Beaumont Carol: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading In Committee Speaker Recalled 
Beaumont Carol: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading In Committee Speaker Recalled 
[Volume:668;Page:15404] 
CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 In this debate in the Committee stage of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) I want to pick up a point about the 90-day trial period and the very significant point made by my colleague Darien Fenton in relaying that example. The comment was made about Australia. Earlier Dr Jackie Blue asserted of course that the 90-day provision is very reasonable that everywhere around the world there are these no-rights provisions and in fact the provision here is even quite moderate in being only 90 days. I have to say there were a number of submitters who quite clearly tried to get us to recognise that we need to compare apples with apples. Caritas which I mentioned earlier in another regard said: “Look we are not specialists in employment law but we thought given that the Government had asserted so strongly that the justification for the 90-day provision was that it applied everywhere else that we should check it out.” It made contact with the equivalent of Caritas in Australia and it was particularly interested in looking at the situation of small employers. It checked with the Australian Catholic Church’s Office for Employment Relations and it was told that matters of natural justice and procedural fairness during probationary periods in Australia are covered by Australia’s fair work and adverse action provisions. A complaint under the adverse action provisions can be taken by any worker—including job applicants so the provisions are quite broad—who feels that he or she has been unfairly treated. Then a range of actions flow from that. Caritas was then referred to the Australian Government website to check that out a little more. 
Once Caritas followed that through it looked at the advice provided to employers and employees about the legal obligations around the termination of employment. It found that there is a provision applying to small businesses the Small Business Fair Dismissal Code which provides a whole lot of things and would stop the absolutely patently unfair examples like the one that my colleague Darien Fenton just gave—a real life story involving somebody sacked not for their own action but for sticking up for somebody else. I reckon most New Zealanders would find that absolutely disgraceful but they need to know that that is entirely possible under this legislation. 
I will also talk a little bit about union access to workplaces. Some cute statements have been made across the Chamber about our position on union access to workplaces. The difference that this law will put in place is that it will give an employer the right to say no to access. We were given example after example in the select committee of how the current access provisions which do not give the employer the right to just say yes or no but have a number of reasonableness provisions are working effectively where there are relationships. People described for us the fact that the union official will generally make contact with the manager to discuss what a reasonable time for access might be and whether access should be provided in particular places or to some groups of workers at some times and others at other times. That is genuine and that is what happens at the moment. I know that from my own experience and from the experience of other officials. There is not a problem. That was made absolutely clear by officials and it was made clear by Business New Zealand. 
This new access provision is purely an ideological thing but the worry is its effect. It may not be widely used but it will be used by employers who do not want to see workers accessing information workers accessing expert advice and workers wanting to organise themselves to get a better deal. This is the last thing we should be doing if we are serious about closing the wage gap between Australia and New Zealand. The real way to close the wage gap is obviously to lift wages in this country. How do we go about that? We do not go about it individual by individual by individual. That is not the way to lift wages. The way to lift wages is to lift the wages of groups of workers through collective employment agreements. How do we do that? We do that by workers joining together in unions by organising and then by seeking to negotiate a collective employment agreement. If bad employers have the right to stop unions accessing workplaces that will not happen.