Woods Megan: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 28 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:305. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):I am sure my colleague Chris Hipkins can pick up his strand of thought in one of his many contributions on this part of the bill throughout the evening. Tonight I want to talk specifically to clause 2 of the bill around the commencement date that is set down. As my colleague Chris Hipkins was just talking about this is a piece of legislation that is due to come into being 4 months after it receives the Royal assent. I am not going to be talking about whether or not the Governor-General will indeed give this bill the Royal assent but I will talk about the significance of the commencement date being 4 months after the Royal assent and what some of the ramifications of that are.What we have is a number of employers in New Zealand who are very aware of the commencement date of this legislation. In fact they have been waiting and hoping that this bill will come into force and indeed they have been delaying collective bargaining. Why the commencement date as stated under clause 2 of the bill has been of specific interest to these employers is around what clauses 7 8 and 9 do around the removal of the duty to conclude collective bargaining. What we have is a large number of employers—or a small number of employers in this country actually because we do not have a large number of bad employers in this country. What we have is a very bad piece of legislation going through this Committee in relation to our employment law.Let us look to some examples of individuals and where this commencement date in clause 2 of the bill is going to affect their lives. Have a look at Freda Soe who works as a community support worker. She is poorly paid and her union has been trying to negotiate a collective contract for her and her workmates for the past 12 months and it still has not achieved that collective agreement. The employer has made it known that it does not want a collective agreement on this worksite but it is currently obliged to conclude unless there is a valid reason not to.But what we have with the commencement date in clause 2 of this bill is a complete removal of that right and this is what this employer has been waiting for. We can see very clearly what this commencement date of 4 months after the Royal assent that is given to this legislation is going to mean to individual workers out there. It is going to mean there will not be a collective agreement because the employer can simply walk away from it because of the provisions that are in clauses 7 8 and 9 which will come into being after the 4-month commencement date.We can also look to the meat industry where this is something that a major employer is very aware of—when the date of the commencement of this legislation is going to be passed and put into place. We have seen in the meat industry in the last couple of years very long and bitter battles that have been waged around the issues of collective bargaining and one that a major employer is now waiting to see there.We see that there are worksites where collective bargaining is not being concluded. In fact they are refusing to acknowledge the meatworkers union’s request to enter into negotiations and bargain around a collective agreement because they know that this legislation has been sitting waiting on the Government books. They are just surprised that the commencement date under clause 2 is going to be a little later than they first thought it would be of course because the Government hoped to get it through during the last Parliament but having lost the vote of John Banks it was not able to. So the commencement date has been pushed out a little further and it is a good thing too as my colleague has said.We also saw the duty to conclude collective bargaining around the Ports of Auckland and this being a very key issue in what happened in the Ports of Auckland dispute a couple of years ago. If this legislation had been in place at the time we would have seen a very different outcome of that dispute. It is a very clear illustration of why it is that employers are waiting with such bated breath for the commencement of this legislation 4 months after the Royal assent for this bill to enter on to our statute book. Under clauses 7 8 and 9 we will have a complete shift. So there were many pernicious things in this legislation that will come into being—Kris Faafoi: Pernicious.Dr MEGAN WOODS: —thank you Mr Faafoi—4 months after it receives the Royal assent. We have talked at length in this Chamber about the removal of the tea break. We have talked about Part 6A and extending that out. But the removal of the duty to conclude collective bargaining is one of the most fundamental shifts we are seeing in our employment legislation that is going to come into being when this bill is passed into law and it is something that we absolutely need to be concerned about. Those are the very reasons why my colleague Chris Hipkins was talking about the fact that this is—