Fenton Darien: Minimum Wage and Remuneration Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Fenton Darien: Minimum Wage and Remuneration Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:647;Page:16171] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 I move  
That the Minimum Wage and Remuneration Amendment Bill be now read a second time 
. The second reading of this bill is very timely. Over the last two episodes of  
Fair Go 
 a story has been running about children who are employed as independent contractors to deliver junk mail. The children some as young as 12 and others aged nearly 16 are earning as little as 25c an hour and to make matters worse they have recently had their pay cut.  
Fair Go 
 reports that it has had more responses to that story than to any other story this year. There has been outrage about what is happening to those children but there were interestingly as many stories about adults who are employed as contractors being pressured in the same way as those children. I am not surprised at that. This bill started with a concern about leaflet deliverers but since the bill was introduced almost 2 years ago many workers employed as contractors in a wide variety of occupations and industries have come forward to say that this kind of abuse is happening to them as well. 
It is a privilege to speak up for those workers who are currently without minimum wage protection. It is a privilege to speak on behalf of those workers who will not have had the benefit of increases to the minimum wage this year and who will not have them next year or indeed in any year unless this legislation is passed. Labour has done a lot to restore fairness for workers over the last 8½ years but this bill does break new ground at the harder end of the labour market. Most submitters to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee agreed that the principle behind this bill is absolutely correct: no one who works in this country should be paid less than a socially acceptable minimum wage. In the select committee process we heard of contractors who are in need of minimum wage protection in many occupations and in many industries. For some workers the situation is so bad that they cannot even prove whether they have been paid fairly or paid at all because the contractor who engaged them does not keep any records. 
Contract workers have told me about how they have been affected by the lack of any minimum wage protection. For example a pizza delivery man told me he was employed as a contract driver not as an employee. Then his franchise boss decided that he should work 10 hours straight on at well below the minimum wage. A home-care worker on 24 hour shifts looking after a man with Alzheimer’s disease signed a contract with an agency that said she was self-employed and therefore not entitled to the minimum wage. A waitress was told she was not an employee but an independent contractor with a waitressing business. A hotel housekeeper was contracted on a room by room cleaning basis. A worker in her brief experience as a subcontractor hired to mop floors and dust offices later discovered that other workers had also signed an independent contract with the licensee of a commercial cleaning company. She was told where and when to clean and told to buy hundreds of dollars worth of supplies. Ten months after signing her contract after working for what amounted to less than $6 an hour she has no cleaning business and the company is still recruiting workers with employment ads that say: “Be your own boss”. 
Under these and other types of shocking contracting arrangements many low-paid workers who deliver services are being denied the minimum wage. But actually it is not just those workers whom we think of as vulnerable who are being affected. Actors Equity and the Musicians Union are also calling on politicians today to support this bill. They say that the poor pay and conditions of many actors and musicians are not commonly known and that because they are classed as dependent or independent contractors they are expected to work for a whole lot less than the minimum wage. Under New Zealand’s labour laws minimum standards protect an employee’s right to annual holidays statutory holidays sick leave the minimum wage and holiday pay. But the catch is that one has to be an employee. So at the end of the working week the wages of many contractors can amount to a lot less than half the legal minimum wage. The most disturbing part of this trend is that big and small companies alike are passing on the risk and the cost of doing business to the lowest-paid workers. 
I talked to a truck driver who was employed as an independent contractor. He was promised $1000 a week worth of driving work. He thought that driving would be the perfect job for him and would deliver a decent income for him and his family. For 2 months he received no jobs. Then he received a call to come in for training and he watched an hour-long video on how to drive trucks. Then he heard nothing again for weeks. Frustrated and worried he made repeated phone calls to the principal contractor and was finally assigned a job driving every Saturday on a contract worth less than $100 a week. The driver eventually got two more contracts but the three jobs altogether paid only $450 a week less than half of what he had been promised and he had to work long and sometimes dangerous hours. When the driver approached the principal contractor he was told that every driver the principal contractor employs runs an independent business and that the principal contractor bears no responsibility to the workers. The principal contractor told the driver it was up to the drivers to do their own thing and that he had nothing to do with the workers. His advice to the truck driver was that if he had a problem he should go to the disputes tribunal. 
That kind of employment practice is a real problem here in New Zealand. It has the potential to grow if we do nothing. We have the opportunity to do something about it and my bill provides that opportunity. The changing labour market in New Zealand needs to be acknowledged. Study after study has found that non-standard work has become a mechanism for lower pay fewer benefits less job security and fewer career opportunities. 
I know that National members will stand up in a minute and say that this bill interferes with commercial relationships and that they will utter other homilies that would be quite at home in a Bill Birch speech from the 1990s. If they have a problem with basic minimum pay and protections for such workers they should tell us that and also tell the people of New Zealand so that when they vote later this year they will do so with their eyes wide open. And a similar question can and will be directed to New Zealand First United Future and Gordon Copeland who are not supporting this bill. 
This bill is about workers who are paid substandard wages in cash and who do not exist in any records. It is about the businesses that hire those workers which claim they have no legal responsibility for them and use contracting arrangements to avoid labour rights and decent pay. The basic principle behind my bill is that it is not fair that some workers should be paid less than others simply because they happen to be in a working arrangement that does not fit within our current employment laws. 
During the select committee process the Labour members of the select committee accepted that the bill needed to be narrowed in its application. As is evident from our comments in the select committee report we acknowledged the validity of some of the concerns around individual arrangements such as those involving the person who mows lawns paints houses or provides catering for a family wedding. So in the Committee stage I intend to move a number of amendments by way of Supplementary Order Paper to limit the scope of the bill to specified occupations. There will be no differentiation in pay between workers aged 16 and 17 and older workers in the Supplementary Order Paper amendments as well. Other amendments will also spell out how minimum remuneration could be calculated when many contracts for services are not hours based. Others will provide more clarity to the definition of principles and will specifically exclude householders. 
In finishing I thank the previous and present Ministers of Labour the officials the advisers and my colleagues on the select committee for their dedicated work on this very important bill. I thank the submitters and all of those workers who have spoken out. I also thank the Greens and the Maori Party for their support. I say to them that by supporting this bill they are helping to provide the most basic of protections to minimum pay—in other words a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. I look forward to this bill progressing through its stages in the House. Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker.