewed towards the employer where the protections that had been built up over generations through the union movement had basically been eroded. We know that the employment relationship is not an equal relationship; this is acknowledged in the Employment Relations Act itself. I believe the Minister in his absolute genuine attempts to want to address those inequities and I applaud him for it.I also like others in the Chamber before me want to acknowledge those who have worked on this bill particularly the officials and particularly the work that they have done in the last week which must have been at times quite demanding. But particularly I want to acknowledge the union movement. The Unite union was one of the first unions to take on the campaign around zero-hour contracts and it did this with its members in the fast-food sector. It was their work highlighting the impact on everyday working New Zealanders who were guaranteed no hours whatsoever who had to sit and wait to be contacted by their employer who could not pay their bills and who could not plan their lives. It was their work in highlighting this—and I might add John Campbell on one of his last shows—showing the public of New Zealand that this kind of bad treatment of employees happened right across New Zealand. I believe that is what sparked this whole movement towards shifting this Government to a situation where it decided that it had to—it absolutely had to—take some action to address what is essentially incredibly unfair action from employers.I just want to talk in detail about Part 2. In the second reading when this bill came back to the House I said that this bill was a different beast from what had been introduced in the first reading and it was. In the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee there had been great arguments some fantastic submissions—particularly the 10500 written submissions from working people right across New Zealand—good submissions from employers who also said they do not want zero-hour contracts. During the select committee process we did actually manage to strengthen the clauses in the bill around compensation for shift cancellations and around notice but actually Iain Lees-Galloway was correct in his statement earlier tonight that when this bill came back to the House it did not actually address zero-hour contracts; what it did was enshrine them in the legislation.So it is incredibly heartening to see and to hear Minister Michael Woodhouse say tonight that he will support Supplementary Order Paper 155 from Iain Lees-Galloway which does actually put in place a guarantee of minimum hours. It goes hand in hand with the other provisions in the bill around notice compensation and proportionality—that is the number of guaranteed hours versus the number of hours that a person may have to be available. And that deals with the whole issue of exclusivity: the whole situation where a worker an ordinary working person may have no guarantee of hours but may also be prevented from finding alternative work which leads to all sorts of difficulties as you can well imagine.The commitment to guaranteed minimum hours is a major step forward and it is the crux of destroying any attempt to legalise zero-hour contracts. I also want to address some of the issues that are in the Supplementary Order Papers particularly in the one that I am putting forward Supplementary Order Paper 151. One of the issues that did concern me was around the availability of hours for workers on salaries—and I was concerned about this during the select committee process as well—and that is that within the bill as it came through to the Committee of the whole House salaried workers would have been able to be on call for a non-specified number of hours and not receive compensation within their whole salary payment. I do not think that is reasonable because it puts them into a situation where they could be working many many many hours beyond what they had signed up to do.We have seen exploitation of salaried workers time and time again in the hospitality sector in particular where I think it was the Masala restaurant that employed a whole bunch of migrant workers on salaries. They were working 70 to 80 hours a week and they were on call for extra hours and actually the hourly rate turned out to be around about $2 an hour. This was for a whole pile of workers who worked there. So I was concerned about the whole protection for salaried workers which is why I have also put up a Supplementary Order Paper in Part 2 and I think in the next part as well.I think we have to recognise that the industrial relations scene has shifted significantly since this National Government has been in power. We have seen more and more and more cases and every MP—on this side of the House at least—will be able to give you examples of ordinary working New Zealanders who have been exploited at work; who have not been able to pay their bills because they have had illegal deductions from their wages or they have had no guarantee of hours; and who have been told by Income Support that the job offered to them despite having no guarantee of hours was in fact a job which took them off their numbers and so made their statistics look a lot better.I think we have to recognise that in this business in this House our duty is to provide laws that are for our most vulnerable and that is what industrial relations law is about. There is already flexibility within lots of legislation around industrial relations which enables things like casual workers permanent part-time workers and fixed-term workers as well as being able to be on call. We have had that throughout our industrial relations systems for decades and decades and decades and it has been tested in our industrial relations legal framework. The rise of the zero-hour contracts that we have seen over the last 10 years has been because employers have felt that they could get away with it. That has been led by the Government and its attitude to legislation.I want to thank the Minister for stepping back and stepping up for the most vulnerable here but we all have to recognise that power is never handed over voluntarily. It is the fact that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of New Zealanders who have supported this that has shifted you into the right place and we thank you for it.