Parker David: Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 22 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5267. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I move That the Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. Excuse me Mr Assistant Speaker; there is a frog in my throat.This bill tries to remedy a loophole in the New Zealand law whereby people can be paid less than the minimum wage under our current law. I think most of us in this House understand that the world seems to be getting to be a more ruthless place year by year and the employment practices that used to never be seen in New Zealand are starting to creep in.As a consequence we have in New Zealand and around the world more and more people working in very precarious situations so much so that we have books being written about what is called the precariat.These are people who are living in circumstances where their terms of engagement—and they are not always terms of employment a point I am going to be coming back to—are so insecure that they do not know what they are going to be paid from week to week.They can be effectively abused by the more powerful person in the employment relationship the employer if the employer is unscrupulous.The examples that we have in New Zealand where people do not get the minimum that most people are entitled to are growing.If people are not employed as employees but are taken on as contractors they are not entitled to the minimum wage they do not get holiday pay they do not get sick pay and they do not get their ACC levies paid for them. This bill cannot fix all of those problems. Neither can it fix the problems that we have where increasingly people are being expected to work for free during trial periods.These people are being taken on as interns and are not being paid for quite lengthy periods now during a trial period.That did not used to happen previously. These insecure work practices are worrying people in all sectors of society. Older people who are trying to re-enter the workforce are sometimes in a vulnerable position and do not have many choices.Parents are worried for their children who seem to be despite a good education taken on in workplaces that are quite insecure.The history of this bill is I think worthy of mention. This is the first bill I have had drawn from the ballot in over 13 years since I have been here. [Interruption] Well it is actually not a very good record. A precursor to this bill was drafted by me while I was a Minister in the last Labour Government. As a Minister I could not introduce a member’s bill. Darien Fenton picked up the bill. It was eventually drawn. It went to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee because the House broadly supported it and the select committee improved the bill so that the bill that came out of select committee is now the form of the bill that I am presenting to the House. It was narrowly defeated in the subsequent readings in the House.I think that since that time Parliament has increasing concerns as the world does in terms of these precarious work practices. Even the Government is moving to a certain extent in terms of zero-hour contracts acknowledging some of the improper employment practices that have become more prevalent in the years since. We say it is not going far enough but even the Government is moving to a certain extent on zero-hour contracts. I believe that New Zealanders agree that all people who work deserve to be treated decently and that includes minimum protections. If we do not protect those minimum protections for everyone we also undermine the employers who are meeting those minimum protections but competing against people who are not. It is wrong that New Zealand’s minimum wage laws apply to only employment relationships. In a number of overseas jurisdictions the minimum applies to the rate of remuneration; therefore you cannot avoid the minimum wage by taking someone on as a contractor rather than as an employee. And that is all this bill does.For the categories of employee who are listed in schedule 2 of the bill which is a discrete list that was worked out including with the involvement of Business New Zealand through the select committee that Darien Fenton was involved in at the time—they decided that most of these problems were in a discrete list of occupations and therefore they decided that rather than having an open-ended piece of legislation applying to all contractual relationships they would list those in schedule 2. It may be that that list is wrong and needs to be amended at select committee but it is a good place to start.Those who are affected by this gap in our law at the moment are the least powerful people in society. Sometimes they are recent immigrants. Sometimes they are people for whom English is a second language. Sometimes they will be students visiting New Zealand. Sometimes they will be people of not very high intelligence. Sometimes they will be disabled people. Always they are not in a union. They are never in a union because they are not an employee and unions represent only employees. These are amongst the most disadvantaged people in society and I believe that we have a duty to protect them.I think that most people in New Zealand think you should not be able to avoid paying the minimum wage by taking someone on as a contractor rather than an employee and so I am hopeful that I will get sufficient support from within this Parliament because I think we are all here for basically the same reasons.We might have a disagreement as to whether the minimum wage should go up or not—that is a fair disagreement to have—but that is a different issue from saying that everyone should be covered by it. I think that at the moment this lacuna in the legislation should be closed this gap in our law should be fixed so that we can protect some of these most vulnerable people.I honestly do not know how many people are in this situation. I do know from my inquiries through the community law centres throughout the country and through some of the unions that actually skirt around the edges of these things because they represent service sectors where the lowest income people work they say there is a problem to be fixed and I have been given instances of where this is a real problem.I do not know how prevalent it is but I do know that in this increasingly ruthless world it is more of a problem this year than it was last year and is more of a problem this year than it was a decade ago.That is not a criticism of the current Government; it is just that the world is becoming a more ruthless and competitive place and people who did not used to exploit these loopholes in the law do on occasions in a way that did not happen in yesteryear.This bill will if passed help people who are currently falling through the cracks. We have got some bad practices developing. We have people now who are sold franchises to do cleaning contracts and who effectively through a contractual rate I think get less than the minimum wage. You know I do not think that is right. This bill might not actually protect those people. It will protect some of them if they are employed as a direct contractor but not as a—Alastair Scott: It won’t. It’s not going to help them.Hon DAVID PARKER: No it will not protect all of these people. I am not pretending that this is the perfect cure for all of the ills in the employment relationships that we have around the country but there is a growth in these non-traditional employment relationships where people are not being taken on as employees but are being taken on as contractors. I think that this is a bill that ought to go to select committee so that we in this Parliament can help some of the most vulnerable people in society not be abused and protect the employers who pay the minimum wage and should not face competition from people who employ contractors for less.