Estimates Debate — Vote Labour

It is a great pleasure to take a call on this very important part of the estimates. It was, frankly, a bit rich when the various farming or former farming members opposite stood before the Committee, under a different vote a short while ago, to boast about the great achievements in the farming sector and the great wealth being generated in that sector for this great country of ours. But they did not mention one thing about the role that the Minister of Labour played in ensuring that farm workers on the minimum wage now get paid less than the minimum wage for 1 week out of every fortnight on their “12 and 2” work roster.

What a disgraceful action by the Minister of Labour. What a shameful thing by this Government. Government members say they like the rural sector. They say they look after people in the rural sector and in the provinces. They do not give a damn about the hard-working people—the hard-working people who are out there early in the morning, doing the milking, doing the hard graft on the farms, putting up the fences, getting a tractor out, doing the feeding-out in the bitter cold weather that we have at the moment. This Government does not care a toss about those people, and it quite happily reduces their wages because it wants to please the big, wealthy, rich farm owners. Well, it is shocking. It is shocking, and it is the farm labourers who are turning up to the offices of Labour MPs, saying: “What gives? What’s going on?”. What possible law could there be that allows a Minister, at the stroke of a pen, to take $100 a fortnight off hard-working farm labourers? What a shocking thing.

Well, the truth is this. We might have a Minister of Labour, but we have an appallingly dysfunctional labour market at the moment—46 percent of hard-working New Zealanders cannot get a pay rise in a single year alone, and 49 percent of employers in a survey last week said they will not give a pay rise to their staff this year. And yet, members opposite sit in the chair, they stand opposite, and they crow about the great economic growth. It was 3.2 percent a year about 3 months ago. Now it is up to 3.8 percent. Who knows how big it will be in a couple of months’ time when they are on the hustings.

But here is the catch. We have a great growing economy—some people are doing well; some people are doing extraordinarily well—but 46 percent of hard-working New Zealanders cannot get a pay rise, and the Minister does not care. The Minister does not care. He is the Minister of Labour. One of his prime responsibilities is to make sure that we have a wage-setting system and that people are fairly rewarded. That is what we expect in a properly functioning labour market. But we have a Minister who does not care that half the workforce cannot get a decent pay rise, and that half of employers are saying they are not going to pay any more. So we are in a pretty diabolical situation.

We know that the income gap is getting worse. We know that inequality is getting worse in this country. We now have the lowest level of homeownership since 1951 because people cannot afford houses. Housing affordability is not just an issue about house pricing; it is about wages and incomes, and wages and incomes in this country have been getting worse and worse for a larger and larger number of people. It is getting worse.

We have a labour inspectorate under this Minister that, with this Budget, is stretched to breaking point trying to keep up with the breaches and the non-compliance amongst employers in this country. It tried to do a blitz on farms. It was a random blitz on various farms, and do you know what it found? There was 93 percent non-compliance with the basic minimum statutory standards of employment—93 percent. Then we have a Minister who bends over backwards to encourage farming employers to pay $100 a fortnight less than they would otherwise have to pay. No wonder the farmers think they have got carte blanche to not comply with the basic minimum standards of our employment law. That is the culture of employment standards in this country today. We have a Government that cuddles up to, that licks up and down, farmers who want nothing more than to pay their farm labourers less, and the Government wonders why it gets 93 percent non-compliance amongst the farming community.

Everything this Government has done when it comes to employment and labour market regulation makes it harder and makes it worse for working people to get ahead and to get a decent pay rise. Every law that this Government has promoted and passed in the last 6 years has made it harder for working people to get ahead and to get a pay rise. It started with the silly 90-day law. One-third of employers have now signed up to it, two-thirds cannot be bothered with it because they know it is bad law, they know it is bad practice, and they know it is dumb, and there is no employer who can point to the fact, as this Government claims, that they have created a job as a result of it—not a one.

Law changes like that do not create jobs; all they do is make life harder. There are good, responsible, and sensible employers saying: “Of course we want to be able to take people on a trial basis, but we know that to do that responsibly we should do it under the probationary law that is still on our statute book.” We know that that law requires the employer—a responsible, fair, and sensible employer—to provide feedback, to treat the worker as if they are actually a human being, and to treat them with respect, unlike the 90-day law, which does not.

When the Government surveyed workers who had been employed under the 90-day law, it could not find a single one who said that they had got any feedback at all on their so-called trial period, because what was blatantly obvious is that those workers were not being trialled in the job. They were not being trialled; they were just being manipulated and exploited, and kicked out the door as soon as the employer decided they no longer wanted them or needed them. That is the standard that employment law has come to in this country.

