Roche Denise: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 05 June 2013. Volume:690;Page:10780. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): This is a noxious piece of legislation and the Greens will not be supporting it. The Employment Relations Amendment Bill is another nail in the coffin of workers’ rights in Aotearoa New Zealand. This bill is designed to force wages down and to keep workers in insecure jobs and it is a blatant attempt to undermine unions and limit a worker’s ability to collectively negotiate decent wages and conditions with their employer. Put simply this bill is a return to the 1991 Employment Contracts Act. It goes hand in hand with other noxious legislation this Government has introduced like the youth rates the 90-day rule of the last term and the reform of the welfare system which is designed to flood the labour market with workers who are desperate for a job and prepared to take anything which of course undermines the pay and conditions for all workers.This bill perpetuates a narrative that employers are benevolent creatures who charitably offer jobs to workers and that we should all be grateful. It deliberately creates an industrial relations environment that is hostile to unions and hostile to workers. Effectively it tilts what was never a level playing field in the power relationship between the employer and the employee heavily into the employer’s favour. This is hardly surprising when one considers that the entire policy setting from this Government since it entered power in 2008 has been to advantage its rich friends and privatise as much of the common public assets and capital as it possibly can. There are numerous examples of this—Skycity is one charter schools are another and private prisons and countless road building projects—that do not stack up economically.The privatisation agenda is evident in this bill when you see the removal of the requirement that collective bargaining continue until the collective agreement is resolved. This is the Ports of Auckland dispute. This is the clause that was put in the bill because of the Ports of Auckland dispute. If we cast our minds back we will recall that over a year and a half ago the ports’ management was keen to avoid settling the collective employment agreement for the Maritime Union of New Zealand workers because union workers refused to allow the complete casualisation of their jobs. The company then attempted to contract out the jobs. However it was stopped by an injunction and the company has been forced into negotiations. There has been a raft of unsavoury behaviour from the ports’ management since last year including revealing leave details of one worker utilising the right-wing media to tell lies about how muchwharfies earn advertising jobs overseas to replace striking and locked-out workers and of course punishing union members who were already casuals by reducing their hours until they were forced to leave the union. Since then of course there has been the setting up of a yellow union which has settled the collective employment contract—containing less favourable working conditions—for fewer workers. The collective employment agreement for Maritime Union of New Zealand members is still unresolved despite the Employment Court directing the parties to have facilitated bargaining.The removal of the provision to conclude bargaining undermines the ability for any union to negotiate collective agreements on behalf of its members. As Helen Kelly said quite recently: “Currently an employer can refuse to settle on an issue … but they can’t walk away on ideological grounds from the bargaining … The new law will remove the obligation to conclude allowing instead for surface bargaining by employers who have no intention to settle.” In last month’s employment law update from law firm Buddle Findlay it described the changes to the collective bargaining by this bill as being “the most significant since those made by the last Labour Government in 2004” and also said that it favours employers.As well as removing the duty to conclude bargaining the bill allows employers to opt out of multi-employer bargaining which effectively means we can wave goodbye to industry standards. It means employers can carry on competing on price by reducing wages below their competitors which reinforces a low-wage economy. The dreams that this Government said we would achieve like catching up to Australia are fast becoming far-fetched when it takes this kind of approach. New Zealand as we have heard recently is now becoming the centre for low-wage workers and some Australian companies are contracting out their call centre functions to Wellington. It is no wonder. With these types of laws—and I include the dubiousHobbit legislation in this—we have become a nation of State-sanctioned sweatshop workers.The bill takes us back to 1991 with a focus on individual rather than collective bargaining. It removes the 30-day rule which is the requirement for employers to offer the collective if there is one to new workers. This provision was to protect new workers from being taken on at lower rates on individual agreements that they may have felt compelled to accept or else they would not get the job. In so doing that protected their colleagues as well. When you combine that provision with the 90-day trial provisions that this Government introduced last term we see a lack of a level playing field in very stark relief. In practice what happens is that new workers have no choice but to accept whatever the employer offers them or they will not be employed at all. I for one have already seen examples of workers being too frightened to join a union during their 90-day trial in case they get the sack because they are “too stroppy”.The meanness of this legislation is really really apparent in the removal of the only protection vulnerable workers have under the current provisions in section 6A of the principal Act. This is the section that meant that the mostly low-paid workers employed by contract cleaning companies at least kept the same pay and conditions if the contractor changed. It is no secret that the previous Minister of Labour Kate Wilkinson was lobbied substantially by one small contract cleaning company which complained that this provision was unfair. So what did the Minister do? She changed it so that the provision would not apply for companies that employ fewer than 20 staff. Similarly for the removal of tea and meal breaks the law being changed to remove those rights in the legislation is due to one issue where an employer and a sole-charge air traffic controller could not agree on a time for a tea break. Once more we see the Government use a sledgehammer to crack a nut.This bill is backward-thinking. It creates an environment where workers will not speak their minds at work and this is a huge risk for health and safety for those in dangerous occupations. When we create a culture where workers will not speak up in case they are seen as troublemakers we put workers’ lives at risk. That is why the Australian health and safety regulations have more worker participation because those on the job know what the problems are. We could learn a lot from them instead of carrying on with our appalling accident and death rate for workers in the forestry sector in the agriculture sector in the building sector and yes even in the mining sector. This legislation is Draconian and I urge the House to oppose the bill.