Roche Denise: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9490. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]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.