The Minister bends over backwards to make it easy for employers to rip off their workers. He is a Minister who does not care, frankly, about basic employment standards. He is a Minister who does not care about freedom of association. He is a Minister who does not care about freedom of choice—which workers are meant to have, according to the international agreements we have signed up to—to belong to, or form, a trade union. This Minister and this Government do not care.

So that is why things are getting worse for workers in this country. That is why they are looking around, saying: “How on earth is it that this Government could get here and be allowed to mistreat so many workers for so long?”. It is time to bring that to an end.

I want to turn briefly to health and safety because that is very important to this country, as we all know. We have all learnt a terrible and tragic lesson with Pike River and this Government has taken on the task to reform and revamp our health and safety laws. It is a pity, however, that in the spirit of this Government bending over backwards to help employers, it could not bring itself to make WorkSafe New Zealand a tripartite organisation. It is meant to be modelled on the similar organisation in the UK, which is truly tripartite, but this Government could not bring itself to do that. It was just one step too far. So when we look at WorkSafe New Zealand, we know that it needs to be properly supported. It will need more inspectors if it is to do its job properly, and it will need to work pretty hard to get employers on board to deal with worker participation, making sure that workers have a proper and fulsome say on health and safety issues in the workplace. That is the only way they are going to get safe—working collaboratively, cooperatively, and sensibly with their employers, even though some employers are resistant to it. Even though some employers do not want workers to have a real say on workplace health and safety, we know that the only way to reduce the atrocious record that has built up in this country is to make sure that workers can have a say, with impunity and without fear, and have a real say on how health and safety is managed in their workplace and in their environs. That is absolutely essential.

If there is any shortcoming in that regard, then we will have to fix that up. The shorter answer is this: when it comes to labour market regulation and the institutions responsible for overseeing it, we can do better—we can do better. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately; I do not know—it will not be with this Government. It will not be with this Government if we want to improve our performance, lift wages for all New Zealanders, and make sure that all people get treated fairly and properly at work so that they can have a good, constructive relationship with their employer, based on true collaboration and cooperation and on a genuine mutual respect, so that their choices and the way they choose to bargain and negotiate with their employer have to be respected by that employer.

That is what the legal framework must deliver so that we have a good, fair system, which fairly rewards and treats people fairly. New Zealanders expect nothing less, neither do we, and that is why we on this side of the Chamber will be delivering that. New Zealanders have been waiting 6 years for it.

What a speech of petty point-scoring from the Opposition member Andrew Little. It absolutely missed the big picture and the great reforms that this Government has taken forward for workers and employers alike over the last several years. Talk about the language we are hearing from Labour people at the moment. Talk about not giving a damn or a toss. It was not as bad as David Shearer, who swore on national radio this morning. My delicate ears could not take the kind of language we are getting from these members. It is clearly showing the stress that they are under.

This Government is doing a whole lot of good in this area, and it has a very proud record. Let us go through some of the things that we have just heard from Andrew Little about the minimum wage—[Interruption] Well, yes. Actually, if we had not done that, we would be casualising and condemning the workers he says he cares about. We were returning things to the status quo and making sure that workers on farms got the fair go that he says he cares about. I say “petty point-scoring” because we have seen press releases on some really good things that this Government has done for workers, from those members and from the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, and it is very disappointing, indeed, to see that kind of attitude. We have seen a lift in the number of labour inspectors through the Budget, so it is hard, again, to know why Andrew Little is saying the kinds of things he is saying. We have seen minimum employment standards—a discussion document gone out—where we are seeking to significantly lift things so that there are criminal penalties where there is exploitation of workers, and so on.

What did we see from Labour and the unions? Petty point-scoring. They could not focus on the absolute good, despite the fact, I might say, that the Council of Trade Unions came into my office with the Employers and Manufacturers Association calling for the very changes I then made. They went on Radio New Zealand National and criticised me. Well, I say that is petty, and it would be great to see the Labour Party stand up for some good reforms that this Government is doing, which, if Labour was honest with itself, it would support.

Look at the Employment Relations Amendment Bill and the changes that this Government wants to make. It has gone through the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. There were moderate changes, and yet all we get is the scaremongering from that side. We heard about the 90-day trial periods. Well, what we did not hear Andrew Little say was that a third of employers—small-business owners in this country, which is what this country is made up of—said that they took on people whom they would not have otherwise and they gave people a go. That is real change. That is real difference. A third of employers gave a job to people who would not have otherwise got one, and I say that that is pro-employers and it is pro-workers.

