Nash Stuart: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNash Stuart: Employment Standards Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9463. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): Sorry Sue.Sue Moroney: That’s all right. It’s OK. I’ll get another one.STUART NASH: Yes I am sure you will. I would like to reiterate a little bit of what Sue Moroney is talking about—the keeping-in-touch days—because I think that employees need to be very careful about how this is managed. I am talking about new section 71CE in clause 55. It is called “Keeping-in-touch days”. What it actually says is and I am going to quote new subsection 71CE(3) “An employee is treated as having returned to work”—and this is the important bit—“and all parental leave payments received by the employee in respect of a period after the date on which the employee is treated as having returned to work are recoverable … as an overpayment …”. It talks about what constitutes having returned to work. Paragraph (b) of new subsection 71CE(3) talks about if the person on paid parental leave: “performs more than a total of 40 hours of paid work for his or her employer during a period of paid parental leave.”The reason I want to highlight this is where the person on paid parental leave says to their boss: “Look I’m going to be away for 16 weeks and we know this but what I will do is when the baby’s asleep I’m going to check my emails. I’ll just check them once a day so I keep in touch and if anything important comes in then I’ll forward it on. Well I will do the responsible thing.” If a person on paid parental leave checked their emails for just 1 hour every day then after 8 weeks they would have worked more than 40 hours a week probably unbeknownst to that person—because they are trying to do the right thing—and probably unbeknownst to the employer as well. They would come back after 16 weeks and they could well get a knock on the door saying: “I’m sorry. We’ve just checked the records and you have worked more than 40 hours during this period. We note this from the employer’s records and we note from the email transactions. Therefore we see this has occurred.” and the employee now owes 8 weeks’ back-pay.I just want to reiterate that that 40 hours is up if the person on paid parental leave works only 1 hour a day. Even if they decided to work just 4 hours a week—you know which is not much at all—that is 10 weeks. So there is a little bit of a fish-hook in here for those who are conscientious who want to do what is right for the company and want to do what is right for the employer and who say: “Look I am just going to check my email.” So the person on paid parental leave needs to understand that in effect if they take the full 18 weeks which is about 2 hours a week that is all they are allowed to work—2 hours a week. Anyone on paid parental leave does need to be aware of that because if they work over those 40 hours over that 18-week period then they will receive a knock on the door because they will be deemed to have gone back to work.The thing about this is not only will they be required to pay back all the money they have received when they were on paid parental leave but also they will not have been receiving any income when they had believed in their minds that they were on paid parental leave if you know what I mean. I can just see a couple of situations where the potential could be catastrophic to say the least.There is one other thing that I would like to query and I am not too sure why this is here. This is new subsection (6) in section 72B as inserted by clause 76(2). What it actually says—it applies to the armed services—is: “This section applies to a member of the Armed Forces as if the member of the Armed Forces were an employee of the Chief of Defence Force”—yes it makes sense—“except that a member of the Armed Forces may not succeed to the member’s spouse’s or partner’s entitlement to [paid] parental leave.”The way I am reading that—and I may have this wrong because I was not on the select committee—in this case obviously is if a woman gives birth then her partner or her spouse is not allowed to colloquially sub into that. I am not too sure why that exists. I think that maybe if someone is on active duty and they want to get out of active duty then they would make a call on this and that may create problems but I am not too sure whether there are—well I can think of circumstances where that may be the case. The Minister may have something to say on that but it just seems a little strange that the men and women who are actually putting their lives on the line to keep New Zealand safe are not actually entitled to the requirements under this bill.