Parker David: Minimum Wage and Remuneration Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Parker David: Minimum Wage and Remuneration Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:654;Page:3910] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 I rise again to support Part 2 of the Minimum Wage and Remuneration Amendment Bill. It intrigues me that the attacks made upon this legislation really show the true belief structure of the National members in respect of minimum rates of remuneration. 
Many overseas jurisdictions do not have legislation that regulates the minimum wage which we have in New Zealand. They have legislation that regulates the minimum rate of remuneration. There is an important difference between those two. If we regulate the minimum wage that applies only to wage relationships—that is to contracts of employment rather than contracts of service. 
At present in New Zealand we have a very vulnerable class of people. Some of the lowest-paid people in society do not receive the benefit of the minimum wage. They suffer a lot of other detriments as well. They receive no sick pay if they are ill. Those people may be working for a terribly low rate of pay but if they are off work because they are sick they do not get sick pay. If they work for 50 weeks in the year they do not even receive 2 weeks of holiday pay because they have no entitlement to holiday pay. They are not paid for statutory holidays. Those are normal minimum entitlements that people who are employed should receive. Workers on contracts of service do not have adequate protection against unfair dismissal because they are not employees. 
This bill does not fix all of those things but it goes some way towards making sure that at the very least the amount they are paid when they are working is no lower than the minimum wage. I ask members what is wrong with that. It is such a simple issue. It is an obvious failure of the current law—notwithstanding the fact that people still will not be protected in relation to receiving sick pay holiday pay or protection against unfair dismissal. But at least they would be getting the minimum rate of remuneration which I think most people in New Zealand probably think they already get by law. Most people in New Zealand do not understand that a class of people is not employed in a traditional employer-employee relationship but is employed on the basis of a contract for service which is not an employer-employee relationship. Therefore those people do not even get the minimum wage. 
I come from the city of Dunedin and it used to have the shame of sweatshops. That was a long time ago when Dunedin was probably at that stage the industrial heart of New Zealand. We had sweatshops and those sweatshops were effectively eliminated by good central government legislation that set maximum hours of work and minimum rates of remuneration for waged workers. Back in those days we did not have the artifice of people escaping the employer-employee relationship through a contractual relationship that was not an employment relationship. This is the equivalent of that social ill because we now have very low effective rates of remuneration for people who do not even get the protection of the minimum wage. 
I feel very strongly about this legislation. If it was on my conscience that I was voting against the most minimal of protections I would have cause to think that maybe my ideology was just a little too tough because it is not fair that people who do not have the minimum protection of receiving sick pay holiday pay and protection against unfair dismissal do not even get the minimum wage. That wage is all that this legislation provides for. National Party members can say that that is wrong but it shows that they do not believe in the minimum wage for other people either. They refuse to even see the minimum wage be extended to this most vulnerable group of people a great proportion of whom are Maori and other groups that are overrepresented in the lower socio-economic groups. Mr Henare who is voting against this bill is doing a disservice to the low-paid people whom he purports to represent the interests of. This bill should be passed.