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): I appreciate this opportunity to take a brief call on the stuff that is at the heart of this Employment Standards Legislation Bill and that is the stuff on zero-hour contracts. I want to reflect on the changes that have been achieved: firstly what they are why they are bad news and how this bill as amended seeks to make sure that they never darken the doors of our employment relations again. It is well known I think by people out there that zero-hour contracts are iniquitous because they are unbalanced. The employer can require an employee to be available at any time and the employee has no guaranteed hours of work and that is a completely unsatisfactory state of affairs. It reduces the employee to the stuff of an object and that is not OK in this country.One little example on the boundary of my electorate is Kelston Girls’ College which tells me on this International Women’s Day that its absenteeism has gone through the roof because of casualisation of labour meaning that parents cannot plan their household stuff so children are required to stay home to look after the elderly. Casualisation is bad enough; zero-hour contracts make that even worse by making it a completely unbalanced employment relationship.I want to acknowledge Iain Lees-Galloway and the Labour team that have worked constructively with other parties on this bill. I think it is no secret that the stuff that is at the heart of this is the fact that the Government has moved because it had to because minor parties came to our position which was very clear: that the original draft of this bill did not deliver on the Government’s stated commitment to outlaw zero-hour contracts. We will not actually know until the third reading—the end of the Committee stage—whether in fact the fine print measures up but we will be watching like hawks.In particular there are three things that we are concerned about: firstly we want to remove the ability of employers to put people on contracts where they are on call with no permanent hours. Being on call can be fine in some contexts provided people are fairly remunerated and the stuff that goes with that. Secondly employers should not be able to cancel shifts at the last minute. The idea that an employer can simply cancel a shift when they like should not be normalised in law. Thirdly where practical hours of work should be included in the stuff of employment agreements so that people can plan their lives with some security. Zero-hour contracts are an unmitigated disaster.This set of changes that has been negotiated by my good colleague Iain Lees-Galloway centres on new section 67E inserted by clause 87—the availability clause. The clause when amended by Supplementary Order Paper 155 will end zero-hour contracts. The amendment is absolutely vital because it changes the bill from being one that entrenches the ability to write zero-hour contracts to one that effectively outlaws them—and we hope for good.That means that an employer can no longer demand that the employee be available all the time without giving them guaranteed hours of work and what is really important—and it will need to be tested in the courts we recognise that—is that there are provisions for the reasonable stuff of compensation to be paid when somebody is required to work. Secondly it means that the employer must have a good reason for requiring the employee to be available for work in the first place. That cannot be to the point of changing shifts at the last moment without paying reasonable compensation. The notice period for changes or cancellation of shifts must also be reasonable—an objective test in the courts—and crucially must be included in the employment agreement. So it is now much clearer in the law that having agreed hours in an employment agreement is an expectation that will be upheld by the courts.There are other clauses that contain vital stuff for this bill records relating to minimum entitlements in clause 84 “4B Employer’s general obligation to keep records relating to minimum entitlement provisions”. The employer has an active obligation to keep records and stuff that allow and require those records to be bona fide to be categorical and to be on the record so that there is nowhere for the employer to hide. It reminds me of one time when I was holding the immigration portfolio and we were looking at people rorting the system with foreign fishing crews and somebody’s employment records were on a computer that just happened to jump overboard off the ship.KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): It is my pleasure to speak to Part 2 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. I have got in my hand here one piece of A4 paper with two sides to it. It is probably one of the most important pieces of paper that we have got in this House for workers this year. It is Supplementary Order Paper 155 in the name of my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway. The first two of his amendments to Part 2 have been well traversed the functional one being one of the changes to clause 87 that provides for a new section 67E(2) which many of my colleagues on this side of the Chamber have spoken about. Basically that does away with zero-hour contracts. I do not want to concentrate on that one but I do want to speak to the third and the fourth amendments on Supplementary Order Paper 155 that Iain Lees-Galloway has put forward in his name.I think it speaks to one of the concerns that the member from New Zealand First