Locke Keith: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
Locke Keith: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
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KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will also oppose the Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2). It is a serious attack on workers’ rights and conditions on a number of fronts. Firstly it restricts union officials’ access to work sites in a much greater way than previously. Secondly it makes it easier for employers to dismiss workers not only through the generalisation of the 90-day trial period but also through technical changes that make it easier for employers to win a dismissal case. Thirdly it allows employers to communicate directly with their employees during a bargaining process so that on a day-to-day basis they can undermine the collective negotiations between the employers and the unions that represent the workers. 
I will talk first about the union access provisions which I addressed in my questions to the Minister of Labour at question time today. It is quite clear that there is no need for the tighter provision on union access in terms of the regulatory impact statement made by Kate Wilkinson’s own Department of Labour. It states: “There does not appear to be widespread evidence of union representatives exercising their current rights to enter workplaces in an inappropriate way resulting in disruption for business operations or adversely impacting on the employment relationship between employer and union members.” Further on that same document states: “Current arrangements provide an appropriate balance of fairness to employers employees and unions.” So what is the need for the change? 
The existing legislation provides a practical surround for union access—that is the Employment Relations Act specifies that union access is restricted to “reasonable times” and “a reasonable way having regard to normal business operations in the workplace;” and must comply with any existing health and safety requirements and security procedures. What more does one want? In this case it will be much more complicated for union officials to get on to sites particularly if there is an anti-union employer. Under the provisions in the bill before the House the employer can wait up to 2 days to respond to a request for access and even then the response could be negative. Then the union has to get back and negotiate further. It could go on for days and days. When one talks about an important conflict on the job—perhaps sexual harassment or a personal grievance which often requires immediate attention—the employer can just stuff the union around and hold it off from getting on to the site for days and days. Even in a subsequent court case the wording around access to workplaces is so vague that postponements could be allowed for all sorts of reasons. The wording in the legislation is that the employer can deny access on “reasonably practicable” grounds. 
Then we have the 90-day trial period which is supposed to make it easier for employers to hire labour. When we read the information obtained under the Official Information Act from the Department of Labour in a document to Kate Wilkinson dated 8 June in terms of the trial period that has existed so far we see that it states: “very few employers use them for this purpose”—that is to hire disadvantaged job seekers—“because of the potential high cost of employing a candidate who was not the best or most able candidate selected from a competitive employment market.” The report goes on to state the very thing that the Green Party and others have been saying: “Some employees indicated that they had felt an increased vulnerability by being employed under trial periods.” There will be fear on the job and these workers will be scared to join a union and scared to stand up for their rights because they can be sent down the road at any time in those 90 days for any reason at all. That is disgraceful. It will divide the workplace between those 90-day workers who are scared about everything and the union members who might be a bit more confident. 
Then we have the unfair dismissal procedures through the Employment Court and the like. There is a provision in the bill that if the defects in the employer’s case or the process were minor or technical then the worker can be dismissed. As said by an earlier speaker the bill does not allow redress through re-employment the way there is at present. This means that the worker finds it very hard to get justice if he or she is unfairly dismissed. It is an important principle across all our law that we do not say that because the problems with process were minor and technical people who committed those breaches get off and can in this case do something very damaging to any workers—that is sack them and deny them of their livelihood. Losing a job is very traumatic and we want to keep the disciplines in the Employment Relations Act that employers have to abide by the provisions of the Act if they want to go through with a dismissal. 
Then there is the question of collective bargaining. It is a well-established procedure. The whole concept of collective bargaining is that the union is on one side of the table and the employer’s representatives are on the other side of the table and they negotiate. It completely undermines that process if the union which in this circumstance will often not even be allowed access to the site very often to talk to workers is disadvantaged by that. The officials are outside the workplace finding it hard to get on and day by day the employer is saying to the workers that the union proposal to them is just a load of cobblers. If the supervisors day by day talk to individual employees directly and tell them what they do and do not believe it intimidates the workers so that one cannot have proper collective bargaining on wages conditions or whatever it might happen to be. 
Overall if we take those issues together we see that it is not as Kate Wilkinson said in her introduction to this debate that the opponents of this legislation are blinded by ideology. There are very directly practical matters of concern in this legislation. They affect workers detrimentally in real-life situations. Being dismissed within the first 90 days is real life and a bad thing to happen to someone. Not being able to have one’s representative on the worksite—be it through negotiations over wages or conditions or some immediate issue of bullying or something that has come up in the workplace—is a real-life problem and it makes it harder in the workplace. To be dismissed and not be able to get back one’s job when the process has been wrong is a real-life problem. 
I think that if we add it all up and then add to that what is coming next—we will shortly probably be debating the Holidays Amendment Bill which will require workers to get a doctor’s certificate for just 1 day off sick being made sicker in the process—we see that it is a very serious attack on workers’ rights and a very serious attack on unions. If we look at the situation with unions at the moment in the private sector we see that the level of unionisation is not very high at all. That is to a large extent because of the discouragement of employees by their employers. They say: “You don’t want to join the union do you?” and they sometimes put certain penalties around it. That is what has kept the level of unionisation in the private sector very low—lower than it was in the 1970s and 1980s before the Employment Contracts Act. 
We live in a time when the economy is not growing rapidly and there is relatively high unemployment. That has pushed down workers’ real wages and conditions for 75 percent of workers over the last year. We need strong unions to redress all of those things. Thank you.