Roche Denise: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 23 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:237. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green):Like the previous speaker Sue Moroney I too have not had the opportunity yet to congratulate you Mr Chairperson on your promotion—I think it is a promotion—to assistant speakership.I am going to restrict my comments to schedule 2 which is under discussion in this part of the debate in Committee of the whole House. Schedule 2 looks at the consequential amendments to other Acts. In particular I want to address my comments to the changes to the Wages Protection Act 1983 which are about ensuring that employers can make deductions from the pay of workers who are taking partial strike action. Rather sneakily this amendment to the parent Act the Wages Protection Act actually reduces the amount of notice that an employer has to give to an employee that they have made an overpayment. In the existing Act it says that it should be 5 days’ notice but this amendment also makes quite a major adjustment—it says that it will be 1 day’s notice. This is quite aside from the whole discourse around what a partial strike is or how much an overpayment is. That is dealt with in the previous part but I must make the point that it is absolutely unclear as to how much workers will be losing when they take partial strike action.What is a partial strike? Lots of people are not clear about it and certainly it is not tested very well in Part 1 of the Act but of course we are talking about schedule 2 and Part 2 of it. My understanding from my experience as a former union official has been that partial strikes have not only been around refusing to work parts of an employment agreement or parts of your normal work but they have also been around things like bending some of the rules and those rules include things like not wearing the proper uniform wearing a badge and wearing different colours from what is described in your employment agreement. Workers have been able to be very creative about their partial strike action. We must remember that strike action occurs only after a vote and it occurs only as a measure of last resort when the negotiations between workers and employers have got to a point where there needs to be a bit of force applied to the relationship with the employer to get it to agree to decent pay increases.I have seen some really remarkable and interesting partial strikes in my experience as a union organiser. Perhaps the most notable one was when a bunch of workers refused to wear pants—this was about the uniform allowance not being paid. They agreed that because the employer had breached the employment contract by not paying the uniform allowance they would wear only half the uniform so they did not wear pants. Fortunately they all worked behind booths just like this. It was not a problem for any members of the public but it was certainly embarrassing for the union organiser anyway.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am now going to ask the member to come to not just mentioning Part 2 but actually debating Part 2. It is a really good story but not relevant.DENISE ROCHE: I was mindful Mr Chairperson that yesterday you asked for novelty.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Novel and relevant.DENISE ROCHE: OK. Thank you very much for that. Part 2 and schedule 2 of the amendment bill talks about these changes to the Wages Protection Act. If we look at what the Wages Protection Act was enacted to do it is actually about protecting wages. I believe that it is a sneaky and sinister attempt to amend the Act by reducing the amount of notice that goes to workers when they are classifying an overpayment when someone takes a partial strike and that that is an unfair way to do it because there has not been any kind of discussion in the public arena. There have been no submissions on this part of the bill about changing the Wages Protection Act as a consequence of the amendments to the Employment Relations Act. That strikes me as incredibly unfair and as a mockery of the democratic tradition.