Clayton Mitchell raised in his contribution earlier on in this debate in that the fact that we have got a clause that does away with zero-hour contracts is good—technically we cannot do that—but it also I think tightens the noose to prevent employers from essentially doing the same thing by any other means.The part of Supplementary Order Paper 155 that I want to first look at is again a change to clause 87. The amendment replaces new section 67E(5) with a new passage that says: “an employer and an employee who is remunerated for agreed hours of work by way of salary may agree that the employee’s remuneration includes compensation for the employee making himself or herself available for work under an availability provision.”That is one way that I think Supplementary Order Paper 155 is very pragmatic in the way that it is saying: if you are a salaried worker and you have got guaranteed hours but you are expected to be available then we can work that expectation of availability into your salary. Rather than wait for it to come along later we are going to make sure it is dealt with at the very beginning of your contract that you sign with your employer and we are going to work some more money into your contract to make sure that you are compensated for if you are made to be available and you are not asked to work in those hours.Again I think that is one really good way that Iain Lees-Galloway has protected workers from not being I guess—for want of a better term—screwed by their employers by another means. We have taken away that main clause that says that we will do away with the zero-hour contracts but there is not another loophole that the employer can go through to not pay that employee as much money if they have been asked to be available during other hours but they are not actually either warned that they are going to not work during those hours or compensated during those hours. So that is one way that I am really happy that Supplementary Order Paper 155 protects the workers out there.The other amendment I want to talk about in Supplementary Order Paper 155 is the one that amends new section 67G. Please bear with me because I am going to read it out. I think people at home would want to hear this because the concern as we have heard in this House around zero-hour contracts is real. I had one father call me on a Friday night worried about his daughter and the unfair practices of her employer at the time which was a shop not too far away from here. If anyone wants to have a juice it is TANK down on Lambton Quay. He was really concerned about the practices of that employer just down the road from here. He was saying: “It is not fair that my daughter is asked to be on call and given close to no hours of availability. How is my daughter expected to work if she does not know when she is going to work or how much she is going to get paid?”.I think that the new provision that Iain Lees-Galloway has got within Supplementary Order Paper 155 new section 67G(2) and (3) will speak directly to the concerns of that parent. He was not actually from my electorate. He called me—I do not know how he got hold of my number; he was outside of my electorate. He just wanted to make sure he could speak to someone to tell someone in this Parliament how outraged he was that his daughter was being treated this way. I think that that is fair that he did that and I am glad that his voice is being heard. I am glad that Iain Lees-Galloway has worked on those concerns.I want to talk about new section 67G(2) and (3) because to do so hopefully will put that father at ease as he may think that there is another loophole within this legislation that will disadvantage his daughter.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.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): It has been a while—thank you Mr Chairman. I would like to speak to a clause that I actually do not think has been addressed in the debate at all so far this evening and that is clause 86A of the bill—not something that is going to be amended by any of the Supplementary Order Papers this evening. What clause 86A does is it amends section 65 of the Employment Relations Act which relates to the form and content of individual employment agreements. It amends section 65(2)(a)(iv) which says that an individual employment agreement must include “an indication of the arrangements relating to the times the employee is to work;”. That is a very weak statement about having the actual hours that the employee is going to work included in their employment agreement.Going back to when we first were trying to think of ways to address the issue of zero-hour contracts some amendments around that particular clause of this bill were actually what we initially started working with. What clause 86A does is it actually adds some new words to that clause so it will now read that the individual employment agreement must include “any agreed hours of work specified in accordance with section 67C or if no hours of work are agreedan indication of the arrangements relating to the times the employee is to work;”. That is considerably stronger than what we have in the current legislation although if I had my way we would probably strengthen it a bit more than what we have got.What we have now got is a much stronger indication—really a much stronger hint to employers—that the default position in employment agreements ought to be that hours of work are included. The hours of work should be agreed between the employer and the employee and those hours of work should be included. Later in the bill new section 67C(2) in clause 87 says that “hours of work includes any or all of the following: (a) the number of guaranteed hours of work: (b) the days of the week on which work is to be performed: (c) the start and finish times of work: (d) any flexibility in the matters referred to in paragraph (b) or (c).”I think about the dispute that is going on