Beaumont Carol: Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Beaumont Carol: Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:668;Page:15018] 
CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 Clause 3 of the Employment Relations (Film Production Work) Amendment Bill is very broad. It is quite short in what it says: “This Act amends the Employment Relations Act 2000.” This side of the Chamber has a great deal of respect for that Act. It was legislation brought in by the previous Government. It repealed the badly thought of Employment Contracts Act—an Act that did a lot of damage to our economy and to our workforce. 
The Employment Relations Act the principal Act will be amended by this bill. I thought it was worth making a couple of contributions on the matter of amending the Act. The Government has shown it is very keen to amend the Act since it was elected. I wonder why that is. This Government is very backward-looking in terms of employment relations. Its members yearn for the days—the good old days from their perspective—of the Employment Contracts Act. They do not like working people wage earners and salary earners and working to achieve a better outcome for themselves and for their families. We are a low-wage economy and we are going backwards in that regard. The gap between wages in Australia and New Zealand is very high and will get worse because of the amendments that this Government is making to our employment relations system. 
This Government sees things like being able to sack workers for no reason without having to give them a reason and with no right of redress as good law. The reality is that most Kiwis do not agree with that. Most Kiwis do not think it is fair that workers can be sacked without reason without being told any reason and without any right of redress. It is just unbelievable but that is what the Government is doing. Of course it is extending it from small workplaces to large workplaces. 
That is one of the amendments to the Employment Relations Act that this Government is pushing through right now but of course there have been others. We will see the appalling situation where workers’ rights to meal breaks and rest breaks—statutory minimum rights—will be reduced. In fact the reality of that amendment to the Employment Relations Act will mean that many employees will be back to where they were before Labour changed the legislation. They will be back to the situation of being dependant on what they can agree with their employer because there will be no statutory entitlement to both paid rest breaks and unpaid meal breaks. This is the backward-looking dark age approach to employment relations. 
Members on this side of the Chamber see employment relations quite differently. We do not see it as a contractual obligation and we do not see labour as a commodity. We see employment relations as being about how working people work in their job in their workplace alongside their co-workers with their employer where they can band together collectively to try to have both an independent voice and also improve their working conditions and wages. We see that as a good thing. This is where the Minister for Economic Development and the Minister of Labour are so negligent because what we need is a complete transformation in the way that work is undertaken in New Zealand. If we want to lift our economic performance then we should not be looking at these nasty cuts to minimum provisions and attacks on working people; we need to be looking at high-quality workplaces where individuals are valued where collectively they have voice where their ideas are encouraged and sought and where we look at transforming our workplaces into much more productive places. 
There is a common advantage in lifting productivity which leads to higher wages for the workers and higher productivity and this means we achieve a better outcome from our workplaces and our industries. If we want the high-value economy that we say we want if we want to close the wage gap between Australia and New Zealand then that is where we should be focusing. The Minister of Labour and the Minister for Economic Development should be the two people who are advocating for that change. They should be saying that we should do things differently. They should not hark back to the bad old days of the Employment Contracts Act. As I said in an earlier contribution this legislation which is another amendment to the Employment Relations Act is a mickey mouse amendment.