Moroney Sue: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 22 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:188. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour):Thank you for the opportunity to make another contribution on this bill. I want to make an additional point on clause 56 in Part 1 because my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway spoke on—quite rightly and I think he was the first person to speak on it—the effect of the reduction in wages for undertaking a partial strike. I want to add the point that it is most frequently our emergency services that actually use this provision when they have a dispute with their employer and there is a very good reason why it is frequently our emergency services that use this provision when they have a dispute with their employer. It is because they are so reluctant to take full strike action to address any dispute that they might have with their employer.I will use the example of the firefighters. People probably did not even notice but over the last year our firefighters have been in a dispute with their employer. People did not notice because fires kept getting attended to and the accidents kept getting attended to. All of those things kept happening because the firefighters did not withdraw their labour in order to get their dispute sorted out. What they did was to take partial strike action—that is they worked to rule. They were on duty the whole time but they chose not to do some duties that were actually outside what they were contracted to do: filling out some reports sending some emails—some administrative functions that were not core to the service that we the New Zealand public rely on them for.Why I am describing this in some detail is that without much fuss and bother they were able to demonstrate their value to their employer and get their industrial dispute sorted out without it impacting at all—at all—on the New Zealand public. What I believe clause 56 will do—I think Iain Lees-Galloway is right about this—is that it will actually mean that if employees the firefighters and other emergency service workers are going to be actually penalised for that they may well say: “Well let’s just go the whole hog. Let’s not muck around with a partial strike. Let’s actually do the whole thing.” That is actually going to harm the New Zealand public if it is brought about. I sat in on some of the submissions on this bill and asked some of the unions that had used this provision about that. They said that the reason why they used partial strikes was the nature of the services that their union members undertook and they said that they really wanted to try every other avenue first before they withdrew their labour and therefore harmed the public in that way. They said they believed that this provision would put more pressure on members of their unions to actually take much more drastic action. I think that that is the thing that the Government does not want to do but I think that this will be an unintended consequence of clause 56 in Part 1 of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill.I want to talk about the 40 percent of children living in poverty in this country who are in working households. I want to talk about them because the Prime Minister wrote in his Speech from the Throne that child poverty was going to be a priority and yet here the Government is in its very first act of the 51st Parliament moving to reduce wages in the very households where those 40 percent of children living in poverty actually reside. I think that the Government is going about this in completely the wrong way because it is those same families who are going to have this pressure on them. When the employer says to them “No you can’t have a wage increase this year but I’ll tell you what. If you agree to give up your lunch break and your tea break I might see fit to give you half a percent.” it is these families who are going to come under the pressure to actually give away their right to have a lunch break and a tea break. That will be completely legal under what the Government is proposing and yet they would not be able to do that under the current law. Under the current law yes they can bargain for their wage increase but they must retain the legal right to have a lunch break and a meal break. It is these very families who are going to have this pressure on them and that is the mechanism that is going to be used. So the pretence from the National Government that workers are going to have control over whether they are going to have a tea break and a lunch break we know to be a complete nonsense. It actually belongs in the crypt where Bill Birch’s idea that workers were going to have freedom of choice to keep their penal rates belongs.