between Bunnings and its employees who are members of the FIRST Union and that is all around this matter. It is something I guess finer than the zero-hour contract issue: it is the issue of being able to mutually agree what their days and hours of work and their start and finish times should be. What Bunnings wants to do is basically to be able to dictate what those are. At the moment that is mutually agreed between the employer and the employee; Bunnings wants to shift that balance of power to the employer and away from the employee.Although these changes in the legislation certainly take us in the right direction and give a much clearer indication to the employer that those hours of work—those start and finish times—and the days of work ought to be in the employment agreement it does not say that they must be. In fact actually the amendment that I would have liked to see would not have said that they must be but that where practicable they should be to make it absolutely clear that that is the default position for employment agreements particularly individual employment agreements. Collective employment agreements will have this sorted because unions will bargain that for their members. It is the individual employment agreements where people are having to bargain for themselves that really concern me. Although this is stronger—and I am pleased to see any strengthening no matter how incremental it is—we could have gone further.I will be watching very closely to see what the impact of the changes introduced by clause 86A will be: how those actually work out in practical terms and how they are implemented. Certainly if we do not see the response from employers that I am sure the Government also hopes to see from these changes then we need to look at something a little bit stronger than what we have in there.I would also like to just briefly speak to Denise Roche’s Supplementary Order Paper 151 because I think Denise Roche is the only person who has spoken to her Supplementary Order Paper so far.JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): I would like to just address some comments to Mr Clayton Mitchell’s Supplementary Order Paper 150. I believe as a member of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): No no. I do not think you want to yet. I think you want to wait until we get on to Part 3. All right?JONATHAN YOUNG: Right. Thank you.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.BRETT HUDSON (National): I move that the question be now put.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): No I did not hear it—there is no point in moving it if no one else is going to call. I am going to put the question anyway.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 154 in the name of the Hon Michael Woodhouse to Part 2 be agreed to.Amendments agreed to.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 151 in the name of Denise Roche to clause 87 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the question That the amendments be agreed to.Ayes 58New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12.Noes 63New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendments not agreed to.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 151 in the name of Denise Roche to clause 89 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the question That the amendment be agreed to.Ayes 58New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12.Noes 63New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendment not agreed to.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 155 in the name of Iain Lees-Galloway to clause 87 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the question That the amendments be agreed to.Ayes 120New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12; Māori Party 2; United Future 1.Noes 1ACT New Zealand 1.Amendments agreed to.Part 2 as amended agreed to.Parts 3 to 5 schedules 1 to 6 and clauses 1 and 2The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I now want to seek the leave of the Committee to consider the following three parts and the preliminary clauses as one question. I will allow members to go across the range of what is left and the preliminary clauses but as part of that leave if we start voting by 9.55 p.m. we will continue and finish all of the votes. Is there any objection to that process? There appears to be none so the question now is that clauses 1 and 2 clauses 114 to 136 and schedules 1 to 6 be agreed to. I will put the votes separately.CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): I note that we have only about 20 minutes to talk to this and so I had better get cracking because there is a lot to be said and to be fair I would like to hear some of the contributions including from Minister Woodhouse with regard to casual employment. I believe that Jonathan Young is also going to be speaking on it.Our amendment which introduces casual loading into this agreement is I think vitally important and it is one that actually covers off one of the loopholes or unintended consequences that we are seeing happen time and time again. We have gone through the zero-hour contract provisions. We are specifically talking about those people who are on casual employment agreements.As I said earlier on we had a number of submitters submitting with regard to how they were adversely affected when it comes to having uncertainty with their work conditions. The one situation I raised was to do with a lawyer who was on a casual employment agreement who was finding it difficult to make ends meet because by the nature of the employment it was very casual.What we are proposing here under our amendment is to put a casual loading on to any casual employment agreement. What we have come up with is an amount of 19 percent. The breakdown of that 19 percent casual loading comes down to a 4.4 percent loading to look at the Holidays Act with regard to statutory holidays. We have a 