Frankly, it is very disappointing to see the sort of left-wing attitude we get from the Labour Party and the Green Party—oppose, oppose, oppose, rather than be constructive on these issues. Again, they try to find any angle on the health and safety reform to criticise it. “Well, it is not tripartite and it is not this.” Well, it is, and I differ on that matter from Andrew Little. But let us all agree on this: this is the biggest health and safety reform this country has seen in at least 20 years. There is significantly more funding into a well-resourced regulator. There are significant law changes coming. If I was to be cruel to the Darien Fentons and the Andrew Littles, I would say that we have seen serious reform from this Government, when, actually, over 9 years of Labour nothing happened—nothing happened. I think we actually need to face the facts on that on some of these issues.

To Mr Little, I say: “Well, if you care about workers, Mr Little, what do you say to the 7,000 oil and gas workers in Taranaki with a party that flip-flops on issues without a skerrick of evidence, like the Māui’s dolphins?”. We expect to see scaremongering over there from the Green Party on that, but to his credit, David Cunliffe finally got to the position—the right position—that there has not been a single Māui’s dolphin harmed from oil and gas exploration over the 40 years that that has been going on in Taranaki. We have seen protests and we have seen calls from Labour candidates for me to be sacked. David Cunliffe, to his credit, finally got to the right position. Well, I wonder whether Tāmati Coffey is going to be calling for him to be sacked. We in this party care about workers. We have done really good reforms. It is just a shame that Labour and the Greens cannot bring themselves to support them.

I rise to take a call on the Vote Labour appropriation. It is kind of appropriate that I do that today, given that yesterday there was a major celebration from The Living Wage Aotearoa New Zealand Campaign, which celebrated the 20 businesses that have signed up to pay their workers a living wage of $18.80. I think that is something that we should celebrate, because the only way that workers are going to be lifted out of poverty is through decent wages and through employers modelling the behaviour that we would like to see other employers adopt.

I note that the Vote Labour appropriation outlines the target for the number of interventions aimed at ensuring the minimum standards of the employment legislation are adhered to, and the Minister of Labour referred to that. It is a crucial task, and although he may say that the Government is reviewing the minimum standards, the fact is that they are being breached all the time. Previous speakers have referred to this as well. What is happening is that the labour inspectors are managing to get some inspections done, but they are woefully underfunded. We do need more of them because there is a lot more they could be doing. The majority of inspections that they did in the agricultural sector, which they reported on in April, showed that most of the minimum employment standards were not being met.

I looked at the “Fencepost Jobs” page on the Fonterra website today, which actually is still advertising for jobs of 65 hours a week with 3 days off in 10 days. These are not the sorts of jobs that we want people to have. We want people to have jobs where they can actually afford to live, and where they can afford to provide for their families without having to rely on the taxpayer to increase their ability to provide for their families through Working for Families, which just acts as a subsidy to employers to keep wages low. That is what Working for Families has become. I have also seen jobs on “Fencepost Jobs” for 55 hours a week, and when I looked at the salary that works out to be $13.66 per hour.

This is unacceptable. This is absolutely unacceptable. The Government’s response to this kind of thing was actually to introduce and change the regulations under the Minimum Wage Act, which meant that workers could work long hours under the minimum wage and have it spread out over 2 weeks. It is shocking. The Government’s regulatory regime is shocking. What we have seen from this Government is the exploitation of young people through the introduction of youth rates. We have seen the introduction of less job security than ever before through the introduction of the 90-day trials, where workers can be sacked for absolutely no reason whatsoever in their first 3 months in a job.

I remind the Committee that the bill that was set to reduce and undermine collective bargaining and take away minimum job security, the Employment Relations Amendment Bill, has now stalled. That was a miserly bill. It was not a moderate change, as was suggested by the Minister of Labour; it was an attempt to undermine workers’ rights to the nth degree. It does not create jobs, Mr Bridges, because it does not create jobs when you force wages down. There was, of course, full employment under slavery because the pay was so low.

The fact that the Employment Relations Amendment Bill has been stalled is a great thing. It is great that we will be able to change the Government and ditch that legislation away from the Order Paper after September. In the meantime, it is the only thing I will probably ever thank the Hon John Banks for.

The reason we support the living wage is because we believe that workers should be able to provide for their families and live in dignity. There are 285,000 children living in poverty in New Zealand. Two out of five of those children have a parent who is working. More parents than ever before are working several jobs just to make ends meet. The cost of keeping wages low, and of not lifting those 285,000 kids out of poverty, is $6 billion to $8 billion a year. We, the taxpayers, all pay for that as well, but it is not recorded in a budget line anywhere.

It is unreasonable that while there have been overall—

Vote agreed to.

Vote Food Safety agreed to.

Vote Immigration