Locke Keith: Employment Relations Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
Locke Keith: Employment Relations Law Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:620;Page:16187] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party as everyone knows—and it has been promoted by the National Party—is supporting this bill which does lead to greater fairness for workers and employers in industrial relations. It will lead to much better relations in our society. One of the previous speakers—I think it was Wayne Mapp—said that unions will now target vulnerable sectors of our economy such as the waterfront. He referred back to the recent industrial dispute involving waterfront workers and their employers. Well that dispute was largely over the question of casualisation. As the proportion of the workforce that is employed full time on that work goes up and the casual sector goes down there will be better relations on the waterfront because there will not be a volatile workforce. There will be a more stable workforce for employers and everyone will be much happier. The more full time workers there are the more workers can satisfy the needs of themselves and their families so that would be very much a step in the right direction. 
I cannot quite understand what Maurice Williamson was saying. He said how unjust it is that the increases negotiated by unions do not have to be passed on to non-union people in the workplace. Well I listen to the National Party sometimes talk about hard work—about people being rewarded for their hard work and all the rest of it. If one allows—as existed prior to this amendment that is going through—the situation of freeloading one has people who do nothing to help to improve their conditions and yet they benefit by riding on the back of their fellow workers in the same enterprise. I do not see how the National Party can stand for that and still support the idea of people working and benefiting from their work. 
The National Party goes on about the question of choice and says that people have chosen not to join a union. Well the fact of the matter is that during the period of the Employment Contracts Act the proportion of union members in the New Zealand workforce went down very dramatically. It has stabilised and in some areas has come up under the Employment Relations Act. But it is still at a very low level. One has to ask why New Zealand has such a low level of unionisation. I have just been to Norway and Sweden which have a very high proportion—60 percent or something—of the workforce unionised. The reason for New Zealand’s low level of unionisation is that it has been hard even under the Employment Relations Act sometimes for unions to talk to workers and to try to get them to join the union. Of course in a lot of workplaces particularly the smaller ones the employer can put quite strong pressure on people who might want to become union members not to become union members. So as this bill better establishes good-faith bargaining it will help I think to improve that situation and get New Zealand back closer to what we could consider to be an international norm among the more developed countries in terms of the level of unionisation. 
Ross Wilson has been criticised very much in the debate this afternoon as somehow giving orders to the Government. I do not know the details of all the accusations that have been raised but I did read a press release today from the said Ross Wilson. I only wish that he could come into the lobbies and tell the Government members about it. But he has not made very much impact on the Government yet. I will just read out two sentences of that press release which relates to the Ahmed Zaoui case: “It is fundamental that the Inspector-General should have to take into account Zaoui’s human rights and the Court of Appeal decision should be acted on without further delay. It is understandable that our Government should …”—