1.6 percent loading which is in actual fact a loading because that is relating to bereavement leave and sick leave. Of course if you are employed part-time or full time you would not necessarily be available for those provisions after 6 months of employment so we are looking to pay that in advance.Then we are looking at 8 percent holiday pay which of course is not actually a loading; it is what you are entitled to regardless. But paying this upfront actually works towards also looking after the interests of the employer who does not need to keep the records and have these accumulated fees paid out to staff who are genuinely employed in a casual agreement. So that worker would have that 8 percent paid up front also.To round that off which gets us to 19 percent is a 5 percent loading. So if you looked at it collectively you are talking about a 6.6 percent loading which is a 5 percent loading for the casual employment aspect of Supplementary Order Paper 150; 1.6 percent which is to do with bereavement leave and sick leave; and then of course everything else you are entitled to.What we are trying to say here and what it will clearly remedy is the fact that if people who are employed casually are going to be paid a premium the employers are incentivised to get that casual employee on to a permanent contract either part-time or full time. If they decide to do that and if they can manage their rostering system to allow that to happen there is no penalty for them. They will simply go straight on to a part-time or a full-time contract which will give them an idea of having certainty around the hours that they are going to get. They will still be entitled to their KiwiSaver provisions.We hope that this amendment gets support throughout the Committee because it does tighten up the final aspect in relation to the casual employment agreements creating a loophole to somehow potentially allow those zero-hour contracts or uncertainty of hours in an employment agreement. I would like to hear from other members in the Committee and so I will wrap it up there. Certainly with regard to support we would love to see that happen. Thank you.JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): Mr Chair I understand that everything in politics is a matter of timing! I would just like to address Mr Clayton Mitchell’s comments and thank him for his contribution and also thank him for his contribution in the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and I believe as I said before that as a member of the select committee he warrants a response. We have had many people speak on this bill in the Committee and particularly those members of the select committee have brought some thoughtfulness to it.In terms of Supplementary Order Paper 150 which the member has been talking about and has presented right now the proposal was intended to create a loading on any casual employment giving benefit to the workers and an incentive to the employer to move the employee on to a part-time or full-time contract. As he listed it off that loading equates to a 19 percent increase on the average hourly rate: 1.6 percent for sick and bereavement leave 4.4 percent for statutory holidays 8 percent for standard holiday pay and a 5 percent casual loading.It is not intended in this bill to dispense with casual agreements. Some people may not like them but casual agreements have their place in the job market. As we heard from many submitters casual agreements work for many people. It is also important to understand that casual employees already have an 8 percent loading for holiday pay. If the employee’s work is so intermittent or irregular that it is impractical to provide 4 weeks’ holiday then holiday pay is paid at no less than 8 percent of gross earnings.Sick leave and bereavement leave are also an entitlement. An employee has an entitlement if they have completed 6 months’ continuous employment with the employer or if they have worked at least 10 hours a week on average and no less than 1 hour each week and 40 hours each monthover a 6-month period.If a casual worker is an employee who is required to work on a public holiday that must be stated in the agreement. If they work on a public holiday they receive time and a half. If they do not work on a public holiday but the day would otherwise be a working day then they are paid for that day.What I am saying is that many of these loadings that the member has presented in his Supplementary Order Paper already exist in employment law so essentially what he is adding is the 5 percent casual loading. The reason why with due respect we are not supporting his Supplementary Order Paper is that his 5 percent casual loading might actually be an incentive for employers to have more casual workers rather than to bring them on into permanent part-time or full-time work. We just wanted to make it known that that was our view and we thank the member for his contribution.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): I think the comments from the previous two contributors to the debate raised the issue of casual work and the casualisation of the workforce.I agree with a comment the Minister in the chair made some time ago which was that casual agreements do have a place in the overall framework. In fact when employers came to submit on this legislation many of the employers—perhaps after a little bit of questioning from the Labour Party—agreed that if they have got permanent agreements casual agreements and fixed-term agreements then there was no need for zero-hour contracts. And it is great because we are not going to have zero-hour contracts but we are going to have permanent agreements casual agreements and fixed-term agreements. Only one of those is defined in our legislation.This is actually a debate—this is a live debate about whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing to define casual and permanent agreements in the legislation and to