Fenton Darien: Employment Relations (Flexible Working  Arrangements) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Fenton Darien: Employment Relations (Flexible Working  Arrangements) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:643;Page:13334] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 I want to make a serious contribution to this debate and I will start by congratulating the member Sue Kedgley on her determination to bring this Employment Relations (Flexible Working Arrangements) Amendment Bill to Parliament and to see it through. From the time her bill was tabled more than 2½ years ago she has worked patiently with like-minded parties to make improvements and to meet genuine concerns. I am really proud that Labour members are supporting this bill and that during its passage we have been active in assisting its progress. 
The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee as other speakers have mentioned put this bill on hold to encourage employers to prove that an education process was more likely to succeed than legislation. We gave them a year in which to do that. Did they prove it? Well no they did not. During that period we also encouraged extensive consultation and debate on flexible working arrangements through the Department of Labour. During that time and since that time has the call for this legislation diminished? No it has not. In fact the call for it from the community has strengthened. 
This bill which is nearing conclusion tonight although still very modest in terms of legislation puts New Zealand further ahead in recognising the realities of the modern workplace. It takes some active steps to do something about the stresses on families and communities that the demands to put the firm before the family are causing our citizens and that is something we should all celebrate. I continue to be absolutely astonished that the National Party ACT and Gordon Copeland have not signed up to this very sensible logical and family-friendly legislation. [ 
Interruption 
] Are United Future members supporting it? Oh well I do apologise to the member; I am sorry. But the other parties of course say that legislation is unnecessary. I would say to those parties that they need to get real and talk to the families under stress who have made submissions on this bill. Those members on the select committee should talk to workers about the ever-increasing expectations placed on them regardless of their family circumstances. 
Bob Clarkson 
: What about employers? 
DARIEN FENTON 
: Members should go and talk to those who responded to the Department of Labour’s consultation process and to the Coalition for Quality Flexible Work—which includes employers I say to Bob Clarkson. That coalition is made up of business professional and legal groups community organisations family advocacy organisations and unions. They all say there is a need for this legislation. 
Sometimes legislation is needed to lead cultural change and we can take many of the family-friendly legislative changes made in recent years. I would ask members opposite whether education would have encouraged employers to provide paid parental leave. 
Lynne Pillay 
: And opposed by them. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: And opposed by them. Well the answer is no actually. It took the legislation that was introduced by this Government and like-minded parties to lead the change which is in fact now supported by the National Party or at least I think so. Would education have delivered 4 weeks’ holiday for working families? No of course it would not have done so. That is another change that is also now apparently supported by National provided people can cash up their extra week’s leave although those members opposed it bitterly at the time. The truth is that National and its fellow travellers do not believe that legislation should ever lead change. Those members stick to their ridiculous belief that the market dictates the way and the invisible hand will always deliver. 
Throughout the debate our long-working-hours culture has been referred to as a reason for the introduction of this kind of measure and it is obvious that something needs to give in the world of work occupied by today’s workers. 
Hon Member 
: The worker’s got to give a good effort. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: This might be of interest to the member Wayne Mapp. A book published in the United States by Madeleine Bunting entitled  
Willing Slaves 
 describes how our overworked culture is ruining our lives. She is actually talking about the US situation but it is very similar to that of many other countries. Hard work is supposed to bring wealth and satisfaction but instead argues Bunting it is bringing worry illness poverty and debt. In Japan it is called karoshi; we have no word in the English language that matches it. But study after study finds that long working hours increases the chance of workers suffering from illness and injury. For those doing 12 hours’ work a day there is a 37 percent increase in risk compared with those working fewer hours. Another well-known study shows that if people work consistently longer than 40 hours a week it will damage their health and it will damage them physically and psychologically. That is a problem and this Government faces up to those sorts of problems. As well as being bad for individuals long work hours are bad for families and for society. They are also bad for business because long working hours relate directly to lower productivity. Tired employees work more slowly they make more mistakes and they become sick more frequently. 
The National Party likes to have a go at Labour on the issue of productivity because National members have no new ideas other than the low-wage low-skill economy they created in the 1990s which caused the problems we are debating today. I suggest that they have a look at the UK. I know they will not want to talk about the UK but I ask them to have a look. Workers there work the longest hours in Europe yet the UK economy is the least productive in the industrialised world. The National Party needs to ask itself some hard questions and come up with some different answers just for a change. 
We do not want New Zealand to be like Japan which has the longest working hours in the OECD. In 1987 the Japanese Government acknowledged that the country had a problem with death from overwork. Do we really want to go there? The Japanese Government began to publish statistics on karoshi as it is called in Japan. Now lawsuits for death by overwork are common with the victims’ families seeking compensation payments. In 2002-03 there were 819 claimants. The notion that we work to live not live to work should never be superseded by the notion that we work until we drop but that is what the National Party would like to see workers in New Zealand do—work until we drop. 
Flexible working arrangements are just one tool for dealing with the impact of longer working hours on family responsibilities but on their own they will not solve our long working-hours problems and we should not kid ourselves that they will. I am watching with great interest the debate in other countries around exactly the same problems that we face here in New Zealand. What is emerging about tackling the working hours issue is the need for a mix of policies starting with legislation like this which gives all workers with caregiving responsibilities the right to request flexible work. But we also need to look at stronger working-hours regulation better work organisation more investment in technology and improvement in low pay which this Government is making significant strides on. There is no doubt that workers and their families are saying they want greater control over their hours and patterns of work. I ask members just to raise the issue and see what response they get from the community. This bill is an appropriate response to that along with other Government measures either already taken or in the pipeline. 
Although the emphasis in this debate has been on reducing long working hours the Department of Labour reports that of 100000 people who work part-time 78000 of them who are women would like to work more hours. So we have to be careful that flexible working is not seen largely as a women’s issue. Large numbers of women workers work part-time where a high and persistent part-time pay penalty is incurred. Part-time work is just not the silver bullet that the National Party seems to think it is. It has often been created explicitly to recruit or retain women while the continuing workplace expectation that long hours are to be worked in particular jobs such as management helps to preserve those areas of employment as a largely male enclave. 
The change in this bill from the right of parents with children under 5 or parents of disabled children under 18 to request flexible hours to the right for any worker with caring responsibilities to make such a request will help to balance equal opportunities with equity by enabling all parents and carers to have access to flexible hours. We want to encourage men to participate fully in their caring responsibilities and to ensure that the reduced pay from fewer working hours or part-time work does not continue to unfairly penalise women. 
This bill has been accompanied by the usual predictions of gloom and doom from the National Party and their mates at the big end of business. They talk a lot about first principles; their principles are the principles of the Business Roundtable. The member Sue Kedgley and the Government have bent over backwards to accommodate concerns from business about potential litigation. Similar litigation in other countries has not opened the floodgates and there have not been massive disputes around this kind of legislation. 
This is a good bill. It is a simple bill. It gives workers with caring responsibilities the right to request flexible working arrangements and it gives employers legitimate reasons to say “No”. But its real value will be in the contribution it will make towards changing the culture of New Zealand’s overstressed workplaces. I congratulate again the member on her wonderful work on this bill. I acknowledge the work of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and the other parties and the cooperative efforts that have gone into reaching a bill tonight that we can all feel proud of.