Woodhouse Michael: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoodhouse Michael: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9471. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): I am pleased to take the first call on Part 2 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. This is the part that among other things goes to the heart of much of the debate that has been going on around this bill pretty much since it was introduced and that is in the matter of zero-hour contracts. I am very pleased and appreciative actually to note that for all the hyperbole around the concerns about the clauses and the various amendments we have actually landed in a place that I think and I hope the majority of the Committee can support.There are a number of people who I think can take credit for that—and I know that there will be a number of people who will claim credit for that but the people whom I want to acknowledge in my first intervention in the Committee stage are actually the officials because they will not say it and they write my speeches and they never mention themselves. It has been a notoriously challenging task to take what we know in principle—and what I think we can all agree on is that the concept of zero hours and those punitive elements of provisions that were creeping into our employment relations landscape should go. The question is what words we use in the legislation to give effect to that that are effective without having unintended consequences and I can tell the Committee and those listening that I have spent countless hours with officials and with others to ensure that we get that right.I acknowledge also the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee as I did in the second reading and others including the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and Mr Lees-Galloway for working towards being as close as we can get to that common goal. I think we will all agree that there were punitive aspects of employment agreements that needed to go. I just want to put on record my thanks to the officials for the work that they have done.One of the difficulties that we did have through this process I think was in coming to a shared understanding about what zero hours actually meant because it has no formal legal definition—it is not set out in any statute. It is a nomenclature that has crept into a lot of Western jurisdictions particularly the United Kingdom and certainly more recently in New Zealand. So I think it is important at least in framing the debate to inform the Committee of what I think we are talking about when we talk about zero hours.I want to acknowledge Dundas Street Employment Lawyers which in my searching on its website came up with the most succinct definition of what I think we were trying to deal with here. I am paraphrasing from its website effectively in having no legal definition but what we tend to talk about is the engagement with an employee without any reciprocal guarantee of work. In many cases those employees are required to be available for work. I will come back to the question of availability soon. But it is the lack of that mutuality of obligation that is the most punitive aspect of zero-hour agreements. It is the quid pro quo that if I do not commit why should the other party?Too many examples were being brought to the attention of unions and MPs where there was no obligation on the employer to commit any number of hours but an expectation that the employee be available for work often to the exclusion of other opportunities to seek work elsewhere. Apart from being pretty poor and stupid this was actually bad for business in my view. These were businesses that had extremely high levels of turnover as a consequence. As one who has had to run an organisation that has quite uncertain throughput and a 24/7 operation I know it is not that easy but it is not rocket science to roster a workforce that has the right mix of full-time part-time and casual staff and other staff who can be available if necessary in an emergency without resorting to these.So it was with that in mind that we came to what I think was a very strong start point with the bill as it was introduced—and even stronger when it came out of the select committee—but there were still concerns and I acknowledge those concerns. For all of the noise around the fact that there were some who claimed that we had not removed zero hours but rather we had entrenched them—for all of that I did not think we were that far away. I do want to acknowledge the Council of Trade Unions and the Labour Party members of the select committee who were prepared to work together to come to an arrangement that I think strengthens the bill even further.I want to come to the issue of availability because Mr Lees-Galloway does have an amendment to the bill that reflects the question of availability and effectively what it does is it says that an agreement should not have an availability provision unless there is a commitment to hours. Just to reframe that the zero-hour agreements have two dimensions: one is the lack of a commitment to hours and the second is the expectation to be available with no compensation. So when the bill came back out of the select committee it had the second part.I would suggest that at least one of the limbs of those two things needs to be fixed in order to get rid of the zero-hour agreement. So for example it is possible to have a casual employment agreement. Regardless of concerns about the casualisation of employment that some hold I still maintain that casual employment agreements have a place in the employment relations landscape. On the other hand it should not be an expectation that someone on a casual hours agreement be waiting by the phone—that is the availability expectation. The bill as it came out of the select committee allowed for there to be no mutual commitment of hours but it did say that if you want your staff member to be available there has to be a compensation for that.Mr Lees-Galloway’s amendment which I am sure he will speak to—and I do not want to steal his thunder on this; I just want to put on record my views on it—did I think eliminate zero hours. If one of the things that we needed to do was to take away one of those imbalances then effectively requiring the employer to compensate for being available even if there were no hours of commitment in the agreement did that. However I was open to the view that a minor change to the availability provisions that says you can have an availability provision only if there is first a commitment of hours still preserves the goal that we are trying to do and may strengthen it at the margins—I am not convinced but I do not think it harms things. So for that reason the Government is prepared to support Supplementary Order Paper 155 in the name of Mr Lees-Galloway.There are some other changes minor changes—again I think at the margins—that provide better clarity around what the expectations are for reasonable notice for example. This has been another area of complexity because both the availability provision and the reasonable notice provision for cancellations need to make sure that we do not in our efforts to eliminate these punitive aspects of employment agreements have the unintended consequence of ruling out that which is necessary and appropriate in our employment landscape.For example in terms of the emergency helicopter ambulance pilot we do want that person to be available. We do not want him or her to be actually deployed but we should compensate that person for being available. The New Zealand Police obviously needs availability provisions for things like the armed offenders squad and Special Tactics Group and so on. So to suggest that we could get away from the availability and on-call provisions which are an important part of our industrial-relations landscape is not I think what anybody would want. What we have to make sure is that in framing these availability provisions we do not leave ourselves with unintended consequences.I just wanted to put on the record what my understanding of zero-hour agreements are. I am very happy to have that elaborated on or nuanced from other members of the Committee. But I remain convinced that this will eliminate those quite punitive aspects of agreements that are known as zero hours. I think that will be good for employees. It will actually be good for employers too—those who may have been a little lazy in their rostering practices. I think the effect of this and I expect and hope the effect of this will be more in the prevention than the prosecution because this will prompt those who have been a bit tardy with their rostering practices and a bit lazy in their expectations on employees to be more diligent. It is not rocket science; it is good business practice and I think that is what we have got here.