Fenton Darien: General DebateText is subject to correctionFenton Darien: General Debate[Sitting date: 23 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:14199. Text is subject to correction.]DARIEN FENTON (Labour): Well I would have thought that the Minister of Labour Simon Bridges may have had a word to say about the fact that it is Labour weekend this weekend. However—Sue Moroney: No he didn’t say it at all.DARIEN FENTON: —he did not say a word about Labour Day being this weekend. He will just be off having a holiday forgetting that Labour Day is about remembering the struggle we had that began in 1840 for an 8-hour working day and forgetting that it has been celebrated in this country from 1900.There was a time when each generation was proud to say that their kids would be better off at work than they were. We have all worked hard to ensure the rights won by our forebears have not been lost. But I cannot say that today. Working people are going backwards under this National-led Government. Our kids cannot get jobs and even when they do they are highly precarious. Flexibility is about how easily they can be fired and how little responsibility an employer must bear. Competitiveness and productivity is about how low the wages can be and how much can be extracted from workers in an ever-diminishing pool of hours. The 8-hour day and 40-hour week are considered a joke. In fact they do not exist in legislation and we have no working hours protection in New Zealand.Sue Moroney: Especially not in the forestry industry.DARIEN FENTON: Especially not in the forestry industry. We subsidise low wages through Working for Families. We pay employers to take on young minimum-wage workers whom they can sack after 90 days. Then we blame people when they struggle to make ends meet.There are more and more people out looking for work now for jobs that do not exist. When they cannot find them they get punished. We are on a punishment regime led by the Hon Paula Bennett.Thousands of workers continue to lose their jobs through lay-offs. It has been a dreadful week this week. I want to just briefly send aroha out to the 1000-odd New Zealand Post workers who are facing the job losses that have been announced today.But what does this Government do? It goes back to its normal modus operandi of cutting workers’ rights. I guess that Simon Bridges should have been at the select committee to hear the stories of workers the 14000 workers who submitted against his Employment Relations Amendment Bill. However because he was not there I am going to tell some of their stories.There is no story stronger than that of the cleaners who work in this Parliament who have appealed to Simon Bridges to not make their lives worse by ditching the protections of Part 6A of the Employment Relations Act. I hope he has been listening like he said he would and like he told this Parliament he would but just in case here are some words from the cleaners: “You never see us. Every evening we catch the bus or the train from Wainuiomata or Porirua to clean your office. We vacuum the floors scrub the toilets and tidy away your rubbish. We come in at midnight when you have all gone home and the Parliament Buildings are empty.”Hon Tau Henare: Where are all the Pacific Island union organisers?DARIEN FENTON: I know Tau Henare is a bit sensitive about this topic. “We come over to Parliament after we have worked all night cleaning the buildings on The Terrace and Lambton Quay. It’s a hard job a dirty job but we don’t mind being cleaners. We are proud to clean the most important house in the country. But we don’t love our pay ... On top of that as contracted workers we face daily uncertainty at work. Spotless has the contract to clean Parliament but it could lose it so do not make it bad for cleaners or make it worse for cleaners Mr Bridges. Part 6A is a fair rule. All the contractors should play by the same rules.” On their behalf I call on Simon Bridges to remove the changes he is planning to make to Part 6A.In Christchurch he should have heard the stories too from workers who came along who have already been traumatised by the earthquake who said: “Why would a Government want to cut our pay? Why would they do that to us?” There was a worker called Julie Reason who talked about her job as a home-care worker—a home-care worker working on assignment job to job working an hour then getting in the car getting paid nothing no tea breaks or anything. She said: “Why would this Government want to cut our pay?”My message to New Zealand workers this Labour Day is that the Labour Party values the hard work of working New Zealanders and their contribution. We are on your side and we have real plans to improve your working lives when this Government is thrown out.