Hipkins Chris: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 30 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:442. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I begin by noting that the member who just spoke Jonathan Young did not name one real actual example in his entire contribution. This is all about ideology for the National Party. It is all about anti-unionism and “anti-workerism”. It is not actually about real people. This is fundamentally a question about fairness and decency. This is about the working conditions of everyday ordinary New Zealanders who go to work because they want to work hard because they want to provide a better future for themselves and their families and they simply cannot get ahead under this National Government.It speaks volumes about the priorities of this Government that it seems to think the way to make New Zealand more internationally competitive and the way to improve our job market is to drive down the working conditions of those who are currently in the workforce. That seems to be National’s entire approach. Jonathan Young pointed out that 85 percent of what we manufacture in New Zealand is exported and we are competing in an international market. I say to Jonathan Young that he is absolutely right on that but we will not improve our international competitiveness—we should not be striving to improve our international competitiveness—by driving down the working conditions of New Zealanders.Iain Lees-Galloway: Race to the bottom.CHRIS HIPKINS: If we are simply going to engage in the race to the bottom all New Zealanders—all New Zealanders—will lose out.I want to talk particularly about the amendments to Part 6A which will affect vulnerable workers and the changes that the Government is going to make there because there is no better example in this legislation of the way that National is working to drive down the working conditions of everyday ordinary New Zealanders who go out and work hard to get ahead.Why do we have Part 6A? We have Part 6A to stop the cycle of contracting out—and constantly contracting out the same work—being used as a way to drive down employment conditions for people in those service-level industries. Take for example a cleaning company for an office block. Let us say it employs 19 workers in that particular cleaning company and every year it re-lets the contract. What is the main thing that the people bidding for that contract are going to be competing on? They are going to be competing on labour costs. So every hard-won gain that an employee cleaning an office block gets out of one employer could be taken away within a short space of time by another employer who bids for the contract based on a lower labour cost.Part 6A is designed to protect those workers and stop that from happening. So why is the Government taking it away? The Government says it is taking those protections away—watering down those protections—only for people who work in outfits of 20 or fewer employees. Here is the question for the Government: what is to stop a large company—let us call it Spotless—simply setting up a whole lot of subsidiary companies each employing fewer than 20 workers at each of its worksites? That is what companies will do. This will guarantee that no matter how large a company is it will be able to opt out of its obligations under Part 6A by simply structuring its business affairs in a way that it can exploit the loophole that this bill creates. It removes protection for vulnerable workers such as cleaners and the people who scrub pots and pans in kitchens. It removes all of those protections from them and it is blatantly unfair. It comes down to a question of fairness and this legislation simply is not fair. Driving down wage costs in New Zealand is not a good strategy for increasing the number of jobs that we have or for improving our international competitiveness.I want to talk about the duty to conclude collective bargaining and I particularly want to talk about the Ports of Auckland and the duty to conclude collective bargaining there. Had there not been such a duty to conclude its bargaining would have ended long ago and its work would have been contracted out. The provisions in the Employment Relations Act stopped that from happening. These are the very provisions that the National Government is trying to remove.Simon Bridges specifically quoted the Ports of Auckland earlier on when he was justifying these changes. Of course we know that this is part of the orchestrated smear campaign that the National Party and its surrogates such as Cameron Slater have been engaged in when they have tried to drive down the working conditions for those who work for the Ports of Auckland. We know that now for a fact because it came out in Nicky Hager’s book that the National Party and others were colluding and that the Ports of Auckland were paying money to bloggers such as Cameron Slater to smear people who were involved in that particular industrial action.Hon Annette King: Disgusting.CHRIS HIPKINS: It is absolutely disgusting. These are the people whom John Key admits to talking to regularly on the phone but not in his capacity as Prime Minister of course only in some other capacity. Perhaps he gets Moonbeam to pass the notes across for him. But actually these are the people the National Party chooses to collude with. This is the style of dirty politics this Government is quite happy to own and quite happy to engage with. I think it absolutely stinks. It stinks particularly when it uses those links to drive down the working conditions for ordinary everyday New Zealand workers who simply want to go out there do a hard day’s work get paid appropriately for it and have appropriate working conditions so that they can fulfil the Kiwi dream which is about making a better life for yourself and your family. The everyday workers out there want to be able to do that and this Government is making it harder and harder for them to do so.I want to talk about rest and meal breaks and I want to acknowledge the over 50000 New Zealanders who in 1 week alone have signed a petition against these changes—Hon Member: 51000.CHRIS HIPKINS: Over 51000. Here it is; I have a pile of it. This is only in a week—this is only in a week—that these people have signed a petition against this. I suspect there would be a heck of lot more than this if the petition had been running for longer. I want to point out that primarily this is not going to affect the unions—this is not a union argument. Primarily it is going to affect those who are not covered by a union collective agreement. We are talking about young New Zealanders getting their first job. Mums and dads out there will be interested to know this. These are their kids we are talking about who are going to be going out to get their first job and who are going to find out that their rights at work are being eroded by the National Government.Iain Lees-Galloway has already given the example of the pilot working for Jetstar. I want to talk about another case. I found a very good case of a bus driver. The tramways union raised the issue last year that some bus drivers in Auckland have been resorting to urinating in bottles because they are being ticketed when they park at public bus stops to use public toilets. That is because they were not being given at the time the appropriate rest and meal breaks so that they could go to the toilet. Is that the type of country that this National Government wants to live in—one where bus drivers get their buses ticketed because that is the only way that they can go to the bathroom? I think that is absolutely disgraceful and yet that is what this Government is quite happily signing up to with the changes that it is making.I mentioned young workers before. Well young workers—new first-time workers—go and work in places like McDonald’s. The Unite union launched action on behalf of McDonald’s workers last year over the company’s failure to provide workers with meal breaks. One of the young McDonald’s workers who appeared before the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee was then dismissed from the company in part allegedly for his appearance before the select committee. That is absolutely disgraceful. I think that those young New Zealanders who go into those first jobs should have the guaranteed right to have a meal break. I think that some of the examples that the Government has quoted—for example it is talking about aged-care workers. I think aged-care workers do a fantastic job and if they need a break to have a cup of tea and to go to the bathroom and to put their feet up for 15 minutes I think they should damn well get it. I think that it is absolutely disgraceful that this Government wants to take that away from people who are working in the aged-care sector and early childhood education. They are doing some of the most valuable jobs for our society and this Government thinks it is OK to erode their working conditions to the point where they cannot even have a cup of tea and go to the bathroom and I think that that is absolutely disgraceful. This is a question of fairness and decency and this Government is simply turning the other way.Eroding the working conditions of ordinary everyday New Zealanders is not the way that John Key is going to deliver on the brighter future that he promised New Zealanders 6 years ago and thus far has failed to deliver. New Zealanders did vote in large numbers for the National Government over the last three elections waiting for that brighter future. If this continues they are still going to be waiting in 3 years’ time. Eroding their rights at work and eroding their pay and conditions is not the way to deliver on the promises that the National Government has made. We should be aspiring to a higher-wage economy not a lower-wage economy in the way that this National Government is doing. We should be aspiring to have some of the best or the best employment conditions in the world. We should not be racing to the bottom so that we can compete internationally with countries that use sweatshops—and that seems to be the argument that Jonathan Young was putting forward earlier in this debate.This is a bad piece of legislation. This is a piece of legislation that will have an impact on every New Zealander who goes out there and works hard for salary and wages during the day. It is wrong it is unfair and the Labour Party will continue to vigorously oppose it.