Gosche Mark: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Gosche Mark: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:633;Page:5018] 
Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) 
: 
 As chair of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee I am very pleased to see this bill being reported back and I will be even more pleased when it has its third reading. It always surprises me that when I listen to the Opposition speakers on this matter they just have no concept of what it is about. They probably never will because they do not notice the people who clean their offices after they go home. Paula Bennett said the bill was about only a few hospital workers. Well she should look at it more carefully because it is about the cleaners who clean her office and who clean this building. It is about the people who feed all of us up in the cafeteria or the restaurant. Those people are very low-paid and have for many years suffered under a regime that the National Party supports—a regime of contracting out and taking a chance the next day as to whether they will have jobs. If they do have jobs it is likely to be on lower wages and lesser conditions. But the National Party supports that. I did not hear a proposal from the National Party either in the select committee or tonight that would replace this law. It actually supports that type of thing. 
Let us just consider what this is about. It is about the people at Wellington Hospital who came and submitted to the select committee. They have been working at the hospital for some 15 or 16 years and have had six or seven different employers—some of them the worst ratbags that have ever been in this country who came here and set up to clean cook and do the orderly services in our public hospitals without which our public health system would collapse. Those employers came here on a loss-leader contract and put all those workers’ jobs to the sword. They just up and ran away and said: “We can’t hack this any more. We’ve taken the wage cost as low as we can. We’re still making a loss so see you later.” That is what the National Party supports. That is the sort of law that party put in place when it was in Government. That is not the sort of law that the vast majority of people in this House support. 
This amendment bill makes a simple technical change to the law. The policy is quite clear. The workers it affects are the most vulnerable workers. They are the people who cook and clean and who do the laundry. They are the people who keep our schools universities and polytechs clean. They are the people in the age-related residential care area. They are the people who shift the dead bodies in the hospital system. They are the people who do the dirtiest most unpleasant most lowly paid jobs in this country. I pay credit to them and take pride that this Government and Labour along with the Greens the Maori Party and the New Zealand First Party are prepared to say that those people are special. They do dirty low-paid work. They deserve to be protected. They do not deserve to come to work one day and find that the multinational company that used to employ them has gone into liquidation and said to the public of New Zealand: “Bad luck. We’re not going to clean your hospitals any more.” 
That is what the National Party supports. Its members will get up here and moan and grizzle and they will say: “This law is about the big bad employers. What about the small employers?”. Well they should have opened their ears in the select committee to the woman who came and said that she worked in a medical centre and was employed by a small family business. She was its only cleaner. What happened? She was on an hourly rate of say $11.50. The contract changed and the small family business got turfed out. She did not. She was employed the next day by the bigger company. The big company dealt to the small company by actually paying that worker less. 
David Bennett and Paula Bennett if they had opened their ears and listened to the cleaner who came in and made that submission would have recognised that a lot of small businesses get screwed by such behaviour. They get undercut by the big players who can come along and say: “We’ll clean up much more cheaply than that small New Zealand business we’ll cut the workers’ wages we’ll take away their conditions we’ll make them work harder we’ll cut their hours. You’ll get a cheaper nastier service and then you’ll come along and complain and we’ll sack the worker for you because it’s all their fault.” In her speech Darien Fenton will outline some of the stories that were told by those workers. 
This is not a new problem. I recall when I was secretary of the Hotel Hospital and Restaurant Workers Union when Auckland Hospital used to have one cleaner per ward. In those days we did not have the cross-infection that we have today. We did not have people going into hospital and coming out with a new disease because the hospital was not cleaned properly. No we had one cleaner per ward and— 
Christopher Finlayson 
: Have you ever cleaned anything in your life? 
Hon MARK GOSCHE 
: That young man over there says I have never cleaned in my life. Well that is how naive he is. I have done those jobs unlike him—who has no experience of real workers in this country—sitting down there in his big flash law office and pretending he knows something about it. I have seen those workers in Auckland Hospital go from cleaning one ward in 8 hours to cleaning two wards in 6 hours and people expect the hospitals to be as clean as before. Then they say: “It’s those workers they’re useless they’re lazy. We should contract them to another contractor so we can get rid of all those lazy workers.” It does not work like that. The contractor goes the workers stay the workload goes up and the hourly rate goes down. And the National Party supports that. It absolutely supports that. It loves that and wants to entrench it in our society for ever. That is the absolute bankrupt ideology of the National Party. 
I cannot believe that people like Paula Bennett who says she has been a cleaner and David Bennett who says he cares about low-paid workers can come here and read their research unit notes out with a straight face. They know what they heard at the select committee—real workers telling real stories about the huge workload that they have to try to perform in their miserable 4 or 5 hours for their $10.25 an hour. Then they have the audacity to expect their jobs to be there tomorrow! No the National Party says those workers should not have that expectation; they should be flexible and they should be ready to work for any employer for any amount of money. That is what the Employment Contracts Act was about and the National Party wants to bring that Act back with knobs on. 
At the select committee Maurice Williamson said he wanted the Employment Contracts Act back without the soft bits and he was serious. He said National did not deal to the workers and the unions hard enough last time and Maurice is looking forward to dealing to them again. He reckons that the 90 days’ probation period in Wayne Mapp’s Employment Relations (Probationary Employment) Amendment Bill is no good because a good employer can find out in 9 days. 
Hon Member 
: Drop the zero! 
Hon MARK GOSCHE 
: So he wants to drop the zero on that one. I will give Maurice Williamson credit for that—at least he was honest on that one. But in every other aspect he wants to deal to those workers and deal hard. 
What can be expected from the National Party when they are living in the 1890s? They are living not in the 1990s but in the 1890s. They want to bring that era back. Labour is opposed to that and all sensible members of Parliament in this place are opposed to that. 
I want National members over there to stay up until midnight tonight. I want them to sit in their offices waiting for the cleaners to come to clean up the mess those members make and tell those cleaners: “I don’t support you having job security.” I challenge one of them to do it. At midnight tonight when the cleaners start to arrive I want every one of those National Party members over there voting against this bill to sit in his or her office wait for the cleaner to arrive and say: “I do not care less about you. I voted against the bill today.” Then let us see whether the rubbish bin gets collected.