Tremain Chris: Employment Relations (Flexible Working  Hours) Amendment Bill — Consideration of Interim Report of Transport and Industrial Relations Committee 
Tremain Chris: Employment Relations (Flexible Working  Hours) Amendment Bill — Consideration of Interim Report of Transport and Industrial Relations Committee 
[Volume:630;Page:2734] 
CHRIS TREMAIN (National—Napier) 
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Tena koutou. Ki te Whare e tu nei ki a Papatuanuku kei waho tena korua. Ki nga rangatira o Aotearoa tena koutou. Ki nga hoa o te Paremata tena koutou tena koutou tena koutou tena tatou katoa. 
[ 
Greetings to you collectively. To the House standing here and to the Earth Mother outside greetings to you two. To the chiefs of New Zealand collectively greetings. To fellow parliamentarians greetings greetings greetings to you and to us all. 
] 
I rise to support the recommendation made by the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee to set aside the Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Amendment Bill for 1 year. The select committee has recommended to set it aside for 1 year in order to examine its real advantages and disadvantages and to do more research. I certainly wish to examine the advantages and disadvantages—particularly the advantages given my background in business and my having employed many people over many years. 
Before I continue I make the comment that there is something we should ask about every bill that stands before this House at the moment particularly given this Labour-led Government’s desire for economic transformation. We need to ask ourselves whether this bill will lift economic growth. Will it lift us up the OECD rankings? Will it increase wages for employees? Will it increase flexibility in working hours? Will it generally do that? Or will it reduce the flexibility needed to grow businesses and lift up our ranking in the OECD? Will it further increase Big Brother Government? Will it further increase bureaucracy? Will it further increase red tape? Those are the questions both for and against the legislation that we need to examine over the next year. 
My personal opinion is that this type of legislation is unnecessary. I will talk members through its advantages and disadvantages. Firstly let us examine the purpose of this bill. Its purpose is to amend the Employment Relations Act 2000 to provide employees with young dependent children the statutory right to request part-time and flexible hours and a framework within which employees can negotiate reduced working hours. It has some key criteria that not many other speakers have alluded to tonight but they are important none the less. I congratulate Sue Kedgley on some of those key criteria because they will be important to business people if this legislation comes into force. 
Firstly the legislation can apply only if an employee has been with the same employer for 6 months. That is an important thing because normally when people negotiate their first employment contract they negotiate flexibility in hours right there and then with their employers. It is important that there is some sort of time frame within which someone can go back to an employer and ask for a change in his or her working relationship. 
Secondly the employee has to have children under the age of 5 or children with a disability. Again that is a key important point. The request has to be made in writing set out the work pattern and explain how it could be made to work. That is a criterion that I am struggling with because it will involve more discussion. My experience is that when an employee comes to me to ask for flexible hours we reach that by discussion. Employers know how their businesses run and they know what other people they need in their businesses to fill holes in employment. They also know the value of their employees concerned. I understand the need for the request for flexibility to be in writing but I suggest that in good employment practice people will largely work together on the issue of flexible hours—as I believe they do now. 
Thirdly the employer must consider the application for flexible hours as soon as possible and refuse it only when it cannot reasonably be accommodated under prescribed set conditions. It is interesting that we talked about some of the conditions that have been raised which vary from business to business—the type of environment people are in. Some businesses very much depend on a combination of the skill of employees—as in the legal profession—plus the time frames within which they need to get jobs done. It is not easy to replace some employees particularly when big financial jobs are coming through. If a lawyer has a particular skill in an area and that lawyer is negotiating a contract—and there are deadlines in multimillion-dollar contracts—those sorts of things cannot deal with the inflexibility of some legislation. Negotiation is required between employer and employee. Those things are important. 
Lastly employees have a right of appeal; that is another part of the legislation. Those are the criteria that I believe are reasonable but I now want to examine the arguments both for and against the bill. 
Firstly I turn to the arguments for the bill and a number of those arguments have been made tonight. In recent surveys a majority of employees said that they were working longer hours than previously that they were feeling under constant stress that their lives were out of balance and that they were under significant pressure. I say that that is very much the case with many employers in this country as well. I do not think there is any difference between employees and employers. 
Secondly some employees who have children simply give up the struggle and drop out of the labour market because they cannot find ways to combine paid work and the demands of looking after young children. Well that will happen anyway regardless of flexible hours. Some men and some women simply cannot deal with the stress of working even flexible hours. I think we need to understand that point too. 
The third point is that a number of countries particularly OECD countries like Germany Italy Belgium and the Netherlands all provide employees with a legal right to request more flexible working arrangements or to reduce their working hours. There are a number of arguments for that. 
Arguments against the bill are that it is simply more bureaucracy more legislation and more Big Brother Government prescription—employers are in business so employees will do this! I think that is where one of the problems lies in this legislation. There is more Government involvement in the lives of New Zealanders and New Zealand businesses. I often hear it said across the floor: “Oh why is there all that bureaucracy? Why is there all that red tape?”. Well this is more bureaucracy in the making. 
There are 322519 small businesses out there which employ 100 people or fewer. Those businesses account for nearly 99 percent of the employees in this country. I suggest to members that by far the majority of those small-business owners know the value of the employee-employer relationship. The fact of the matter is that a small business with one or two people cannot grow its business without having a positive relationship with its employees and without some form of flexible working arrangements in place. I believe that an argument against the bill is that by far the majority of small to medium sized enterprises treat their employees extremely well and form relationships with those employees from day one. Many employees are part of the business and treat it as their own as well which is fantastic. 
Despite that the problem I have is that there has always been the insinuation from the Government and in fact sometimes from the Greens as well that employers are bad that they are evil and that they do not care for their staff for the families of their staff or for the welfare of their staff. I have to say quite simply having been an employer of many years standing that that is not true. Numerous small businesses out there lend money to their employees when they get into strife give employees additional holidays over and above the legislative requirement give wages in advance and allow staff leave to attend their kids’ swimming sports and prize-givings and go on their kids’ school camps. Those events are all important parts of employees’ lives and of employers’ lives too. Flexibility in employment arrangements happens in hundreds of thousands of New Zealand businesses right now. Believe it or not businesses do provide flexible working hours as we speak. 
Women are a key part of this workforce. As my colleague Jo Goodhew said earlier there has been a 16 percent increase in the number of women in the workforce in the last 4 years. Having employed many many women in my lifetime I know they are fantastic employees. They are dedicated and they want to get ahead. Any employer who cannot form a positive relationship with the women in his or her workforce is on a hiding to nothing. Employers have to form positive relationships and provide opportunities to have an ongoing relationship with their staff. To sum up I say that we support the review of the legislation over the next year.