Copeland Gordon: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Copeland Gordon: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:633;Page:5027] 
GORDON COPELAND (United Future) 
: 
 As is well known in this House United Future is a centre party. On the one hand we completely support the right of free association of workers. We support workers’ right to enter into collective bargaining arrangements and support all of the other rights that have been established in this country for a very very long time. Some members who do not live in Wellington should walk up Bolton Street on some occasion where they will find on the right-hand side just above the Bolton Hotel what looks like a church building. In it they will find a memorial to the person who established the 40-hour working week in New Zealand many many years ago. So we have a very proud record of retaining the rights of employees. 
However there is another side to the coin so on the other hand United Future also supports free and open markets. We support free and open competition because it is through competition that people are inspired to improve workplace practices the quality of their work and indeed the labour productivity of their employees—something that New Zealand has done very badly on in recent years. Our productivity has risen by people just working longer hours instead of actually working smarter and more skilfully within the time limits they are given. 
Therefore on that second tier United Future has some very real philosophical problems with this bill. This bill states that new employers must become party to any collective agreement that binds employees electing to transfer—that is the bill gives employees the right to transfer to a new company that has taken over a contract that has been terminated on the same terms and conditions as previously and as part of the same collective agreement that binds the transferring employees. 
I would like to give the House some alternative scenarios to the ones that were given earlier by say Mark Gosche. He talked about cleaners so let us suppose for example that some cleaning work was not up to scratch. I have to say in all honesty that I meet nobody of my generation who regards the cleanliness of for example Wellington Hospital as satisfactory. It is not. It is grubby and dirty and it has no relationship to the clean hospitals that I knew a generation ago. We have seen in that whole area a great slide in standards. If the contract of the people who are not maintaining a place to the required standard comes to an end the new contractor has to take on board those workers who were not up to scratch in the first place. United Future can see absolutely no sense in that. That is actually a spiral downwards to a kind of lowest common denominator outcome. 
We believe that the mixture of rights and responsibilities that I mentioned earlier and that we stand for should actually lead in the opposite direction to that. It should lead to the incentivisation of better work standards and better productivity. We should see that it is important if people are not fulfilling a contract’s conditions and if on a performance issue a contract has been ended to bring in people who can improve performance. One will not do that by using exactly the same people as before. 
 So this bill has been a bit of a line-ball call for United Future but we have decided in the end that from our point of view it does cross the line into an area that is intrusive statist “pink-think” and nanny-ish. We do not believe that it is the route towards improving relationships or work standards. We believe that those things should be addressed through the process I have mentioned with a balance between on the one hand the right of employees to free association—to unions to collective bargaining etc. —and on the other hand the right of companies and firms to compete with each other in the interests of better standards. Price is not everything. People are often prepared to pay more for a better quality of work. So the quality of work cannot be left out of the equation and the bill in our view does that. 
I want to add one more thing to that comment. Some of the submissions that we received stated—and indeed the Department of Labour officials themselves agreed—that this bill would impact on small businesses far more than on large companies particularly when it comes to terminating contracts and tendering processes. The lowest level of involvement in business ownership of any sector of New Zealand society is that amongst the Pasifika communities. We believe that this legislation will endanger the survival of fledging Pasifika companies many of which are involved in cleaning contracts and the like. We do not think this legislation will help those businesses; we think it will harm them. We want to see those businesses prosper see small businesses graduate to become bigger businesses and see bigger businesses graduate to become large businesses. That is the pathway to economic success. We think therefore that although this bill is well intentioned it breaks the old maxim that the end does not justify the means. Just because the Government has a good end in mind it still has to find the way to do it and to do it effectively with good outcomes for all. 
We believe that this bill fails that test. Accordingly United Future will not be supporting it.