Roche Denise: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6360. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take the first call for the Greens on the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. After quite a lot of debate within our caucus we will be opposing this bill going to select committee. We do recognise that there are some really good aspects to it and what we would have liked to see was a bit more positive stuff before we could give it our support to the select committee. That is not to say though that we will not be actively participating in the select committee process to try to amend the things that we disagree with in order to have a bill that we could agree with maybe on the second reading. The things that we like that fit with the Green’s kaupapa are around extending paid parental leave the stronger enforcement of existing employment standards the introduction of higher penalties at the Employment Court and greater power being given to labour inspectors. But the fact is that this bill as it is written has the potential to legitimise zero-hour contracts and actually make the situation around zero-hour contracts and insecure work even worse. On balance we cannot support that.Let me start by describing one of the key purposes of the bill which is to extend the paid parental leave scheme. We are great supporters of paid parental leave. Our policy is to extend it to 13 months’ leave and it was excellent to hear the chair of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee talk about the benefits of paid parental leave. We also support Sue Moroney’s member’s bill for 26 weeks of paid parental leave and I want to acknowledge the fact that the amendments that David Seymour has been able to make are as a result of the last bill around paid parental leave being 26 weeks which Sue Moroney brought to this House and the amendments and compromises she made in an effort to get it through and failed. We acknowledge that and these aspects of this bill are good and we would be supporting them.I would like to move now to the stronger enforcement of employment standards. We absolutely support this too. According to the Statistics New Zealand’s 2012 Survey of Working Life about one in five working New Zealanders was not receiving at least some of the minimum standards that we currently have. From our perspective this bill does three main things that support stronger enforcement of minimum standards: one it gives labour inspectors more powers to apply for orders from the Employment Court in cases of breaches; two it creates robust definitions of what constitutes breaches of employment standards; and three it provides higher penalties that the Employment Court can bring. We support all of these changes because basically we support working people having a fair go. However although the legislation does provide labour inspectors with more tools to deal with problems the legislation is only one of the steps we can take.Although I acknowledge that the labour inspectorate does a really good job and has received more funding recently it is still insufficient to police the sadly too common problem of labour abuse. In previous years and previous times we have had unions that did compliance work so it did not fall simply to labour inspectors. A classic example is in today’s paper with the New Zealand Herald reporting on the Masala restaurant which had abused and underpaid workers for 5 years between 2009 and 2014 with the most egregious example being a worker who was paid $2.64 an hour to work a 66-hour week. The question is: how has it taken 5 years for this tragic work environment and these breaches of minimum standards to come to light? Our inspectors do work very hard but there are not nearly enough of them. We have currently got in New Zealand one labour inspector for 53658 New Zealanders compared with Australia where they have better employment standards and one of the reasons is because of the compliance. They have one labour inspector to 19130 Australians. The employment relations climate that this Government has created through its imbalanced and disproportionate favouring of employers from the “HobbitBill” to the provisions in this bill that legitimise zero-hour contracts means that workers are afraid to speak out so there is far more work for labour inspectors to do. So although I do applaud the positive provisions in this bill that allow for stronger enforcement it seems to be a hollow gesture in light of how under-resourced the labour inspectorate is.The climate of fear that has been pervasive throughout the industrial relations environment in New Zealand is as a result of the changes that I have just referred to that this Government has made. The best example of how that plays out is zero-hour contracts. As with the Health and Safety Reform Bill it appears that National has capitulated to vested interests—although it has done it at the start of the process this time instead of at the end—in providing very weak provisions around it. There are some quite obvious flaws—and I hope they are not deliberate flaws—in this part of the bill Part 2.The first flaw is that the current legislation requires employment arrangements to contain only an indication of the arrangement relating to the times that the employee is to work. It is a very weak provision. The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions has rightly pointed out that this bill does not contain any provisions for a minimum notice period for an arrangement and actually workers need at least a week’s notice so that they can plan their lives.The second flaw around zero-hour contracts is the availability provisions set out in new sections 67E and 67F in clause 87. The key problem with this is that the bill does say that there must be payment of compensation but it does not actually define what that is. This could just be something as simple as 50 cents an hour. We think that is unreasonable and that there should be a minimum defined compensation payment. Furthermore although we applaud the intention of section 67F—that employers must not treat employees adversely for refusing to undertake additional work—we know from experience that this law will regularly be flouted and that the overworked and under-resourced labour inspectors will not be able to do much about it. The power imbalance exists in many industries that use zero-hour contracts and the lack of definition around compensation means I am afraid that workers will be bullied into signing broad availability clauses that basically undermine the whole deal.The third area is around shift cancellation. This is actually worse than the status quo where workers can actually be entitled to be paid for the cancellation of shifts but like the availability provisions there is no minimum compensation and there is no test for reasonableness.My final comment is around the departmental disclosure statement which actually said that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment tested some of these proposals and that Business New Zealand indicated that it was comfortable with the approach. I think it summarises the lack of balance in this legislation—that the Government is happy to consult with Business New Zealand but it has not actually taken on board the other side of the story which would have been represented by the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions. We are deeply saddened that we cannot support this bill. We will be following it through the select committee process. If there are major improvements in the areas that I have outlined here then we would probably reconsider and so I hope that we will have a good relationship and a good discussion when we come to the select committee. Thank you.