King Annette: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7143. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour): Labour welcomes this bill the Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill. It is the settlement of a long-running case because several years ago the Human Rights Commission ruled that travel time should be remunerated. So I want to begin at the beginning and give credit to Tamara Baddeley who bravely took a test case on behalf of hundreds of fellow home-care workers.Let me tell you about Tamara Baddeley. She is a member of the former Service and Food Workers Union now a combined union with the Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union called E tū. She was working with the union which filed a test case with the Employment Relations Authority in 2013. At that time the union secretary John Ryall described the situation as a serious injustice and one that needed to be remedied. Tamara was paid $14.80 an hour for the home visits she did when she was helping the clients whom she had responsibility for. Her work included showering these older people dressing them feeding them and checking to see whether they had taken their medication. In one day her round covered 12 calls around the city in her old ageing Hyundai. For that she got an allowance of 33c a kilometre but she got absolutely no payment for the time she spent travelling from one client to the next client. That was treated as if it was her own time as if she was somehow having a rest or on holiday or as if it was her tea break. But of course to go from one client to the next client it took time to travel there.What we know is that there are many people who work in New Zealand who travel from one job to another. There would not be a person in this House who has not had to call out a plumber or an electrician only to find that also included in the cost you get is the cost of their travelling to come to your job—but not for home-care workers. I thought that maybe it had taken so long because of some of the attitudes that we have towards work that women do. I was really staggered when I heard the Prime Minister recently say that he did not think it was discrimination to pay women less; it is just the occupations they are typically involved in. Can you see the irony in that?Women are paid less because they are in caring occupations—occupations that require them to go in and look after old vulnerable people. They do not fix things like your plumbing or your electrical wiring; they care for human beings. Because they are in these industries that women are normally in somehow or other it has been all right to pay them less and certainly to pay them less when it comes to the payment of travel.The former Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner under the Human Rights Commission Dr Judy McGregor—an amazing woman in my view; a courageous woman a woman with conviction—brought out a report called Caring Counts: Report of the Inquiry into the Aged Care Workforce in about 2013 or was it a little earlier? I cannot quite remember. It was an amazing report with many recommendations. She did not just believe what she was told; she went in and worked in the community and in rest homes to see what actually happens to those who are the carers in them. Through her conviction and from what she saw she decided to get a legal opinion which concluded that there was a good argument that the travel time between clients constituted work under the Minimum Wage Act.I thought to myself “Imagine any of us perhaps. What about the member for Whanganui who travels in his car or the member for Palmerston North who travels in his car from his electorate to Wellington—imagine if their pay was docked or they were not paid when they were travelling to come to work.” because that is the effect of what was happening to these many many women.Judy McGregor as I said heard the cases as we did in Labour. They heard cases. Jonathan Young may have even read this case because it was from his electorate. I would hope that he put some energy into advocating for them. Trudie Featonby of Taranaki—she clocked up 160 kilometres over 2 weeks. She tracked between her clients in their homes in Bell Block all the way out to Waitara and back again. At that time there were 12000 home-care workers affected.As home care grows there will be even greater demand by older vulnerable disabled people wanting to stay in their own homes. They want to stay in their own homes because that is the place that they know and they are close to friends and neighbours. In effect they save hundreds of millions of dollars by not needing residential care. The cost of residential care and of the subsidies that are provided is hundreds of dollars a week. By staying at home with good quality carers these people are saving taxpayers a heap of money. They will be able to do that only if we retain the health workforce that provides this service. Those who provide this service are the lowest paid.Home-care workers are the lowest paid in New Zealand doing some of the hardest work that you could ever do. Anybody who has done any of that sort of work—and I know there are people on this side of the House who have—knows that it is hard grinding work but very very rewarding. But the turnover of staff is huge—as high as between 30 and 40 percent. It is low-paid work with little recognition.This bill is a very important first step. I say it is a first step because there are still things to deal with for home-care and community support workers and that includes a historical underpayment of them not just for their travel but for what we pay for the value of the work that they do. But this bill does settle an agreement. It is an agreement between the Crown the district health boards providers of home and community-based and support employers and certain unions on behalf of the home and community-based and support employees. The bill supports an agreement that was reached for the payment of travel time between the parties. As the bill says it “seeks to ensure an enduring affordable and sustainable solution for paying HCS employees for the time and the cost of travelling between each of their clients.”It has a phase in—a transition if you like—over two time periods. Home-care and support services’ employees will receive payment from 1 July 2015—so it has got a retrospective part to it because it is backdated to then—and they will be paid for time spent travelling between that time until 29 February 2016. The payment will be calculated—and I will not go into it because I do not have time and we will get to that.But then from March 2016 the payment will be calculated again and this will then be prescribed in regulation. It does extinguish any other claims. You might say “Oh doesn’t that sound a bit dicey.” but it was an agreement reached between the parties and we need to honour that agreement and support it. Maybe some will feel a bit squeamish about extinguishing other claims but to settle this because it was incredibly complex and it could have been incredibly expensive trying to work out back-pay going back many many years—and probably there are a few people here who could have put in a claim—and because it was agreed that it does extinguish other claims then we need to support it.So we welcome this bill. We welcome it at the very good Health Committee where we will no doubt hear submissions from the public on it. It is a good step along the way to recognise some of the hardest-working most valuable workforce that we have in New Zealand—overwhelmingly a workforce of women.