Moroney Sue: Employment Relations (Rest Breaks and Meal Breaks) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Moroney Sue: Employment Relations (Rest Breaks and Meal Breaks) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:662;Page:10513] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 I think that last contribution to the debate on the Employment Relations (Rest Breaks and Meal Breaks) Amendment Bill goes to show that National has no idea what meal breaks and rest periods are all about. Not once in that member’s contribution nor virtually at all in the contribution of the Minister of Labour was the question of health and safety in the workplace addressed. That is exactly what meal breaks and rest periods are all about. It is not about people somehow having a right to spend some time chatting with their workmates; it is about all the research and evidence that exists not only in New Zealand but internationally that tells us that when workers are fatigued and when they have not had the opportunity to rehydrate and eat that is when things go wrong at work. 
When I talk about things going wrong at work I am not just talking about a widget not being produced properly; I am not just talking about shareholders not getting the maximum profit out of the workplace that they might have wanted on that day; I am talking about people losing their lives. That is the seriousness of the bill we are addressing this evening. 
National says it is introducing flexibility but it is actually giving these workplaces a recipe for disaster. The Minister spoke about giving flexibility so that workers could decide to have their break at the end of the shift. Well let us think about that from a health and safety perspective. If someone is in an environment where they work for 8 hours before they get to have a break—because they have used the wonderful flexibility that this bill affords to not have a break for 8 hours—and on hour 7½ they make a big fatal mistake that ends either their life or that of a co-worker will the Minister stand up and take responsibility for that because she has allowed that flexibility into the workplace? That is exactly what National is proposing to introduce into a workplace where it knows the power relationship is uneven. 
The idea that workers and their employers will sit down together and mutually agree that the workers will not have their break until the end of the shift is a complete nonsense and National knows it. The employer will be making these decisions. That is what this bill is all about: giving carte blanche to employers to decide what is in their best interests in terms of productivity. Never mind the health and safety of the workforce! Never mind what workers actually want to do! National is giving that right over to employers to decide how they will do it. Well that has had some really disastrous results in the past which is why the previous Labour Government brought a bill before this House and successfully put it through Parliament. Yes I say to Mr Bennett that I am proud of that. As a member who has actually put some legislation through this House I know that if Mr Bennett ever achieves that he might also understand how important it is that when one has actually gone through that process a Government that never warned anyone it was going to do so does not come along afterwards and tamper with it and take the impact of that bill away. 
When I came into Parliament one of the things I wanted to do was ensure that we had better work-life balance not for people within this precinct—I am sure you understand that Mr Assistant Speaker Roy—but for all New Zealanders. That is why Labour’s bill was so important. It ensured that workers had the right to take breaks at work. From listening to National members debating this issue one would think that Labour had put in place a bill that said people had to stop work at 10 o’clock and they had to stop work for 10 minutes. That Act of Parliament did no such thing. It simply provided for two 10-minute tea breaks and a half-hour lunch break for the average length working day. It was no more prescriptive or restrictive than that yet National is pretending that there was a straitjacketed Act of Parliament that was creating havoc throughout the workplaces in this land. That is a load of rubbish. 
Some of the stories that led me to argue for this area of law to be fixed up were from people in very vulnerable parts of our employment area. The particular group that came to see me were people working in service stations in the Waikato. They were in the position that they could not take a meal break at all during the day. 
Hon Member 
: The Minister is laughing. 
SUE MORONEY 
: Well members opposite may find this extremely funny but what had happened was that the staffing hours had been cut for the service stations right throughout the area. We all know that gas companies have been making money hand over fist yet they were cutting back hours. They cut back the hours to the bone and it meant that every time a car drove on to the forecourt the worker who may have been trying to have his or her meal break had to stop eating lunch go out and serve that customer. Repeatedly these workers were not getting meal breaks. That was the group that came to see me. On further investigation I discovered that it was an even larger problem. 
I wonder what investigation the Minister did before she went down this path. In 2006 there was an investigation into the causative factors associated with summertime workplace fatalities. It was an important piece of work because amongst other things it discovered that here in New Zealand there are two peak times when work-related fatal incidents are most likely to occur. I would really like the Minister to take heed of this because it is very important with regard to this bill. One of those peak times is in the late morning between 10.30 and 12.30; the other is mid-afternoon between 2.30 and 3.30. The trend is applicable to all industries but is particularly relevant to the agricultural sector. 
The Minister ought to be taking that sort of thing into account. It screams out to me that those are the times of the day when people ought to have had a break. They should have taken 10 minutes to have a drink of water—I feel like I will need to do that myself in a minute—rehydrate get their energy levels back up again take a little break from work and then get back into it. The evidence internationally and in New Zealand tells us that this prevents deaths in our workplaces. That is the reason for rest periods and meal breaks; not so employers can shuffle it to the end of workers’ shifts just before they are about to go off and have the big break anyway but actually to prevent accidents from happening in the workplace. 
I think it is very interesting that the Minister not only has not looked at the research that was done here in New Zealand in preparing this bill but also did not listen to her own officials when they warned her—and the official documents tell us that they warned her—not to have a knee-jerk response to the airline dispute that was happening at the time. They told the Minister that it was an industrial dispute and urged the Minister not to have a knee-jerk legislative response to it because if she became the kind of Minister who uses legislation to intervene in industrial disputes there would be no end to it. 
Did that Minister listen? The Minister clearly did not listen; she went against her officials’ advice. She has not looked at the research and evidence. She does not care about health and safety in the workplace. She does not understand the role of meal breaks and rest periods with regard to health and safety in the workplace and she is putting New Zealand workers at risk.