Fenton Darien: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading In Committee Speaker Recalled 
Fenton Darien: Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading In Committee Speaker Recalled 
[Volume:668;Page:15413] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 I will continue if I may on the theme of the transitional provision in Part 2 of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2). My colleague Carol Beaumont made some very good points about the questions that are still there about the 90-day provision but I will be a little more positive for a moment about the reference in the transitional provision. 
Clause 40 “Transitional provision” refers back to new section 64 “Employer must retain copy of individual employment agreement or individual terms and conditions of employment”. That is one provision in this bill that Labour supports but we did not get to talk about it because we did not have enough time in the debate on Part 1. We support that provision. We support workers having the right to their individual employment agreements in writing; they are supposed to have those anyway. We think that is an improvement on the current situation. 
There is another reason why we think it is an improvement although I do not think it will help the hapless souls who are employed under the 90-day trial period provision—all of those in every workplace in New Zealand who change jobs in the future. When we go back to the Department of Labour research on the existing arrangements in workplaces of 20 or fewer employees it is very interesting to look at what was happening with individual employment agreements. One in four of the workers end up with no job. The 90-day trial period was supposed to create jobs for all of those people in particular the so-called vulnerable workers—migrant workers Maori workers and so on—but there was no evidence to show that it contributed to increasing their employment in any way shape or form. 
Not only that but when we looked at the other parts of the evidence in that survey we saw that some of the employers did not even put the conditions in writing. There is a pretty widespread practice out there of having individual agreements that are not in writing even though it is a current requirement of the law. It is a current requirement of the law. Even when employers put the agreement in writing of course the conditions were non-negotiable. It is one thing to have a written individual employment agreement and we support that; it is another thing to have a non-negotiable individual employment agreement. 
That is the problem all the way through this bill. The whole 90-day trial provision is not voluntary and it will not be subject to good faith. Good faith is meaningless in this situation. We have heard and relayed some of the stories about the impact of that provision. 
The same report said that employers generally did not seek employees’ acceptance of a trial period in an individual agreement; rather it was stated in the employment agreement with other terms and conditions. For most workers applying for a job the job is conditional on their accepting a trial period. So although we support this transitional provision and its reference back to new section 64 the Prime Minister’s statement and other Ministers who said that the 90-day trial period could be entered into only by agreement between the employer and the new worker at the beginning of the employment relationship have been shown by their own department’s research to be completely untrue and to be utter rubbish. 
I noticed also during the consideration by the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee that it made a change to new section 64 which the transitional provision refers to by inserting subsection 2A to make it clear that the employee may have access to a copy of the employment agreement retained by the employer. That is a good idea. I think that is a very good idea. Of course employees should have access to their individual employment agreement. But you see the reality is that in many workplaces they do not. That provision is good and will improve the situation. 
However many many employers who will take advantage of and exploit the 90-day trial provision will ignore it anyway. It is meaningless for them. We have heard from many workers that they are told that employers are using the 90-day trial period so they do not have to give them an agreement; they do not even have to agree to it. We can write these things down and they are improvements but I have to say that I have no confidence that they will make a huge difference. 
Just picking up the point of my colleague Carol Beaumont about transitional provisions and what could be considered I wonder how on earth we are going to get an education programme going and what resources the Minister and others are planning to put into this. This is a huge change.