Kedgley Sue: Employment Relations (Flexible Working  Arrangements) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Kedgley Sue: Employment Relations (Flexible Working  Arrangements) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
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SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 I move  
That the Employment Relations (Flexible Working Arrangements) Amendment Bill be now read a third time 
. This is a simple light-handed bill that establishes a new employment right for any employees with caring responsibilities allowing them to seek to vary their hours or their place of work. 
Although the bill is simple I hope that in years to come we will look back on it as a landmark piece of legislation that helped to break down our rigid and inflexible working hours culture and usher in a new era where flexible working is accepted as the norm rather than the exception and where employers accept that it is in their interests to give employees more say over their working hours so they can strike a better balance between paid work and family life. I hope too that once the new right is established next year in July and hopefully extended to all employees when the legislation is reviewed in 2 years’ time it will reduce the chronic stress that many employees experience as they try to juggle the competing demands of paid work and family life. I also hope that in time businesses will actively embrace flexible working arrangements as a way of making workplaces more productive and competitive. 
This all might sound a trifle “Pollyanna-ish” but in the United Kingdom where similar legislation has been in place for years the availability of flexible working hours has accelerated to the point where officials there now claim that flexible working is becoming the norm rather than the exception. In New Zealand by contrast the inflexible 9 to 5 mentality is still very much the norm and flexible working arrangements are still looked upon almost as a favour as something an employer may grant in exceptional circumstances rather than as a legitimate and productive working arrangement. 
Although many employers claim that they already have flexible workplaces often in practice when we drill down it turns out to be little more than the ability for workers to adjust a lunch break sometimes or to go to the dentist which of course falls a long way short of the ongoing changes to working hours that this bill would allow. Even where flexible working arrangements do exist they are far more common amongst white-collar workers and managers than amongst ordinary low-paid workers. I hope that this bill will change this and ensure that all workers no matter how low-paid they are have the right to seek to change their start and finish times their shifts their work-compressed working weeks or whatever it is they believe will help them to better balance their paid work and family lives. Of course this will impose an obligation on employers to seek to accommodate their requests wherever they can providing that it will not be to the detriment of their businesses. 
In New Zealand we have not only an hours-driven working culture but a culture of long and excessive working hours. We work amongst the longest working hours in the world. Forty percent of us work more than 45 hours a week and a fifth of us work more than 50 hours a week so it is no wonder that many suffer from chronic stress and what some call the “work/eat/sleep syndrome”. We are only just beginning to realise the high price we pay for our long and inflexible working hours culture and the debilitating effect that long working hours can have on people’s lives in terms of dysfunctional relationships children who do not get to spend enough time with their parents workplace stress and so on. The truth is that the time that parents spend with their children has declined steeply over the last two decades while workplace stress and absenteeism have increased. 
We are in danger of becoming a nation of wage slaves with no time for our children or for our communities. The reality is that our rigid long working hours culture is no longer necessary in the 21st century. It is a straitjacket that we need to shed now that we have all these wonderful new technologies like the laptop and the cellphone that can keep us in touch with the office without actually having to be there in person. We have to get our head around the fact that we do not all need to work exactly the same hours. We certainly do not need to start and finish work at the same time. Many of us can easily do some of our work from home or from another location. 
If significant numbers of employees were able to vary their working hours and work from home more often it would have very very real social benefits as well as environmental and economic benefits. We could dramatically reduce the congestion caused by all of us rushing like lemmings to get to work at the same time each day. There would be no need to waste taxpayers’ money building expensive new urban motorways. Carbon dioxide emissions would reduce as would the amount of oil that we consume. In fact if the price of oil continues to rise we might find that encouraging people to work from home becomes one of the tools that future Governments use to try to reduce our dependence on oil. 
When workplaces become more flexible more women and in particular more older New Zealanders will be able to stay in the workplace. Employers will therefore have access to wider recruitment pools which will ease the skills shortage that so many people are commenting on. Productivity will increase as well. All of the research shows that employees who have more control over their working arrangements are more motivated and therefore more productive so there is less absenteeism less staff turnover less workplace illness and stress and so on. Therefore employers benefit as well as employees. It is a win-win situation. 
With all of these benefits it makes sense that Parliament would encourage more flexible working arrangements and encourage and protect employees who want to have more choice about how they balance paid work and family life by basically setting up a new employment right and a framework for employees to negotiate variations in their working hours. In the United Kingdom where employees already have this right 90 percent of the requests made under the flexible working hours legislation have been successful. The United Kingdom’s flexible working legislation is hailed as a success right across the political spectrum. All parties are seeking to extend its provisions and the Conservative leader David Cameron is a passionate advocate for extending the legislation—the right. He argues that flexible working arrangements are the key to modernising workplaces and making them more productive and competitive. 
Initially British businesses strenuously opposed the new right. Now they actively support it. In evaluations they say that it has been well received by employers and it has encouraged rather than compelled employers to experiment with flexible working practices. They say that employers who introduce flexible working hours are finding they can fish in a wider pool. They say that the people they recruit are more likely to be motivated and to remain employed in the same firm and they go on extolling the virtues of flexible working. 
Obviously the new right when it comes into effect next July will not deliver flexibility overnight but I do hope that as a result of this bill our rigid long working hours culture will slowly become a thing of the past—a skin that we shed—and that flexible results rather than hours-driven workplaces will become the norm. 
I thank all members of the Coalition for Quality Flexible Work some of whose members are here for their unwavering support for the bill. This organisation is a coalition of more than 50 professional groups community groups and unions including Grey Power women lawyers associations Parents Centres business and professional unions the Council of Trade Unions and other unions. I owe a huge debt of gratitude too to Ruth Dyson for her work and support in getting the bill through; to the new Minister of Labour Trevor Mallard for making a recent amendment to the bill; to Mark Gosche chair of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee; to other committee members like Peter Brown and Darien Fenton; and to others for their support. I thank all political parties except for National and ACT for supporting the legislation along with Gordon Copeland and Taito Phillip Field. 
It is a shame that the National Party has not been able to support this bill as the conservatives have so enthusiastically supported similar legislation in England. National members say that families are the centrepiece of their policy but this bill is aimed at reducing the pressures on families. In the final analysis it is Business New Zealand not the interest of families that determines how the National Party votes on legislation. 
I thank all of those who have helped with this bill because as it has proceeded it has actually been strengthened rather than weakened. We have extended the right to all persons with caring responsibilities and we have introduced mediation and other low-level cost-effective methods of dispute resolution that have allayed most of the concerns of employers. I hope that this bill will bring about a real change that when we review the bill in 2 years’ time we will all agree that we should extend it to all employees and that the fears that National Party members no doubt will start going on about in a short time will prove to be completely false. Thank you.