perhaps tag to those casual agreements some casual loading of the type that Clayton Mitchell is proposing with his Supplementary Order Paper 150. I do not want to necessarily express a firm view one way or the other on that except to say that it is a live debate but I do see some merit in defining casual agreements. I think that by defining casual agreements we would deal with a lot of the issues that Clayton Mitchell is trying to deal with by including the loading.One thing that the loading does—or at least it is one thing that is the intention of including the loading—is for it to be a disincentive. It is not intended to be an incentive to put employees on a casual agreement but actually it is intended to be a disincentive to employers to put people on casual agreements or to at least make them stop and think about whether it is in their best interests to have people on casual agreements or whether they would be better off having them on a permanent part-time agreement with guaranteed hours. Obviously there are other aspects to the loading as well that Clayton Mitchell has raised in terms of equity such as just what casual employees are entitled to and we already have that 8 percent loading recognising annual leave.I think there is a lot more to it and that may very well be one of the next things this House needs to think about such as permanent agreements being for permanent work—so where work is permanently available that should not be provided through a casual agreement. I also think that there is a lack of understanding amongst many employers about what the appropriate use of casual agreements is. Although we have case law and although we have a degree of advice from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment we do not have them in law and that makes it very difficult for many employers to actually use them properly.We are going to support the New Zealand First proposal. I suspect it is not going to get up tonight but this is an issue we have to come back to. I am very keen for members from around the House to address some of these broader issues around casualisation and how we make sure that the range of employment agreements that we have available to us are being used properly.I just want to make one last comment since we are ranging over all the remaining parts which includes the title. The title of this legislation is the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. That seems a very bland title for a bill that extends paid parental leave eliminates zero-hour contracts—after we have finished here tonight—and improves employment standards. Of course that is actually because this started off dealing only with employment standards. After the Labour Party and Sue Moroney and the 26 for Babies campaign ran that wonderful campaign the Government realised it had to act on paid parental leave. And after the Unite union and the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and the Labour Party and other Opposition parties ran our campaigns around zero-hour contracts the Government realised it had to act on that too. It threw those two issues into this legislation hence the Employment Standards Legislation Bill deals with those.Do you know what? We are happy. We are going to be celebrating after tonight. We have made huge advances tonight. We have also identified the next tranche of work that this House needs to consider in employment relations and I hope that the cordial approach that we have built around employment relations might continue and we might actually start to reverse some of the damage that has been done in recent years and make some real progress.ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition): I feel privileged and honoured to take a call on these final concluding stages of this piece of legislation. The Employment Standards Legislation Bill is vital in a world and in a labour market when actually standards minimum standards and the idea of certainty are becoming rare commodities for far too many workers. The idea now that we have a provision that makes it very clear for workers that they cannot be compelled into an agreement that tells them they must be available or must be at work with no guarantee of any work at all—the fact that that has now gone when that was endorsed in the earlier draft of this legislation is a welcome development in this legislation. So I think the Committee tonight—although I would never suggest it congratulate itself—can reflect well with the rest of New Zealand that it has done its job of reflecting the sorts of standards that New Zealand would expect in our employment legislation.The same can be also said for the parental leave and employment protection parts of the legislation—now having provision for parents whose child is born prematurely so that they can have some certainty for themselves that those entitlements will be available for them.This draws on work that members on this side of the House have done. These are basic things that working New Zealanders once upon a time expected—took for granted perhaps. Now we live in an age when for a lot of working people the idea that they not only have standards but have the means to enforce them is becoming something that is out of their reach. So I think it is a great moment for this House that we take this legislation which started its life in an inferior form and through the good work of MPs—certainly on this side of the House and indeed in the whole House—and have now arrived at a bill that is in a shape and we can proudly go out to all New Zealanders and say: “This seriously starts to set good minimum standards.”The provisions relating to the requirement for employers to keep a record of minimum entitlements for their employees—I in the early part of my professional life learnt how to conduct a wages and time book inspection which is something that you do not hear much of these days. In fact I am not sure even labour inspectors know