Twyford Phil: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 30 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:455. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū):I do not know about Seymour—I think I have heard enough Mr Assistant Speaker. I want to start talking about the forestry industry. Forestry is an unregulated industry. It is dominated by contracting. It is devoid of collective bargaining. It is a perfect model of the kind that the Employment Relations Amendment Bill seeks to extend across all sectors and it is the very industry with low rates of unionisation whose workers will be most badly affected by this law. It is an incredibly flexible industry. The members on the Government side of the House talk about flexibility as if it is this great thing that they are bestowing on the New Zealand workforce and New Zealanders but I think they should think pretty seriously about the real-life consequences of these policies and of this bill for New Zealanders in industries like forestry.Tomorrow the Independent Forestry Safety Review Panel will release its report. It is campaigning by the union movement that has brought this about which is ironic given what it going on here with this bill. It was the union campaign that highlighted the hidden shame of the forestry industry not just the accident rate but the appalling terms and conditions in this industry where the tea break legislation which this bill does away with is not even enforced and there is no hope of collective bargaining because of the fragmented nature of the industry. It was these failures that last year saw 10 workers killed and 180 people seriously injured at work it was these failures that left 1200 forestry workers on ACC for more than a year out of a workforce of 6500 and it was these failures that led to the death of workers like forestry worker Charles Finlay who was killed on the job in Tokoroa in July last year.I have here Charles Finlay’s individual employment agreement and at the conclusion of my speech I am going to table it because I think it is appropriate in this debate that members of the House should be able to look at an individual employment agreement from the forestry industry which is the kind of agreement that will be a direct consequence of the legislation that National is passing today. This agreement is what individual bargaining looks like in reality—this is the thing that this bill promotes. It allows employers to favour individuals if they want to and this bill makes it legitimate for an employer to refuse to settle a collective agreement even if it is what the workers want. This agreement says it all. It was signed in 2005 and never updated except for small increases in pay and it has a limitless requirement for hours worked—limitless. Overtime worked was paid at the standard rate and after 27 years in the bush Charles Finlay was earning only $16 an hour regardless of the fact that he was working 10-hour to 12-hour days. I have here as well some of Charles’ payslips and I will come to those later.This agreement was signed before the last Labour Government introduced mandatory tea and lunch breaks in 2008 and when it was signed it included just one break: half an hour for lunch. As I said I also have some of Charles’ payslips and they confirm his pay rate of just $16 an hour. They confirm the long hours he was working in this most dangerous of industries. But I also have some of his timesheets and they tell the real story of work where there is no collective bargaining—as much of this flexibility that the Government is selling as the employer wants and no premium for long hours or experience. The timesheets show that Charles often started work at 4 a.m. and finished at 4 p.m. with a half-hour smoko in between—12-hour days 11½-hour working days in the middle of winter in the middle of the country. Mr Finlay might have had tea breaks as well but if he did these were not in his agreement in 2005 so they would have come about only through the introduction of the law passed in this Parliament by the fifth Labour Government. Charles Finlay was killed at 5.30 in the morning. On the day he was killed it was dark and cold. He had been home barely 12 hours from his work the day before when he was up again and off for more hard hard low-paid and dangerous work. Charles Finlay leaves behind a widow on 80 percent of $16 an hour raising 11-year-old twins and a 21-year-old son.Tomorrow the Independent Forestry Safety Review Panel will recommend that the employment terms and conditions of forestry workers support safe workplaces but today the Government and this Minister makes that much more difficult to achieve. The Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety himself in his first speech in his new role conceded to the Business Leaders’ Health and Safety Forum that there is a link between safety and conditions of work but now we have this bill in the House which does not recognise that. In other industries without collective bargaining it is the same. In fact the four industries that have the most fatalities have minimal or no collective bargaining or organised workers with protection to raise employment issues. I am talking about forestry fishing agriculture and construction. Talk to these workers to see what this bill is trying to deliver for everyone. The wages in dairy farming decreased last year during the boom year while immigration went up. It is an industry out of control with regard to hours of work and low wage rates where 42 percent of the workforce turns over in less than 1 year. That is what an industry looks like when there is no collective bargaining and that is what this National Government wants for everyone.Take the ports. The Government has used—in fact Simon Bridges was very open about saying that the Ports of Auckland dispute was partly the inspiration for this law but let us look at that. Within only a couple of months of a dispute with the Ports of Auckland’s workforce over casualisation the employers told the workers that they were all going to be fired and their work contracted out. It negotiated with foreign stevedoring companies to bring in strikebreakers en masse. That dispute was not protracted—it had been going for only 2 months—and the Ports of Auckland decided to dismiss its entire workforce. Well the members of the Maritime Union of New Zealand—whom I am proud to call my friends; many of whom live in my electorate in west Auckland—stood up to an employer determined to casualise their jobs and take away their rights at work. And that is what this bill is intended to do—to make it easier for employers to do that to their workers.I want to say to Charles Finlay’s widow and children if they are listening to this debate that even though this National Government is determined to weaken the rights of working people and take away their rights at work Charles’ death will not be in vain. New Zealanders are fair people and we in the labour movement will not rest until those rights are restored and strengthened. We stand for fairness at work. We believe in having a high-value economy where people are paid well for skilled secure work not the crude dog-eat-dog 19th century approach that is the hallmark of National’s approach to labour relations. The great irony of this National Government is that it came to office talking about the wage gap between New Zealand and Australia yet every bit of employment legislation it has brought to this House and passed in the last 6 years has been at its heart a determined effort to drive down labour costs.This is not about vilifying all employers. In fact I do not believe there is a groundswell of support from New Zealand employers asking for this law. Hardly any of them submitted. There were more than 13000 submissions on the bill and they were overwhelmingly opposed to this law. But make no mistake—this bill is intensely political. It is the National Party throwing red meat to its more hard-line ideological supporters in the business community. But it will unfortunately incentivise and encourage the worst behaviour by the worst employers. Labour stands for fairness and decency and all of these things are undermined by this legislation in the House today. It is non-union members who will be the worst affected. That is the irony of this. Labour is utterly opposed to this bill.