Fenton Darien: Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Fenton Darien: Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 21 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8861. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 I rise to put on record Labour’s very strong opposition to the Minimum Wage (Starting-out Wage) Amendment Bill. The passing of this bill today will create an underclass of young workers and consign them to economic marginalisation. Not content with making it impossible for young workers to challenge their unfair treatment and dismissal in the first 90 days of employment and not content with its abject failure in addressing youth unemployment this Government has now come up with a failed and tired old approach of cutting the wages of young workers aged 16 to 19 years. 
This bill assumes that there are thousands of employers out there just waiting to offer jobs to younger people and to give them a foot in the workforce as National says and as the Minister of Labour says. We know that that is a false assumption. The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment has openly admitted that it has very little idea of whether this bill will meet its stated outcomes. The ministry tried a best guess that this bill could create 400 to 1100 jobs but we in Labour have learnt to become very wary of Government predictions of job creation. Who has forgotten the 2011 Budget projection of 170000 new jobs by 2015-16? What has happened since then? Unemployment has continued to rise more good jobs have been lost and our youth unemployment is a national disgrace. Then today we learnt that there could be as many as 1500 more jobs going from Telecom which are high-skilled jobs. 
What worries me most of all about this bill is that it is just the beginning under this young new Minister. Treasury has suggested that paying other workers sub-minimum wages is something that could be extended in the future—other workers who have a high unemployment rate. So what we could see in the future are the vulnerable workers such as Maori and Pasifika or those who live in areas where jobs are hard to find on a so-called starting-out wage. 
Unfortunately what this bill does is remind us that the Government has no ideas and that we are going back to the past where low-wage jobs were the norm where productivity was increased by having more people paid less and working longer where good jobs were offshored because of lack of investment and hands-on economic policy and where our young people were sacrificed to a future of economic marginality. 
This bill needs to be read in context with the Government’s planned changes to other employment laws which will help slash the wages for hundreds of thousands of other New Zealand workers. From what I hear the Government’s ideas for those employment law changes are so irrational that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment is struggling to draft the appropriate legislation. I think that that may be why the former Minister of Labour Kate Wilkinson failed to progress the National Government’s policy and the new young much-admired but very inexperienced and naive Minister Simon Bridges will find the same thing. 
Cuts to workers’ rights and pay are classic National Party. In the face of its economic failures and its marginalisation of thousands of unemployed and underemployed it has resorted to its tried and failed policies of last century. In 2010 National strongly opposed Roger Douglas’ member’s bill to reintroduce youth rates and the then Minister of Labour Kate Wilkinson confirmed that her Government would not support a return to discriminatory and unfair youth rates. We heard a range of florid speeches—and I can see that we are going to get another one from members like David Bennett and Jackie Blue—opposing youth rates and saying that young people deserved better. Well what has changed? What has changed is that the Government is returning to its neo-liberal roots of making cuts to workers’ rights and pay as a substitute for real economic policy and plans and it is our young people who are going to pay the price. 
You know the most offensive thing about this bill is its framing as a starting-out wage. We know that that title is simply not true. Under this bill 16 and 17-year-olds will be returned to youth rates every time they start a new job regardless of previous job experience and under this bill 18 and 19-year-olds who may have already had jobs on adult minimum wages or adult wages will be forced on to sub-minimum rates if they have been unfortunate enough to be on a social security benefit including the invalids benefit and sickness benefit. This bill combined with the social welfare reforms from the Minister for Social Development Paula Bennett that we heard about and debated here yesterday feeds the notion that our young people are lazy they are addicted to drugs and they are unreliable. It is based on the false assumption that the only way we can get young people into work is to pay them less. 
The National Government has tried to run the argument that this bill is about the dignity of work. Labour certainly agrees that work is the best antidote to poverty but it should be decent work. Decent work is not where people are paid less than they are worth where they can be sacked without reason where they can be forced to take jobs that could be unsafe and where they are punished by a nasty regime within the social security system if they do not gratefully sign up for any job on a sub-minimum wage. A job should not only be about the work performed. It is a lot more than that. It is about getting experience but also it is about relationships with other people in the workplace. It is about being fulfilled as a human being. People must feel recognised for their efforts and know that they are valued for those efforts and the contribution they make and that applies to 16 and 17-year-olds and to 18 and 19-year-olds as much as it does to anyone else. 
What this bill will do is unleash thousands of young people available as cheaper workers on to our labour market and that affects every single worker in New Zealand. There is absolutely no doubt that having cheaper young workers leads to the displacement of older workers—older workers who in this dire economic climate are desperate to hang on to their jobs who are not only in the queues of unemployment but also underemployment who are crying out for better wages and who are crying out for a Government that will do something to help them. And it takes no account of the expenses of young people—the expenses they incur while actually working—and whether the job will pay for the expenses of going to work. 
When we have a Minister for Social Development who is so desperate to claim success in job creation that she trumpets the employment of 16 workers for 2 weeks in the census collection we are in real trouble. When we now apparently have a culture within our Government agencies where job gains are celebrated by the ringing of a bell no matter what the job is no matter what the pay level is no matter what the conditions are and no matter what the safety risks are and where all that matters is numbers we are in serious trouble. 
As we have gone through this bill I have had on my mind one person I want to mention and that is a teenager called Peniata Junior Endermann. He is a student at Edgewater College in Auckland who works from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Monday to Friday as a cleaner earning the minimum wage. He is studying full-time. He is still at school. He is 16 going on 17. This job along with his homework means that Peniata puts in 16-hour days to help his mother who also works as a cleaner on the minimum wage and to help provide for his family and three siblings aged 15 13 and 9. So Peniata is not lazy or unmotivated or unwilling. He has got himself a job. He should not have had to but the state of our economy and low wages mean that in families like his everyone has to help out. But if Peniata changes his employment or if he is employed by a different cleaning firm under this bill and the Government’s intentions around protections for cleaners and other vulnerable workers his pay will go down to $11 an hour. So it is young people like Peniata whom the young Minister Simon Bridges needs to talk to. 
This Government did not listen to the more than 500 submissions opposed to this bill. It ignored the business community who said that this is not a silver bullet and will not do the job and that the Government needs to do a lot better on youth unemployment. The simple arrogance of this bill is gobsmacking. I cannot express strongly enough Labour’s disappointment and dismay at the direction this Government is taking today.