Boyack RachelRACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): It is a pleasure to take a call on this bill tonight and I want to begin by thanking the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety for bringing this bill to the House early in this term of our Government. This piece of legislation was an important part of Labour's 2020 election manifesto and I just want to acknowledge the work of our members in bringing this forward. Many would say that this change is overdue. A lot of people across many parts of our country have worked incredibly hard to bring forward 10 days' sick leave. This as the Minister has said is part of our delivery for working people as we recover from COVID and as previous speakers have said we learnt the lessons from COVID about just how important it is to have adequate sick leave so that we can ensure our communities stay healthy. I want to thank the select committee and all of the submitters and officials for all of the hard work they've done over the last few months to hear submissions on this bill.I spent many years before coming to this House as an organiser with FIRST Union and I want to acknowledge their submission. FIRST Union is a private sector union that represents a significant number of people in supermarkets in banks in retail manufacturing transport industries—many industries where if people do become unwell it's very easy for them to pass their bugs around to co-workers and each other and also people going into their supermarkets getting on their buses getting on their trains. So having spent many years in this industry I've seen and have many many firsthand examples of what it's like for workers who actually don't have access to enough sick leave.I want to respond to a previous speaker Scott Simpson who made some comments around supermarkets. I'm actually going to set the record straight around supermarkets. We have two large supermarket chains in this country one of which is Countdown and to the best of my knowledge they still pay eight days of sick leave a year. The previous speaker made some very good points about an even playing field because the other large chain Foodstuffs who own Pak 'N Save and New World supermarkets through individual owners they don't—most of them unless they have a collective agreement—pay more than five days' sick leave. I've spent many many hours attempting to negotiate for more sick leave at Pak 'N Save in Richmond in my electorate of Nelson. What I can say is the owners of those supermarkets are incredibly wealthy multimillionaires and what I can say on that is that Countdown supermarkets have come to us on many many occasions asking us to even that playing field because actually supermarkets should be competing on quality of product on customer service not on a race to the bottom over wages and conditions that actually lead to poorer outcomes for workers.In my experience there are three reasons why our workers don't take sick leave. The first which we're talking about tonight is that they don't have adequate sick leave. It's very common for people to use up their sick leave on one incident of either themselves or a family member being sick. We have situations now when it's not just women looking after children; you often have both parents working and in my experience it was actually often male-dominated industries particularly in sawmills that were arguing really hard to have increased amounts of sick leave because those whānau were finding that whether it was the mum or the dad who was looking after the child actually they needed sick leave both of them in order to be able to look after their tamariki. But look that's what we're addressing tonight.But there's other things that happen and one of the things I've seen is a significant amount of pressure from employers for people to go in when they're sick. The classic case which used to come up all the time was workers ringing in sick and being told by the employer You don't sound sick." Now it's such an old-school way of thinking. There are many times when people are sick and they don't sound sick but they certainly are sick and they're having to prove to that employer that they were genuinely sick and having to have an argument about why they needed to stay home. That's partly because of our culture.This is the third reason and a few speakers have picked up on that tonight: in the supermarket industry one of the things I used to find was workers who didn't want to stay home because they were letting the team down. We've had this culture in New Zealand of taking a concrete pill sucking it up. The "she'll be right" attitude the "you don't want to show weakness" kind of attitude. Actually what happened during COVID: we finally had that change we finally addressed this as a nation and actually said it is important for ourselves for our whānau for our co-workers for our communities to stay home when we're sick. So part of that self-imposed pressure that culture is changing and it's a good thing.Many speakers have talked tonight about what is a good employer. In my view a good employer—and I come from a family of employers as well and have employed people—is one that actually looks at how they can support their workers to be the best that they can be to be well and to be productive. We know that workers who are treated well who are respected will treat their employers well in return. It's a fallacy to talk about cost because actually if people stay home when they're sick they are less likely to spread that sickness to others actually leading to lower amounts of sick leave.Now I signed up to a little tool last year called Flu Tracker and if others in this House haven't signed up to Flu Tracker I encourage you to do so. One of the things we saw last year was that as well as having people staying home to protect themselves from COVID19 we actually had lower levels of flu circulating through our community. So what I say and what I propose is that if people are able to and our culture changes to where they do stay home when they're sick those contagious types of bugs are less likely to be passed around.We've had people talk tonight around people misusing sick leave and I do acknowledge there are times when people do that but I also say there are management tools in existence that should be used to manage when people are misusing sick leave. There's fantastic case law out there where people who perhaps applied for annual leave had it declined had gone on a little jaunt photo on Facebook and look in those situations employers have found to be justified in dismissing someone under those circumstances. So actually part of this is about employers also using the tools available to them properly to discourage that. But as I said we do know that employees who are treated well treat their employers well in return.So to sum up we need to change our culture around sick leave. Look across at Australia where they have 10 days a year. For too long in Aotearoa we've been struggling away on only five days a year and most workers are using that up every year for good reason. So this change it's overdue. It's necessary to continue protecting our communities and on that note I commend this bill to the House. Kia ora."