Logie Jan: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 19 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16811. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green):I am pleased to take a call and express the Green Party’s unequivocal opposition to the Employment Relations Amendment Bill. Earlier my colleague Denise Roche outlined many of our reasons for opposing this bill and tonight I would just like to focus primarily on one area in relation to collective bargaining. This bill attracted 13677 submissions and from my calculations less than 1 percent supported this bill. But of course this Government listens to only 1 percent so it is really no surprise that the bill has come back with very little amendment.This bill is another demonstration of whom this Government is serving and it is certainly not the majority of New Zealanders. This bill is yet another example of the voices of the privileged few overriding the voices of the many. It is yet another demonstration of the inequality that this bill will exacerbate. One of the alleged aims of this bill—so ironically—is to ensure “a balance of fairness for employers and employees”. George Orwell would be proud of this example of double-speak because most New Zealanders know and they know at a very deep personal level how out of kilter our system actually is.Employers are currently holding too much power and this bill gives them several more fairly hefty tools to add to that imbalance. We can already see the effect of the current imbalance even without these changes when we look at how the benefits of the very significant increases in productivity in this country over the last few decades have been channelled into profits and chief executive officer pay packets rather than being shared with the whole team who actually generated this increased productivity.We see how out of kilter things are in the struggle of the cleaners in this very Parliament to get a living wage. We see the current imbalance with our rest home workers currently struggling to get by on just over the minimum wage while they hold people’s lives in their hands every day doing critical work for our society and our economy. We see how out of balance the system is already when we see that over 40 percent of New Zealanders are defined as living in vulnerable economic circumstances.We see how out of balance the system is already when we know that two out of five children in poverty in this country are living in working families. This is not a sign of workers having too much power; this is clearly a sign that employers are holding too much power and too much of the benefit of our economic work. In a new Government the Greens will be advocating for more tools for employees to help negotiate fair and safe work conditions and wages.This bill puts barriers in the way of negotiating fair contracts. It undermines the original intention of the Employments Relations Act which is to promote collective bargaining. It takes us back to the bad old days of the Employment Contracts Act which alongside benefit cuts was largely responsible for the massive growth of poverty and excessive wealth in this country. We do not support that. It is not serving us as a country.This bill removes the duty to conclude bargaining and removes the requirement for employers to bargain for multi-employer contracts. Both of these provisions will make it less likely that some employers will want to negotiate collectively. And it removes the requirement in the Employment Relations Act that collective employment agreements be offered to new employees. That is effectively a return to individually based bargaining. It is not going to work for the people who need the most support who are contributing the most to our economy.