Roche Denise: Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 12 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5745. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take a call for the Greens on this the Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill. We will be supporting this bill and I sincerely hope that it will pass its first reading and be referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. I congratulate the member of the House David Parker who has brought this bill here today through the ballot process.I want to acknowledge the fact that this bill follows on very strongly from a previous bill that was brought to a previous Parliament by Darien Fenton a previous Labour MP who was actually my previous boss at the Service and Food Workers Union. That bill was very similar to this one although this one makes a few more amendments to the Minimum Wage Act that would make it easier to investigate and enforce remuneration rates of the contractors who would be covered specifically by the clauses in this bill.The Greens support an industrial relations environment that is fair to those who work and is fair for employees too. Unfortunately what we see at the moment is a situation where the balance of power that is the employment relationship has been tipped more in favour of the employers and actually into a situation where bad employers have been given an incentive to exploit people. We have seen this Government deliberately and systematically undermine the rights of ordinary working New Zealanders and allow exploitative practices to flourish.I will give you a few examples. The previous Labour speaker alluded to some of them. Just to recap there are things like the introduction of youth rates which means that young people can legally be discriminated against in their pay rates. There is the fire-at-will legislation that allows workers to be sacked for no reason whatsoever in their first 90 days of work and of course there were the changes to the Employment Relations Act which included things like the removal of the requirement for new employees to be offered the existing terms and conditions of a collective employment contract when they start the job if there is already one in place. There is another one too. That was the removal of the protection for continuity for people like cleaners when their employer’s contract changes hands—Part 6A it was. So those protections have all been eroded if not removed. My point is that these were all vulnerable workers.This bill is an attempt to try to ensure that another group of vulnerable workers have some minimum protections—that is that they have access to the minimum wage. We see it time and time again where certain workers are exploited. They are taken on and called contractors and I have seen it in my home community. I have seen it with a cleaner there who was in tears when she told me that she had to work longer hours despite the fact that she was not being paid any more money because she was a contractor. This is a woman who had to wear the logo of the employer who had to wear the uniform of the employer who had to go where the employer directed her and had to work the hours that the employer told her to. Her wages were halved as a result of the employer saying that her contract needed to include more work. She was also responsible for paying her own tax for paying her own ACC for providing her own cleaning equipment for providing and buying her own uniform that she did not actually want to wear because it was her employer’s not hers and she was also responsible for her own health and safety.We are seeing this more and more. The previous Labour speaker alluded to the issue that is happening with home-care workers where they are frequently being told that they are not employees and that they are contractors. It is about time we stamped out the exploitation of vulnerable workers and this is one step towards it. We support this bill.