Bradford Sue: Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Bradford Sue: Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will be supporting this bill right through the process despite its being yet more piecemeal employment relations reform from the Government. Although there is no doubt that the Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill will be a worthy and welcome change for a number of workers we in the Greens think it is high time that the Government worked on a full review of the Employment Relations Act and the Holidays Act which could encompass all these small amendments as well as bringing in some much needed major changes. 
Most workers would agree that the recent  
New Zealand Air Line Pilots’ Association Union of Workers Inc. v Air New Zealand Ltd 
 Supreme Court decision which found that an employer and an employee cannot agree to transfer a public holiday from a day listed in the Holidays Act to another day was not a good outcome for workers. The bill before us this afternoon will resolve the very specific problem that employees whose shifts span 2 days where one of those days is a public holiday cannot currently transfer the public holiday to a 24-hour period that begins or ends on the public holiday. 
However the bill before us this afternoon will not of course resolve some larger public holiday issues that many workers face in New Zealand. It will not for example deal with the fact that New Zealand’s total of 11 public holidays is a whole week less than Italy’s 16. Germany and Spain have 3 more days than us to spend with their friends families and communities. Those extra days no doubt help them through the equivalent of that long and for some people depressing stretch that we have in this country between Queen’s Birthday weekend and Labour Day when for months we enter a public holiday drought. I note with interest that among Japan’s grand total of 18 public holidays are Coming of Age Day Greenery Day Children’s Day and Respect for the Aged Day the latter of which fulfils a traditional veneration for the elderly that we once possessed but have mostly lost. 
Nor will this bill do anything for the many workers who do not have a shift that spans across 2 calendar days but whose shift is not the traditional Monday to Friday. These workers lose many public holidays that the rest of us take for granted and include for example the many back-office processing workers in banks who work Tuesday to Saturday and therefore miss out on holidays that fall on Mondays. In 2006 seven of our 11 public holidays fell on Mondays. This year those workers like the ones I just mentioned are relatively lucky—only four public holidays fall on Monday so they lose only a third of their holidays rather than the two-thirds lost in 2006. 
No the bill will not fix any of these problems but it was never meant to do so of course. Like so much of the Government’s industrial relations legislation at present the bill aims to deal with only one small problem at a time. Nor will this bill sort some other issues that hundreds of workers and union members around the country tell me are major difficulties they face at present. 
For example there is no clear vision that I know of in the Government’s agenda about how to deal effectively with the problem of freeloading where employers play off union members and non-union members against each other easily nurturing a culture in which staff feel just fine about bludging off the union fees paid by some for the ultimate benefit of many. This bill will not resolve the real struggle many employees are having as they attempt to bargain standard industry-wide conditions of employment or create industry multi-employer collective agreements. The bill will not help us to sign up to the core International Labour Organization conventions—convention 87 on freedom of association and protection of the right to organise or convention 130 on the minimum working age which outline basic internationally agreed minimum working rights for all workers. The bill will not do any of these things because as happens all too often the Government at times does not seem to know who it wants its friends to be—working people and their families or large multinationals that threaten to flee every time something is proposed that they do not like. 
The Green Party supports the Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill that is before us today as we will support all the other bits and pieces that the Government puts forward that we see as being in the interests of ordinary workers and their families. But we also think it is time that the Government put a holistic approach to industrial relations on the agenda—a plan that addresses the long and often uncertain hours Kiwis work the struggles they have in bargaining with employers that are increasingly adept at using foreign human resource strategies of splitting and dividing their partially unionised work forces and a plan that supports the efforts many workers are making to reintroduce into our national consciousness the concept of a basic set of pay and conditions that allows all workers to bring up a family and participate in their community. We think it is time the Government put aside its concerns about scaring the horses and put on the table a full agenda for working people rather than these small piecemeal band-aid solutions to isolated problems. 
In commenting on this particular band-aid though I think it is important to note that an overriding principle needs to be an assurance that any transfers of public holidays that occur should take place only when it is genuinely in the best interests of the employees to move their public holiday from the day that everyone has off. It is not in their interests to have it moved as a right that they have bargained away due to a disparity of bargaining power between themselves and the employer. In most cases it is undoubtedly in the interests of both workers and employers that someone whose shift spans 2 days should not have to down tools halfway through their shift on the stroke of midnight and then return to complete their shift when midnight rolls around a second time just to take a public holiday. They should be able to agree to transfer it. 
However there is an important principle as to why we all share public holidays on the same day rather than employers being able to dictate when workers can take their holidays. Public holidays are more than just a day off. They are a shared time and an opportunity for families to come together. They are a time for festivals for sporting and cultural events to take place and for us to join in many different ways to spend time together as well as having that important time to rest. The purpose and value of public holidays is undermined if everyone has a different day off. We need to work consistently as politicians to protect the right of ordinary working people to spend a legal public holiday with their children their families their friends and their communities. Leaving an issue like the one in front of us today to be resolved on its own is not enough given the natural tendency for some of those who hold a disparity of bargaining power to offer only “take it or leave it” failing to lift their eyes above the balance sheet. 
I look forward to voting for this bill because although it is piecemeal and small it is also a tiny but critical component of the Green Party’s much bigger vision of a better life for working New Zealanders and their families.