Moroney Sue: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 23 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:235. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour):In beginning my contribution on Part 2 of this bill I say I was very remiss yesterday. I was quite excited about getting the call from you Mr Chairperson Mallard in your capacity as the Chair for the first time and I failed to congratulate you on your election to that position. So I take the opportunity now to do that and I look forward to taking many calls under your chairpersonship and your speakership in fact.We are on Part 2 of this ugly—I have to say—bill which is the first act of this Government under its new term. And of course yes the Government is on the attack against workers. Part 2 is the part that really bothers me. Although much of the destruction is done in Part 1 actually Part 2 is about the way in which all of this destruction is going to be brought about in the workplace.As Iain Lees-Galloway was saying in his contribution yesterday it is unusually retrospective. We hardly ever deal with retrospective pieces of legislation in this House but when it comes to attacking the rights of workers that National Government has no shame. It has no shame. Part 2 is where it makes this retrospective. What Part 2 says is that there is no need to conclude collective bargaining—that there will be no obligation on parties to actually conclude and come to a collective agreement with each other about wages and conditions. And the Government in its hurry to do that wants to make sure that collective employment agreement negotiations that are already under way are going to be captured by this legislation.But in order to understand why the Government has done it this way I think we need to backtrack a little. The history is this. The previous National Government really wanted to pass this piece of legislation about 4 or 5 months ago but there was one big problem: it lost the numbers. It lost the numbers to pass this legislation because John Banks had to leave Parliament because he is on his way to jail. That is what has actually happened here. The Government wanted to pass this legislation at that point in time but when Mr Banks had to relinquish his seat in this Parliament the Government no longer had a majority with which to pass this piece of legislation. That is how bad it is.The Government’s other support partners at the time would not support it. They would not support it because they know the damage this is going to do to the New Zealand workplace. And they know the damage this is going to do to workers and their families. At a time when we face increasing child poverty in this country what is the current Government doing? It is moving to ensure that wages will be lowered—that wages will not be able to increase with the cost of living—because there will be no pressure no legislative requirement on employers to conclude bargaining and to actually have bargaining result in a collective agreement.Part 2 quite specifically says that it applies to all bargaining whether the bargaining commenced before on or after the commencement of this piece of legislation. So workers who are currently engaged in collective bargaining with their employer are going to suddenly find on the passing of this bill that their employer will not be required to conclude an agreement with them. As we sit here in New Zealand today workers are undertaking bargaining. A lot of those workers are in the health sector interestingly enough. A lot of workers in the health sector are undertaking bargaining at the moment. It is those workers whom this Government is after. There are a lot of expired employment agreements happening in the health sector. So right now as we sit they are engaged in a bargaining process.What the law currently says is that there is a requirement to conclude bargaining and for it to result in a collective employment agreement. That is a very rational and sensible thing which has actually seen New Zealand though quite an interesting period of time. The economy has been in recession yet there have not been extraordinary outbreaks of workers making unreasonable demands and using this part of the legislation to hold their employers to ransom. We have seen none of that. We have seen absolutely none of it.I asked a question yesterday and still have not had an answer from anyone opposite about where they can cite the example of employees of workers making unreasonable demands and getting unreasonable wage increases because of this duty.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard):Order! I am just now going to advise the member to come back to Part 2 of the bill which could not possibly involve questions that were asked yesterday.SUE MORONEY: The duty to conclude bargaining is what Part 2 actually says can start happening before the Act is even passed through this Parliament. That is the point that I making—that actually it is unusual that it is done in this way. Many of those workers are engaging in collective bargaining right now. They are already in that process and yet this part Part 2 says that it does not matter that they have already initiated the process or that when they initiated it there was a whole set of different laws in place. This part says that despite that if they have initiated bargaining before the commencement of this Act the rules are going to change. The rules are simply going to change midway through their bargaining process on them.Why would that Government be so bloody-minded about having retrospective legislation? Well I think the answer is the number of employment negotiations that are under way in the State sector—the sheer number of them. I think health is going to be one of its major targets. We have got the resident medical officers’ multi-employer collective agreement that is being negotiated at the moment. We have got the radiation technologists who are negotiating their collective agreement at the moment. We have got the stenographers. We have got the clerical and administrative workers in the health sector who are negotiating. We have got the clinical physiologists. Importantly we have got the nursing one. That is the big one that is coming up. That is where the big dollars are to be saved by this Government and that is what it is after. It wants to suppress the wages and conditions of nurses working in our public hospitals.Then we go on to the education sector and we find that there are a few coming up in that regard as well. I think this is what it is about. The secondary teachers’ collective agreement expires on 30 June 2015 and Government cannot wait to make sure that those teachers are going to face a situation where the cards are all on the employer’s side because there is no duty to actually conclude collective bargaining. It is the teachers the nurses the police the firefighters and all of the other important public servants whom we rely on for our social services in this country whom that Government is after and it is absolutely plain in Part 2. The Government is making sure that the nurses’ employment agreement which is up for negotiation at the moment will be captured by this removal of the duty to conclude bargaining.So it is absolutely clear in Part 2. As I said before it is really unusual for there to be retrospective legislation passed in this Parliament. Why is it that this Government would be so keen that this legislation applies to bargaining already under way? Well it is clear that it is because of the type of work where that is existing at the moment. I have listened carefully to those Ministers as they have argued about containing the cost of public services. Well when it comes to our education and health services that can really mean only one thing. That can mean only that they are after wages.I am thinking about the wages of the nurses who are going to be affected by Part 2 because Part 2 is going to apply to them even though they have already initiated collective bargaining. Thinking about their wage movements they have had virtually no wage movements under the National Government. They have had over the course of the last 6 years about a 6 percent increase in their national collective employment agreement. That is less than the rate of inflation so the nurses have already been paying for the savings that the National Government has been making in its surplus in its bid to make its Budget balance.