how to do them. But the idea now that employers know that they have to keep a record of employees’ minimum entitlements and the extent to which their employees are getting them I think starts to turn the clock back which we had seen ticking in the last 30 years and the idea that it is OK to talk about minimum standards—this bill now reflects that.Let us acknowledge and let us celebrate the work that has been done. The Minister has worked very hard obviously with members on this side and with no less a personage than Iain Lees-Galloway to produce a piece of legislation about which everybody in this Committee can leave tonight and say “The New Zealand Parliament has done its job and the interests of working New Zealanders are once again proudly at the forefront of doing something progressive and constructive and beneficial” which stands in stark contrast to much other employment legislation that has passed through this House in recent years.I conclude by saying to all members in this Committee who have been part of this very important debate—some would say struggle—that we now have a piece of legislation that is palatable and we can look in the eyes of all New Zealand working people and say: “This is good.”DENISE ROCHE (Green): I want to talk to Part 3 of the bill and in particular to Supplementary Order Paper 150 from Clayton Mitchell which I thoroughly agree with and the Greens will be supporting. The reason we will be supporting it is that earlier in a different part of the debate the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety talked about mutual obligations and mutuality between employer and employee. One of the concerns that we see arising around the casual workforce is the overuse of casuals and the undercutting of permanent paid staff in the workplace because casuals are being used. That was the concern with zero-hour contracts as well before we eliminated them tonight.The effect of this Supplementary Order Paper would be that anybody who is employed as a casual would actually have a loading on top of around 19 percent. In my original member’s bill where I talked about this I actually talked about a loading of time and a half which is a substantial increase. It is probably more than what is actually prevalent in the Australian workforce of casual workers where they do frequently have a loading of 25 percent or more.Clayton Mitchell’s Supplementary Order Paper actually says that if you are a casual you do not get bereavement leave you do not get holiday pay you do not get sick pay you do not get KiwiSaver—there is a whole range of rights that other workers get that are basically stripped away from these workers which essentially puts them into a cheaper category of work. That is another incentive if you like for employers who may be unscrupulous to want to overuse those casual workers. If you put a loading on their hourly rate and have that defined in legislation then what you have is a disincentive to use casuals.I think that if we are looking at wanting to create a society where everybody gets a fair go where people can earn enough to live on then we need to be looking at the hours of work and how those hours of work for ordinary working New Zealanders play out. Casual work although it is obviously useful particularly in those peaks—and I think previous speakers on this side of the Chamber particularly Sue Moroney have talked about the ability for most industries and most workplaces to be able to predict the amount of work that is happening and so you can top that up with casual workers. That has been the standard practice for decades and decades. What we have now though is a situation where the overuse of casuals can actually undermine and does undermine permanent employment.The casual workers themselves are worse off than any other worker. It is also harder for them to actually fight for their entitlements because of the very nature of being casual. These are the vulnerable workers whom I think we should talk about. Thank you.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 154 in the name of the Hon Michael Woodhouse to Part 3 be agreed to.Amendments agreed to.A party vote was called for on the question That the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 150 in the name of Clayton Mitchell to Part 3 be agreed to.Ayes 58New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12.Noes 63New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendments not agreed to.Part 3 as amended agreed to.Part 4 agreed to.Part 5 agreed to.Schedules 1 to 3 agreed to.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 154 in the name of the Hon Michael Woodhouse to schedule 4 be agreed to.Amendment agreed to.Schedule 4 as amended agreed to.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 154 in the name of the Hon Michael Woodhouse to schedules 5 and 6 be agreed to.Amendments agreed to.Schedules 5 and 6 as amended agreed to.Clause 1 agreed to.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am ruling out Sue Moroney’s amendment to clause 2 because it was contingent on an amendment that was lost being passed.Clause 2 agreed to.The Committee divided the bill into the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill the Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 3) the Holidays Amendment Bill the Minimum Wage Amendment Bill and the Wages Protection Amendment Bill pursuant to Supplementary Order Paper153.Progress to be reported presently.House resumed.The Chairperson reported the Employment Stands Legislation Bill with amendment and divided it into the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Amendment Bill the Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 3) the Holidays Amendment Bill the Minimum Wage Amendment Bill and the Wages Protection Amendment Bill and reported no progress on the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill and the Health (Protection) Amendment Bill.Report adopted.