Moroney Sue: Employment Relations (Breaks and Infant Feeding) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Moroney Sue: Employment Relations (Breaks and Infant Feeding) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:646;Page:15523] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 It is my very great pleasure to rise and speak to the first reading of the Employment Relations (Breaks and Infant Feeding) Amendment Bill which seeks to amend the Employment Relations Act. It sure beats depending on the ballot for a member’s bill to be drawn. I say that because one part of this legislation was the subject of a member’s bill that I put into the ballot towards the end of last year. 
I am very pleased to have gained the support of my colleagues and I thank my colleagues and the Minister of Labour in particular for taking up the issue in a Government bill which has come into the House today for its first reading. I also congratulate Steve Chadwick on the infant feeding part of this bill because that was the subject of a member’s bill that she lodged and we all know that this particular issue is dear to her heart. I also thank my colleague Charles Chauvel who when this was a lowly ranked member’s bill actually helped me with its drafting to ensure that it did come within the legal context—so my thank you to Charles. 
It was appropriate that the announcement was made by the Minister Maryan Street during the Easter weekend centenary commemoration of the 1908 crib-time dispute at Blackball. As some members have alluded to the miners took industrial action to ensure they could get adequate time for rest and sustenance before undertaking their jobs. We all know how dangerous the job of mining is how physically demanding it is and the importance of those miners undertaking collective action to bring the matter to the attention of their employers—which leads us to be addressing this issue in law a century later. Many members have asked how come it is not in the law already. I have a potted history here to inform the members of the House and any listeners as to how that occurred. 
In 1908 and thereabouts the right for meal breaks was put into law for various sectors of the workforce. Of course in those days the legislation was done industry by industry and that remained so for quite a period of time. However in 1981 under a National Government all these various industrial parts of the law were collapsed into one piece of legislation called the Factories and Commercial Premises Act. In 1981 the parts of those various pieces of legislation that were dropped out by that amalgamated Act of Parliament were the legal entitlements to meal breaks and rest periods. In 1981 that did not trouble anyone too much because all working people in New Zealand were covered by national awards which prescribed the meal breaks and the rest periods. So when the Factories and Commercial Premises Act was brought in and it did not include those breaks and rest periods it did not have an impact on anyone because everyone was covered by a national award. 
However in 1991 when the Employment Contracts Act was enacted—again by a National Government—a lot of workers were exposed to no longer having their legal entitlement to meal breaks and rest breaks because that legislation demolished the national award system. That meant that a whole range of workers did not have an automatic legal entitlement to meal breaks and rest periods. So that is the history; that is how we got to the point where we are now addressing this issue and bringing it back into the law so that it is the entitlement of all working people in New Zealand—and so it should be. 
Last year when I submitted my member’s bill on this subject into the member’s ballot I had a launch of the subject at the University of Waikato. I thank the Centre for Labour and Trade Union Studies at the University of Waikato for participating in the launch of the bill at the time. They were very interested in it from the perspective of an issue that they called “donated time”. Many people in that department are concerned about what they call the ongoing creep of time that belongs to employees actually being taken over by employers with no further compensation. However I come to this legislation from a slightly different perspective. I come at it from the perspective that it is a basic human right for people to have regular and proper breaks at work from a health and safety perspective and from the perspective that this is good for work-life balance. It is about how we are able to operate at work how refreshed we are when we get home and how we are able to interact with our families.  
I want to refer just briefly to the health and safety aspects of this bill so that people are very clear about how meal breaks and rest periods at work fit into the health and safety category. In 2007 the Department of Labour did some research into the causative factors associated with summertime workplace fatalities. I was very pleased to work with the then Minister of Labour Ruth Dyson on the terms of reference for the research to be undertaken. It was carried out primarily to look at the blip that we seem to have every year in this country in relation to summertime holiday fatalities in the workplace. 
However the research inadvertently discovered that there are two peak times when work-related fatal incidents are most likely to occur. One is late morning between 10.30 a.m. and 12.30 p.m. and the other is mid-afternoon between 2.30 p.m. and 3.30 p.m. which is roughly about the time when people ought to be taking breaks. So although some further research needs to be undertaken the researchers suspect that when they delve further into this they may well find that these accidents and fatalities occurred because people had not had proper breaks throughout the day they were fatigued and they may have become dehydrated and not been able to focus on their jobs as well as they may have if they had had proper sustenance and rest breaks. So perhaps that is a major contributing cause to many of these fatalities. 
During the course of this debate some questions were raised as to whether legislation is necessary or whether there is just a need for a little bit of education. One of the reasons I saw fit to prepare a member’s bill on this issue was the examples I had brought to me about workers who were not getting access to meal breaks and rest periods in their workplace. I want to share a few of those examples with the House. 
Probably the example that shocked me the most was one that occurred last year in Hamilton to a young 17-year-old woman in her first job. She was working for a very large retail company in Hamilton. She was new to the workplace and did not know the rules very well but she decided to go and have morning tea at about the same time as her colleagues did. She was rather surprised when she was called into the office disciplined and given an employment warning for daring to take a morning-tea break. When she asked how it was that other people in the workplace were taking their meal breaks and were not getting disciplined for it her employer said to her: “That’s because it’s in their collective employment agreement. It is not in your individual employment agreement.” Sure enough when she looked at the individual employment agreement she had signed it was silent on the issue of rest periods and meal breaks. The moral to this story is that she very quickly joined the union and became party to the collective employment agreement. 
That story from just last year demonstrates that sadly this issue is alive and kicking in our workplaces and it is not just in small workplaces or in places where perhaps under Paula Bennett’s analogy employers might not know about health and safety. Such employers may not have access to health and human resources but this company was a large employer that ought to have known better yet that is what was occurring. I have also had examples from people working in the petrol service station industry who have come to me saying that they cannot get meal breaks. I have had bus drivers coming to me to say that they are trying to negotiate into their collective employment agreements—literally as we speak—decent rest breaks at work and they are getting a solid no from their employers. So this issue is very much alive this year. 
This is an issue that people right across the political spectrum respond to. People think it is unfair that all workers do not have the rights to these breaks. I know that because in the 3 weeks leading up to the announcement I collected a petition in support of getting these breaks put into law and people readily signed that petition. They were quite shocked to discover that that right was not in the law and they readily agreed that it ought to be. 
I conclude by saying I wish the select committee luck in listening to the submissions on this bill. I hope to come to the committee and listen to some of those submissions myself. I feel I am grieving a little bit for not being on that select committee at the moment. I commend the bill to the House. 
I seek leave to table the petition of the people who support the meal breaks and rest periods going into law. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House.