Roche Denise: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Employment Relations Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 22 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:172. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green):This is my first time speaking in the 51st Parliament and it grieves me to actually have to speak on this bill in the Committee of the whole House because it is a noxious piece of legislation. I will confine my comments to Part 1 of the bill as is required under Standing Orders for the Committee of the whole House but I do want to have on the record that this is a distressing piece of legislation that is bad for New Zealand workers and that the National Government should be ashamed of itself.This is not the legislation that we want in this country that will provide for harmonious workplace relationships. It is not; it will not provide that. This is not the law that we need in place that will work hand in hand with our health and safety laws to keep workers safe. This legislation is not going to provide that. This is not the law that will increase productivity through good employment relationships between employers and employees. This legislation will not deliver that. This is not the legislation that will encourage employers to be good excellent employers to their workers. This legislation is not going to deliver that. The purpose of the Employment Relations Act is to promote collective bargaining. Contrary to what the previous speaker David Bennett said the amendment in this bill will completely undermine all attempts at collective bargaining across this nation for every group of workers who organise themselves into a point where they can negotiate collectively with their employer.The bill does this in several ways. One way is in the removal of the duty to conclude where the employer can apply to the Employment Relations Authority and ask that it deem the negotiations to be finished. They can do that if those negotiations have been what is referred to in the legislation as “difficult”. Negotiations by their very nature are difficult. I have never ever ever heard of a group of workers represented by their union actually going and asking for the type of mediation to conclude a settlement unless there was difficulty happening on the part of the employer all along the line. We have seen this countless times and most recently I guess with the Meat and Related Trades Workers Union with AFFCO employers and with the Ports of Auckland. It was not ever the unions that were walking away from the negotiations because it is not in their interests to. But it is in the interests of employers to walk away from collective bargaining because when you get into individual-based bargaining that is when you get to force wages down.If we seriously want to be a country where we are welcoming back our young people to jobs in New Zealand then those jobs need to be good jobs. They need to be jobs that people want to take on that they can feed their families with and that they can provide for themselves with. They cannot do that when this Government creates what is essentially a low-wage economy. What this legislation does is it reinforces bad management behaviour. It gives no examples of how employers and employees can work for a more productive workforce and for more productivity. We see this happening in small pockets across New Zealand and in unionised workplaces. We used to be a country that pride itself on being fair. We used to be a country that thought that a fair day’s pay was what you should have as of right if you gave a fair day’s work.This legislation eats away at every right that workers have to the point where it removes even the right to a tea break. I acknowledge Sue Moroney from the Labour Party for the work that she did in ensuring that there was that right enshrined in this legislation before it is amended. Tea breaks rest breaks are essential not only for health and safety but also for a productive workforce. We know if we look at our shocking ACC injury rates that people need to take their rest breaks so that they are fit for work. What we have seen over the last 12 months is 182900 claims for ACC for work-related injuries. They happened at work. In areas like agriculture fishing and forestry there is a one-in-four chance of being injured at work and we know from talking to those workers that fatigue has a huge impact on their ability to do their jobs. Each one of those industries also has situations where workers may be single operators as was referred to the Minister but they need to take rest breaks more than ever in order to be able to minimise the risk that they deal with.Those worksites—in farming forestry and fisheries—are frequently isolated workplaces. They are frequently workplaces where they do not have union representation. Here is where we come to the crux of the matter and to what this legislation is all about. It is about breaking the unions and reducing the rights of workers to belong to unions. If not why would we have in this legislation the clause that removes the right for new workers to be offered within the first 30 days conditions based on the same collective employment agreement if there is one in place on that site? The removal of that means that we are therefore getting into a situation where workers are having to negotiate individually.When we take into account the other legislation that the Government enacted in its previous term like the 90-day trials and like youth rates we are creating a situation where new workers desperate for a job are not going to talk about wanting a tea break. They are not going to raise any issues of health and safety. They are going to work whatever hours and for whatever pay that the employer deems fit to give them because if they do not they can be sacked within 90 days for no reason at all. This legislation goes hand in hand with the other provisions that this Government has put in place to make life harder for workers. It will drive wages down. It will certainly drive wages down because we know for a fact that unionised worksites worksites where there is a collective employment agreement in place have better pay better working conditions and better health and safety. When we start to break down their ability to negotiate collectively through the removal of the duty to conclude but also through the removal of the requirement for employers to participate in multi-employment collective agreements then we are starting to break down bargaining to a point where individuals will be paid based on their individual ability to negotiate.Most low-paid workers in low-skilled jobs particularly in the service sector have not got a lot of power to be able to negotiate—unlike for example the chief executive officer of the ANZ bank David Hisco—Carmel Sepuloni: $2000 an hour or something.DENISE ROCHE: $2000 an hour or $4.1 million a year is his income. If you look at those top 50 chief executive officers—the New Zealand Herald did a study on this quite recently—you see that they had on average a 4 percent pay increase over the last year which is not the sort of increase that has been passed on to workers I might add. It is only their strength in numbers that gives them the ability to negotiate decent pay rates. Otherwise there would be no point. If every employer was an excellent employer and if every employer invested in their workforce invested in their workers and treated them well then it would not be an issue. But legislation is about protection. Legislation is about education as well. We need to lift the standard that our managers have so that workers are treated better on their jobs. This legislation does not do it. It goes completely the other way.When the Government MPs and the Ministers talk about flexibility they are not talking about a worker’s flexibility around work; they are talking about the employer’s right to manage to the extreme and to force wages down. When we force wages down it is bad for all of us. It is bad for our economy as well. We need to be smarter about how we run this economy. We need to be ensuring that our workers are able to live on what they earn but we see that two out of five of all the children who are living in poverty—and there are 265000 of them—come from working families.