Beaumont Carol: Employment Relations (Workers’ Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Beaumont Carol: Employment Relations (Workers’ Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:668;Page:15215] 
CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 I rise to put it on the record that of course Labour supports democracy and supports secret ballots as Labour members have said. It is true that we supported the referral of Tau Henare’s bill the Employment Relations (Workers’ Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee so we could hear submissions and ensure that we were confident that secret ballots do occur in industrial action. Of course that is overwhelmingly what was said to the select committee. 
This is a nonsense bill. The bill is flawed and in its original form it was a complete joke. It merely required a ballot to be taken; the ballot did not have to have any particular result. That showed how flawed the bill was. But the bill is also a cheap stunt based on a flawed premise. It is based on the premise that union organisers as the previous speaker Dr Jackie Blue said force workers to take industrial action. The premise is that unions have to see the whites of employers’ eyes and have nothing personally to lose but of course the poor old workers do. Well the bill is based on a flawed premise because we operate in an age of voluntary unionism. We operate in an age where secret ballots are absolutely overwhelmingly the norm so there is no problem to solve. No evidence was presented by officials of complaints that workers felt that they had been pressured into taking strike action. Very little actual evidence was presented by submitters that this was a problem. Some assertions were made by organisations like the Employers and Manufacturers Association but there is no problem to solve. 
This bill is just like Paul Quinn’s bill: it is all about ideology and about trying to be tough. This particular bill is based on Tau Henare’s experience in the 1980s. He cited in the media that one of the reasons for this bill was his own personal experience of standing over workers to require them to take strike action. Of course that was in an environment of compulsory unionism and it was because he was being a bully. I have been a union organiser for many years—first of all in an environment of compulsory unionism and then primarily and mainly in an environment of voluntary unionism. I can say as can most of my colleagues that I have never stood over workers. But even if I had tried to stand over workers they have their own minds. They can choose whether to be members of a union. As Jackie Blue did get right in her speech people do not take strike action lightly because it costs them money. It is hard to do because it costs them money. 
In an environment of voluntary unionism why would workers strike when they can just leave the union if they want to? Workers take strike action when they are desperately trying to improve their appalling wages and conditions or when their employer will not negotiate with them in good faith. If members on the other side of the House had taken the time to genuinely engage with union members they would have found that the majority of union members in New Zealand have probably never taken strike action and those who have would tell them that they took a secret ballot before they did. That is the experience post the 1980s certainly. Tau Henare’s head is stuck in the 1980s when he personally stood over workers and bullied them into taking strike action. He said that himself in the media. 
I think it is very interesting—I am assuming this of course and I would love to be proven wrong—that the ACT Party will support this bill. Of course ACT supposedly is the party of freedom so I will be very interested to hear whether the ACT members rise to speak on this bill. Why do unions as organisations not have the freedom to determine their own rules and to have clearly set out in those rules—as most if not all of them do—provisions for secret ballots? Why does the Government have to intervene to solve a problem that does not exist? The reason is that it is about freedom for everybody except unions. Underlying this is in some cases a real hatred of and certainly antipathy towards unions by members on the other side of the House. Government members do not like unions. Why is that? The reason is quite clear: unions are about organising workers so that they can get a fairer deal—so that they can get a fair share of the pie. 
I would just love to try to open the eyes of members on the other side of the House as to what a modern union looks like. I genuinely believe that most members on that side of the House are stuck in a time warp. They do not actually know what a modern union looks like. If somebody like Michael Woodhouse was honest he would tell us that when dealing with organisations like the Nurses Organisation he has dealt with people who are very professional about their job who care intensely about the sector that they work in who resolve more disputes than they create who ensure that the voices of their members are heard who want to see their members get fair access to training and upskilling and who have a view about how people in the health sector should be treated. Michael probably could tell us that because he has dealt with modern unions in recent times. But unfortunately I think most people across the House are stuck in a time warp based on the sorts of bully-boy tactics that Tau Henare exhibited in the Northern Clerical Workers Union in the 1980s. That is not the reality of a modern trade union. The shame is that members on the other side of the House are not taking the time to find out about the reality. 
If this Government tried to find out about the reality it would see that in order for us to change our workplaces create workplaces that were really productive and create the sort of economic growth that we want workers have to be engaged skilled and involved and have to have an independent voice. I put that challenge across to members on the other side of the House. This bill is based on a failed and flawed premise. 
I have talked about my experiences. I have never in all my years as a union official stood over anybody. I have led strikes and I have been involved in organising workers who have taken strike action but I can say it was done democratically it was done by a secret ballot and it was done as a last resort. It was done because workers absolutely have the right to organise to collectively bargain and in the absence of getting any progress through collective bargaining to take strike action to put forward their case. We cannot force people to take strike action. It is nonsense to think we can force people to take strike action. Would we stand over them and physically push them out the door? Would we barricade the doors so they could not get back into the workplace? How could we require them to stay out when they did not want to? How could a union organiser imagine ever being able to organise that workplace again in that circumstance? Of course he or she could not. 
My colleague Darien Fenton touched on another issue: the problem with this bill is that it is unbalanced. It focuses solely on industrial disputation from the point of view of unions. It focuses on strikes and it has no interest in dealing with the other side. The Employment Relations Act aligns strikes and lockouts. Where is there any similar limitation on employers taking industrial action? There is none. A number of submitters made that point. I have to comment on a very big lockout of recent times. It is true that lockouts are rarer than strikes but they tend to be longer and more costly. The Progressive Enterprises distribution centre lockout cost the affected workers and their families thousands and thousands of dollars. They were locked out. Who made that decision? It probably was not the board of Progressive Enterprises; it certainly was not the shareholders. When the value of the shares in Progressive Enterprises—which is Foodtown and Countdown—went down did those shareholders have any rights? Did they have any say in that lockout? No they did not. So if this Government was serious about this issue it would also be looking at that side of the equation. 
We will see increasing disputation in this country. I predict that and I am sure that I will be proved to be right. This Government is anti-union and anti-worker and it is watching the gap between rich and poor grow. It is doing nothing to address the gap in wages between Australia and New Zealand. Hammering unions is the wrong way to go about closing that gap. If the Government was serious about addressing that issue it would know that collective bargaining is the way to close the gap.