Sepuloni Carmel: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSepuloni Carmel: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 18 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:9162. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): Following on from what the two previous speakers said this bill follows a claim filed with the Employment Relations Authority in August 2013. The claim asserted that the time that home and community support employees spend travelling between clients is work for the purposes of the Minimum Wage Act 1983. Because of the claim the Ministry of Health entered negotiations with district health boards providers of home and community-based care and support and certain unions on behalf of members and non-members. The result is a good one. It is this settlement.Labour is pleased to see the settlement of this case finally brought before the House after the Human Rights Commission ruling several years ago that travel time should be remunerated. The National Government has reluctantly bowed to pressure from unions and adopted Labour’s fair and sensible policy to pay home support workers for the time they spend travelling between clients. It is great that we are in the position whereby this House in its entirety is supporting this bill; it is just unfortunate that the Government dragged its feet on the way to doing this. We have to give credit to Jenny Goodman and the Public Service Association which bravely took a test case claim on behalf of hundreds of fellow home-care workers.Even with this progress this settlement is still a long way from dealing with the historical underpayment of home and community support workers. Many of these people are on wages close to the minimum wage or on the minimum wage actually and given the work they do they deserve to be on a pay grade similar to nurses.My colleague Annette King made the point around pay equity. Why is it that this valuable form of work in terms of home-care support is undervalued when you stack it up against other professions? This is an area that needs to be looked at in terms of pay equity. We know that the vast majority of people undertaking this work are in fact women. It is a highly feminised workforce and these women deserve to be paid the value of the work that they are doing.The wider funding of home support services also needs to be addressed as home support remains the only service not planned and funded on a national basis. The lack of funding does push down wages in the sector. The lack of funding also means as the Home and Community Health Association has stated that “home and community support will increasingly become an option only for those who can afford it.” Many people in the last year have found their home support levels have been cut and this should be of growing concern to all of us given that we have an ageing population and that many more people moving forward are going to be requiring this type of care. If we cannot adequately fund it now then what position are we as a country going to be in in 5 10 15 or 20 years’ time?What is unfortunate is that the reality is that the Government has cut $1.7 billion out of the health system over 6 years and the workforce is bearing the brunt of this gross underfunding—stretched to capacity. Stretched to capacity and we are putting our workers in this workforce into dangerous situations because of that. There are still issues with the settlement. New organisations that join up will not be covered by this deal and that is an issue that needs to be addressed.I think it is important to note that the bill does not cover Part B of the settlement which was the “Establishment of a Regularised Workforce and Review of the Home and Community Health Sector”. I can say having been the research manager of a Pacific non-regulated health workforce development research project in the past that that conversation around the regularisation of the workforce was something that was being had I think 6 or maybe 8 years ago and continues now. What we need is not only for the workers in this workforce to be paid adequately for the valuable work that they do but also for safeguards to be in place to ensure that they are protected.Home and community support employees will receive payment from 1 July 2015 for time spent travelling between clients and I just want to note too that from 1 July 2015 to 29 February 2016 the payment will be calculated using a figure that represents the minimum wage for the weighted average of the time spent travelling between clients. Also I want to note that from 1 March 2016 the payment will be calculated based on the employee’s qualifying travel time being the weighted average time per client visit assigned to the travel band applicable to the client’s location and this will be prescribed in regulation.I just want to go back to what was discussed earlier about the value of this workforce and just again—because I do not think we can say it enough—say that this workforce historically has been undervalued and some attention needs to be paid to how we value this workforce better. Remuneration is definitely one part of that but it is not the only part of that.I want to point out that when we were undertaking the research on the Pacific non-regulated health workforce one of the things that came up time and time again was that these women who were undertaking this type of work were doing so because of the fact that they had a heart for the clients and the people that they were working for. It was not just a matter of undertaking a job for the sake of undertaking a job; there was actually that passion and commitment to the work that they were undertaking and the care that they were giving to the clients whom they were looking after. So I want to acknowledge the fact that this is a dedicated workforce and so that is another reason why we need to place value on this.We need home carers and actually during that time when we were undertaking that study that was one of the concerns moving forward—whether or not we would have the appropriate workforce to be able to cater to the needs of our ageing population. So it is not just about valuing them; it is also looking to the future and seeing how we can encourage more people to take up this type of work. As I said remuneration is a part of it but all of the working conditions that they are exposed to are a big part of making sure that they actually want to continue working in that workforce and that we can attract more people to work in that workforce.As I said before it is a highly feminised workforce and this really does illustrate the issues with pay equity that we have in this country. I mean if there is any workforce that we should be concerned about in terms of pay equity it really is in the health sector and it really is the unregulated workforce.So we are as I said earlier pleased to see that the settlement of this case has finally been brought before the House after the Human Rights Commission ruling several years ago that travel times should be remunerated for. It is just so unfortunate that it has taken so long for us to get to this point. Again I want to give credit to Jenny Goodman and the Public Service Association which has bravely taken a test case claim on behalf of hundreds of fellow home-care workers.I will just reiterate something that Annette King said earlier which is that this demonstrates really the importance of having a unionised workforce being involved in a union and being a member of a union because actually for an individual to be expected to take up a case like this alone would be overwhelming for anyone. But to know that you have a union and know that you have support behind you to be able to do that makes it a lot easier and it actually brings us to the point where we can have successful results like we do here today.Labour is definitely supporting this bill and can I just acknowledge each and every person who has played a role in bringing this to the House and ensuring its success. Thank you.