Bennett Paula: Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Bennett Paula: Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
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PAULA BENNETT (National) 
: 
 It is something to be speaking tonight about flexible working conditions! I suppose the first thing I would acknowledge about the Green Party and about Sue Kedgley who has put this bill forward is that it has raised the debate to a different level in our society. In the last 14 months we have certainly heard employers in particular talking a bit more about flexible working hours what it means for them and how they can deliver it to their employees. There are obviously things that we think are fundamentally wrong with the bill but I would like to start by discussing flexible working hours and what the National Party believes they mean for employees out there and for employers as well. 
We believe that a change toward flexible working hours is already happening. We have seen that in the research data coming out—that up to 83 percent of employers are actually giving flexible working hours to their employees at the current time. I have personal experience having worked in the recruitment field before coming into Parliament. I was in a situation of negotiating contracts and conditions for people going into employment and I would certainly agree that the issue that constantly came up was not the issue of getting more money. More often than not particularly for women the issue was of the hours they were going to work. If people had young children they were looking for something that gave them the opportunity to spend time with them. That was vitally important to those people. Equally people without children were looking for a block of time off—half a day every fortnight—which would mean more to them for whatever reason they wanted to spend that time on. I never saw the reason as being what was important but I saw the work-life balance as being what was vital.  
So in all fairness there was constant negotiation. Employers who were smart enough to know they were living in a tight labour market knew that if they wanted to have good people on board or if they had good people already working for them and wanted to keep them the best thing to do was to recognise what their employees’ concerns and issues were and to adjust the workplace to the best of their ability to accommodate them. We see that on a day-to-day basis and we heard stories about it at the select committee from the submitters who came forward. What I found amusing in the submission process was that we often heard people say: “Well I’m OK but I’m worried about other people.” and that is where it came from. We heard a lot of people talk about how they had been able to negotiate flexible working hours for themselves. 
I want to keep on this issue a little bit because I do not think we are all really grasping how absolutely important it is and just what the effects are. A lot of lip-service is going on certainly from Labour but it is about time we saw some serious action. What we hear time and time again is that the Government wants to see more women get into productive work. We certainly heard it from the Prime Minister; it is what she wants. We remember that from the Speech from the Throne. So that means by definition that women who choose to raise their families are not seen as being in productive work. We would like to see more research about the long-term effects on women who are going into paid work and the time that that takes them away from their families. We need to start asking some of the questions we have about what the long-term effects will be on those families and what that means for them. So when we have such a push towards that—when we see children going into childcare and early childhood education at a younger age and when we see women in situations where they feel they have no choice but to go into paid work and so make that choice—we wonder about the point of this legislation which we feel is legislation for the sake of it and not legislation that will solve some of those problems. We can deal with the rhetoric but until we deal with the facts I think there should be some huge concern going on there. 
Awareness is good and it has stimulated debate. I suppose if this were a different debate I would be asking the Minister of Labour to give us an account of the work-life balance project that she has initiated and has been running. It would certainly be of interest to us in the National Party because we obviously have equal concerns about the flexibility of hours and people’s ability to get that work-life balance. The Minster has certainly recognised that and put a project in place. She has been going around to try to educate employers but we are not seeing what sort of results have come from that. So one presumes that that project must have failed if we now need to legislate; it is as simple as that. Perhaps we should have stuck with a programme of educating employers and talking to employees more often about their rights. Time and time again we have heard from employers that they would allow more flexibility if they knew what each individual really wanted but that they are not hearing that. I certainly agree with a previous speaker from the Maori Party who spoke about that inequality and about people feeling they cannot stand up and actually ask for it. Legislating will not fix that quite frankly but educating would have. 
I find it quite amusing to hear members on the other side of the House bleating on. Those members should talk a bit more about the role of the unions in relation to the most vulnerable workers because we wonder how well they are educating those vulnerable workers they say they speak for time and time again. The unions need to let workers know that any one of them at any time can step up and ask for flexible working hours. Anyone can ask for flexible working hours at any time and that is a really important fact for this House to take note of. It is quite easy for a member to stand up on that side of the House and paint us as the ogres who do not care about workers and who do not understand the pressures people live with on a day-to-day basis. The reality is that we are dealing with legislation that will be more arbitrary create more bureaucracy and make it more difficult for those people to stand up and ask. 
So do we need an education programme for employees in order for them to understand what their rights are and to give them an understanding of how they can step up and approach people and know what they can do? Without a doubt they should stand up. The work-life balance project was not an absolutely bad idea. It was a reasonably good one but we are not seeing it through to its full conclusion. Instead it is being interrupted halfway through with legislation that will make this process a lot more arduous and there will be many times when it will not get the results for those people that the Government really wants. 
One of the concerns we have—and it is quite a tough one—is that someone can apply for flexible hours only once every 12 months. So there is a 12-month clause in the bill and although members may say that people can do it in other ways if we go by this legislation—and one presumes that people will abide by the rules and regulations—we see that they can apply only once every 12 months. Get in the real world! Things change—that is the reality of it. So people who have arrangements with their partners to work certain hours one week and to share childcare issues together will all of a sudden find themselves in a situation where they cannot ask again in that 12-month period because every one else has. 
 What happens at present? Actually we find that employees negotiate amongst themselves and that is happening more and more. We heard that from people who came forward to the select committee with submissions. Those people said that time and time again employees were working out their own negotiations then taking them forward to the employer in terms of how they would job-swap who would fill which shifts and what hours they would work. It has been proven time and time again that this is the kind of thing that really works. So if we accept that flexible working hours are already happening and if we accept that people have the right to ask for them and can ask for them on any given day at any given time then this bill is really just another form of a grievance process that will be used by some employees who are aggrieved by their employers and want to take them through the process. 
I will talk through this process quickly in the last minute that I have. Aggrieved employees can firstly go to a labour inspector so that is another level of bureaucracy that has been put in since the bill was first introduced 14 months ago. If the labour inspector does not go for that the employee then can go to mediation at the Employment Relations Authority. Appeals by the losing party will then be heard successively by the Employment Court and the Court of Appeal and ultimately there is the possibility of going to the Supreme Court. Obviously there was a concern that this process might happen because a clause was put in to say that the most anyone can go for in compensation is an amount equal to the employee’s pay for 8 weeks if it is found that through this process the employee should have been given those flexible hours. However according to this bill the judicial system is not permitted to overturn an employer’s decision which seems absolutely ludicrous in itself. Thank you.