Locke Keith: Employment Relations (Workers’ Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Locke Keith: Employment Relations (Workers’ Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will be supporting the Employment Relations (Workers’ Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill to go to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. But whether we support it beyond that will depend on whether it is proved in the select committee that there is a real need for such a bill and a way to handle some of the downsides of the bill that have already been explained by speakers including the previous speaker Darien Fenton. 
The bill seeks to codify practices that already exist in unions to conduct secret ballots before engaging in industrial actions. In order to promote a legislative framework for that and as Darien Fenton said an army of bureaucrats becoming involved in the work of a voluntary organisation—and unions are voluntary organisations—a reason has to be provided. What is the problem that now exists that requires such legislative intervention? We do not make laws just for the sake of it. Sometimes National goes on about a nanny State; well this would be a nanny State if we enacted a law for no good reason. 
I think Tau Henare in his introduction indicated what lies behind this. He talked about the need to protect people from intimidation and things of that manner without providing a single bit of evidence of intimidation in the current union situation and not a single bit of evidence has been provided by any of the National speakers. Essentially this bill and the talk around it without providing any evidence are creating a prejudicial attitude towards unions serving to soften up unions and workers for more attacks on them and to create a public climate where they find it more difficult to resist those attacks. David Bennett talked about an ulterior motive for going on strike but it is quite clear that when workers take the democratic decision as they do to go on strike they are thinking and canvassing all the issues; nobody voluntarily takes a reduction in income for nothing. 
Other negative problems are also associated with this bill and they have been brought to light by unions such as the Service and Food Workers Union which says that already employers sometimes try to take injunctions against unions to either prevent or slow up industrial action and to put unions off their stride by saying “Well you’re not obeying this union rule or that union rule.” The more we put a legislative framework into the union situation the more likely it is for employers to try to use injunctions to say that “According to this law you did not conduct the ballots quite right. Were all the members informed?” and all the rest of it. I think it is right as Darien Fenton pointed out that this debate is in the context of more industrial action caused by Government policy—for example court workers in the Ministry of Justice went on a series of rolling industrial actions over the last 6 months and finally won their dispute which originated in the Government not giving enough to the ministry to pay court workers properly. 
The bill does not address the other side of the equation which is that of employer lockouts. As has been pointed out—and the Greens would address this in the select committee as it would help us to determine whether we supported the bill beyond that deliberation—there should be a procedure to stop lockouts. There have been very damaging lockouts recently in the dairy industry and so on that have hurt workers and employers. In these days of computer technology it would not be at all problematic to email each shareholder of a company and each member of a board to ask if they supported a lockout and to give the reasons argue it out and have a debate over email or in some form. There could be a special meeting and a secret ballot of shareholders before workers were ever locked out. It is probable that at the moment most lockouts are done autocratically by the chief executive officer and even the board is not informed or brought fully into the discussion in most cases. 
With those few words I say that the Green Party will be supporting this bill going to the select committee. But our support is conditional on proper justification being provided for it and on alterations being made.