Moroney Sue: Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 12 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5742. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): It is a pleasure to rise in support of this very good bill which has been brought to the House in the name of my colleague the Hon David Parker. I want to congratulate him on having this bill drawn. It is a very important bill. It is about minimum wages for people who are classified or known as being contractors. This should be a no-brainer actually for a civilised society. When we set a minimum wage for all New Zealanders who are in paid work—this bill is really going to be the expression of whether this Parliament believes that that should be extended to all people who are in fact in paid employment. What we have is a situation that certainly the Labour Party believes is untenable and unfair and not the sort of decent treatment that we believe all New Zealanders expect from a civilised society and that is that people who are providing a service should be paid at least the minimum wage. For many New Zealanders that is not currently the case.I want to give a few examples of the types of work that now fall into this category because once upon a time when we talked about employees and we talked about workers it all used to mean the same thing. It all was basically a nine-to-five job and it was an employment relationship but these days some of the work that was traditionally done in that way is being done by people who have no option but to do it as independent contractors. They have no option but to do it as independent contractors because that is the requirement of the person who would once have been called their employer.People who deliver pamphlets are often employed in this way. This is obviously work. It is work that needs to be paid for but far too often these people are paid less than the minimum wage because they are offered it as an independent contractor. They are given an amount of money to deliver X number of pamphlets and depending on the terrain that they are working in or the weather or the nature of the pamphlets that they are delivering it might take them longer than was anticipated. When that is broken down hour by hour sadly it often means that they are being paid less than the minimum wage for that work.Another example that is much closer to my heart because it happens to be an area of work that is largely performed by women is the area of home-based care—home-based care for the elderly for the disabled for the people who need to have personal cares taken care of in their own home environment. That is also an area that is predominantly I would say contracted out. It is done in this way where there is a care package that is contracted for and there is a certain amount of remuneration that is given to the people who perform that very important work. It does not really matter how many hours it takes them to perform that work; they will get just that same amount of money. For far too long in this country here is what has transpired for that very important work. Because people have to travel to get to the homes to deliver the care often if we took from the time that they start their work at the beginning of the day to the time that they finish their work—if you broke that down as an hourly rate—those women were ending up getting paid less than the minimum wage.So that is the importance of this bill. It would ensure that that could never happen—that however the employment situation is described however the employment relationship is structured we would always ensure as we should in a civilised and decent society that people doing all of that important work would at least get the minimum wage. I say “at least get the minimum wage” advisedly because it is my belief that women performing that very important work in people’s homes—which actually requires a lot of mental energy a lot of knowledge and a lot of physical activity—should in fact be getting paid more than the minimum wage but this bill will do for me for now.