Roche Denise: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 20 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:6037. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take a call on Part 3. This as other people have said is where the rubber hits the road. It is the significant part of the bill that deals with worker participation worker engagement and health and safety reps health and safety committees and as I said in one of my previous speeches with who is in and who is out. It is in this part that we see the Government’s experience of being lobbied coming into play in the legislation. That is where we see the exemption of health and safety committees and reps for businesses with fewer than 20 workers.I have been thinking very seriously about what engagement means and what participation means and reflecting on the types of submissions that we received. We received many submissions to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee on the Health and Safety Reform Bill from employers who were really really concerned that health and safety representatives would have too much power. They talked about the fact that health and safety representatives could be vindictive or that they could use that power basically to shut down the plant or the operation for no good reason whatsoever. In this part of the bill there are some constraints around that.This is quite a wide-ranging part of the bill and I want to take several calls on this—I am just giving you notice Mr Chairperson. I do want to take several calls on this to address some of those different aspects that are held within it. It is quite important and also wide ranging. First off we have got the whole issue of engagement and then following that we have got the issue of participation.The bill talks about what engagement means. What I see engagement as meaning is that it is supposed to be about ensuring that workers know what is going on—that they have the opportunity to be told what is going on but not necessarily that they get the opportunity to speak back although that is covered a little bit further in participation. But what I have seen from my experience as a worker and as an employer is that frequently telling people is not the same as engaging people.For true participation you need to have a two-way dialogue and that is the balance that is being talked about in the model law in the task force and in the recommendations from the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy. It seems to me that one of the ways that workers can participate is by electing a health and safety representative. The fact that workplaces that have fewer than 20 workers do not have that right as a right means that that type of participation that type of engagement and that type of voice has actually been silenced.I guess that goes further when you look also at health and safety committees which are not required. A health and safety representative can ask for a health and safety committee to be set up or in workplaces with over 20 workers my understanding is that if more than five workers ask for a health and safety committee then the employer—the person conducting a business or undertaking rather—can consider it. The employer has the right to consider it and also the employer has the right to decline that.I note that there is a Supplementary Order Paper from the Minister that tries to soften that a bit by saying that actually the workers who would be affected by that have to be told. Great—they just have to be told. They do not have to be agreed with their request does not have to be met; they just have to be told. Actually when you think about it that is not really engagement either.Today I got an email from a gentleman who had the dubious pleasure of being my boss for 7 years. He is a volunteer and he was a volunteer then for the Waiheke Waste Resource Trust on Waiheke Island. His name is George Blanchard. The poor man—he was my boss for 7 years and he was a volunteer. He actually wrote to me because he was a director of our community-owned recycling waste collection and processing company which uses a lot of heavy machinery.The worksite itself which was owned by the council was pretty dodgy I have to say so health and safety was a huge issue. What he wrote to me today—and I will quote from it because it is a nice email—was: “I’ve been thinking about the way safety was organised on the”—basically—“dangerous Clean Stream Waiheke Ltd site. We had a completely unionised site with union members on the safety committee. When someone turned up in an unsafe state it was the union rep the health and safety rep who asked that person to go home and not to turn up again in that state. This meant that the person knew that it was a request aimed at the safety of co-workers and not a vindictive approach by management. This might be a good model to explore. Talley’s could learn something here if its management was capable of such a thing.” And I am going to mention Talley’s under parliamentary privilege—I would not dare mention them outside—basically because it has taken and it is taking a vindictive approach to workers who do want to have a voice or who have dared to participate in union activities. It is doing this during the breakdown of employment collective agreement negotiations.I guess one of the things that worries me the most is the talk that we heard from some employers like Talley’s during the select committee process about this huge lack of trust which actually I believe has filtered through into this iteration of the bill. It has changed the balance so that the employer gets to make a whole bunch of decisions including in places where there may be a health and safety rep what workers that representative will cover whom they will represent and what work group they will represent. So for example if you had an employer who really did not want to meet its obligations it could quite easily say: “Well this representative on this large worksite will only represent this group of workers who are the admin workers and let’s forget about the ones in the warehouse.” It sort of defeats the purpose of having a health and safety representative if that is the way an employer is going to operate but it does happen.We make law for the exceptions—for the bad cases. We make law to make sure that those sorts of exploitations and bad employment practices can be controlled. But what we are seeing is a complete watering-down of the rights of workers to be able to say anything about health and safety. It does say in the bill that this is about ensuring that workers participate but we have got a situation where the bill itself does not set up as a right situations where workers have that voice.Outside this bill in the rest of the legislation around employment relations we have got a whole bunch of legislation that this Government introduced that silences workers even more. I will give you examples. They are things like the 90-day trial fire-at-will law. What that does is that new workers coming on are unable to raise their voice for fear that they will not be brought on again. Look I realise that further on in this part of the bill there are some issues around coercion and around the behaviour to try to prevent that but we have got this happening in other parts of employment relations and they are interconnected. If a worker cannot speak in their first 90 days at work for fear that they may be sacked for no reason then what hope have we got of them being able to raise any issues around say the deep-fryer basically burning people on a regular basis or not having any sort of protective bars to stop workers falling into it? We have come to a situation where that balance has absolutely changed.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Before I take the next call I just want to acknowledge that a member has brought into the Chamber a casket that is normally for the carriage of ashes. If she thinks she is going to use that as a visual aid in some later speech the rules would require her to have it out of sight until she uses it. If she is intending to use it for some other purpose I fail to see how that is within order in the House at the moment. So I would suggest at the moment that it be taken off the desk.Sue Moroney: Can I speak to the point of order?The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I suggest you take it down at the moment. Thank you. I can advise that currently I am seeking some guidance from the Clerk’s Office in respect of this. It has been drawn to my attention that it is causing offence in the House. The question for the Clerk’s Office is whether it is going to be seen as a visual aid or whether it is going to be dealt with as a matter of offence to the House. If it is a visual aid it then is open to the Chairman to decide whether or not it is appropriate as a visual aid or not. That will be something that will be decided at a later time. If the member has a point to raise in respect of my comments she may do that now.