Beaumont Carol: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBeaumont Carol: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 19 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16811. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour):Well that speech by Dr Cam Calder was a rather pitiful attempt from across the other side of House on such a major piece of legislation. I intend to take my full 10 minutes because this legislation is hugely significant. This Employment Relations Amendment Bill does a number of things and I just want to outline them for people who are listening. We have got a Government that is saying that this bill makes minor or technical changes to the Employment Relations Act. Nothing could be further from the truth. This bill will actually undermine the wages and conditions of all New Zealanders. This bill works against the key objectives of the Act it seeks to amend in terms of undermining our commitments to working New Zealanders and our international commitments to things like collective bargaining. The main changes focus on collective bargaining and include removing the duty to conclude a collective agreement and allowing employers to opt out of multi-employer collective bargaining which is where we operate across more than one workplace. It has a strike tax to try to make it more difficult for workers when they are trying to settle a collective agreement and they use the ultimate tool that they have to do that. It will make it more difficult. It removes basic entitlements to meal and rest breaks. For people listening to this I ask you whether that sounds like minor or technical changes. I do not think so. I think that this is a Government that is very good at spin. It is very good at just repeating the same messages. Whether or not they are actually accurate is by the by. It is like if you say it often enough it will become the truth. Well in this case I can assure people that that is not the case.The impact around collective bargaining I want to really unpick because collective bargaining is the way that working people together negotiate wages and conditions and improve their position to both promote and protect their interests. That is around improving their wages but it is more than that; it is also around ensuring that they get decent rest breaks have conditions of employment get leave improvements and all of those sorts of things. Most of the things that we would now take for granted in this country the things that we think are normal have been obtained through collective bargaining and through unions and employers reaching agreements on fair wages and conditions. This is about an exchange. When a person works for somebody else they are exchanging their labour. In our value system in this country that exchange is meant to be a fair one. It is meant to be about a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. That is what I was brought up on—that principle. I know that many other New Zealanders believe in that principle as well.This bill undermines that principle. Making it harder to negotiate a collective agreement will make it harder to improve wages and conditions. We have seen that. We have seen that in this country. The evidence is actually there. It was not that long ago that wages in this country were fairly level with wages in Australia. Over the last couple of decades that gap has grown and it is continuing to grow now. There is a differential of between 30 and 40 percent in wage rates for the same jobs cross-Tasman. But it is more than that. Inequality in this country is growing. Those on low and middle incomes are doing it tough out there. If you do not believe me go and talk to your local budget service. Ask them because what those services tell me—and I talk to a lot of budget services in my consumer rights and standards role—is that among the people they are seeing there is an increasing proportion of those people who are in paid work OK? So it is not just people on benefits; it is people who are what you might describe as the working poor—people who are struggling to make ends meet even though they are working. Their wages do not support their family. That is wrong. That should not be how it is in a rich country like this one.I want to ask who suffers the most. Well obviously we could say that children living in families who are struggling to make ends meet certainly suffer but when you look at it it is Māori workers it is Pasifika workers and it is women workers who actually are worse off when we fragment collective bargaining and when we say: “Let’s do it individually. Let’s not worry about getting together as a group and trying to improve our wages and conditions.” The net impact is that those people who are less able to negotiate individually will be far worse off. I just want to say here for the record that it is not just people who are covered by collective agreements who benefit from collective bargaining. Collective bargaining has a much wider reach. It does still have an impact across industries where there is collective bargaining in place. As we reduce that as this bill will do we will see wages driven further down.While I am talking about women and women in the paid workforce I want to acknowledge a woman I worked with and a woman whose funeral I went to today. That is Viv Walker. I worked with Viv at the New Zealand Clerical Workers Union here in Wellington many years ago. Viv was a battler for women workers. At her funeral it was acknowledged that what she was saying to people up to the day she died was: “We have to get rid of this Government. It is not looking after the interests of most of the people living in this country.” And that is so right. This bill is another example of working people in this country being harmed by the actions of that Government—the Government members across there who sit there and serve the interests of their corporate mates rather than the interests of low and middle income New Zealanders. I want to acknowledge the work that Viv did. I want to acknowledge her as a strong woman who fought for fairness in the workplace and say that this bill goes against everything that she stood for.Going back to low wages I want to say that it means that families cannot necessarily afford to have decent food. Does that matter to anybody across the House—decent food? What becomes a discretionary spend in a household is actually food because they cannot change what they are paying in rent or mortgage or whatever.Meka Whaitiri: Power bill.CAROL BEAUMONT: They cannot change the power bill—that is right—and a whole lot of other things. What becomes discretionary? Families’ food bills. That is shocking. That is just disgusting. It puts stress on families and that has a whole lot of negative consequences. It could look a whole lot different.Mike Sabin was talking earlier about productivity. Well actually a cost-minimisation approach—a “screw down the labour costs” approach—will not lift productivity in a sustainable way. What will lift productivity are decent workplaces where people are well trained where they are treated with respect where there is fairness in the workplace and where they are paid well. That is what will mean that you have an engaged and productive workforce. There is plenty of evidence to show that when workers are treated in that way and when they have a collective voice actually they can work with their employer to lift productivity in that workplace. That is the way to lift productivity not as Mike Sabin says a bill like this designed to reduce wages and to treat people as commodities whose labour you screw down the cost of.I want to urge people to think about what kinds of workplaces we want in this country because this bill is going in a very very bad direction. Many New Zealanders will recall what happened under the Employment Contracts Act. This is taking us back. This is back to the future. Recently we had a Danish delegation visit the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. It was fascinating actually. It was a delegation from right across the political spectrum in that country. I happened to have dinner with the delegation and on either side of me I had two MPs from the equivalent of the National Party. And do you know what? They were shocked—they were shocked—at what they heard about employment relations in this country because in Denmark they actually value collective bargaining. These were National Party equivalents. They value collective bargaining value the role of unions and actually want to see workers paid better and treated with respect in the workplace. They were shocked at how big the divide is in this country between what we are saying and what those across the House are saying.In conclusion I just want to say to members opposite that this bill takes us backwards. This is not the future that we want for our workplaces in this country. This is not going to create a strong economy that can continue to provide the standard of living that we want for New Zealanders. This is a bill that will hurt many working New Zealanders. We will oppose this bill and for those listening to this I say there is a real alternative. If you want decent wages if you want to see workplaces where people are treated fairly and if you want to see workplaces where there is cooperation and high productivity then change the Government.