Employment Standards Legislation Bill

I am pleased to take the first call on Part 2 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. This is the part that, among other things, goes to the heart of much of the debate that has been going on around this bill pretty much since it was introduced, and that is in the matter of zero-hour contracts. I am very pleased and appreciative, actually, to note that for all the hyperbole around the concerns about the clauses and the various amendments we have actually landed in a place that I think, and I hope, the majority of the Committee can support.

There are a number of people who, I think, can take credit for that—and I know that there will be a number of people who will claim credit for that, but the people whom I want to acknowledge in my first intervention in the Committee stage are actually the officials, because they will not say it, and they write my speeches and they never mention themselves. It has been a notoriously challenging task to take what we know in principle—and what I think we can all agree on is that the concept of zero hours and those punitive elements of provisions that were creeping into our employment relations landscape should go. The question is what words we use in the legislation to give effect to that that are effective without having unintended consequences, and I can tell the Committee and those listening that I have spent countless hours with officials and with others to ensure that we get that right.

I acknowledge also the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, as I did in the second reading, and others, including the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and Mr Lees-Galloway, for working towards being as close as we can get to that common goal. I think we will all agree that there were punitive aspects of employment agreements that needed to go. I just want to put on record my thanks to the officials for the work that they have done.

One of the difficulties that we did have through this process, I think, was in coming to a shared understanding about what zero hours actually meant, because it has no formal legal definition—it is not set out in any statute. It is a nomenclature that has crept into a lot of Western jurisdictions, particularly the United Kingdom and, certainly, more recently in New Zealand. So I think it is important, at least in framing the debate, to inform the Committee of what I think we are talking about when we talk about zero hours.

I want to acknowledge Dundas Street Employment Lawyers, which, in my searching on its website, came up with the most succinct definition of what I think we were trying to deal with here. I am paraphrasing from its website, effectively, in having no legal definition, but what we tend to talk about is the engagement with an employee without any reciprocal guarantee of work. In many cases, those employees are required to be available for work. I will come back to the question of availability soon. But it is the lack of that mutuality of obligation that is the most punitive aspect of zero-hour agreements. It is the quid pro quo that if I do not commit, why should the other party?

Too many examples were being brought to the attention of unions and MPs where there was no obligation on the employer to commit any number of hours but an expectation that the employee be available for work, often to the exclusion of other opportunities to seek work elsewhere. Apart from being pretty poor and stupid, this was actually bad for business, in my view. These were businesses that had extremely high levels of turnover as a consequence. As one who has had to run an organisation that has quite uncertain throughput and a 24/7 operation, I know it is not that easy, but it is not rocket science to roster a workforce that has the right mix of full-time, part-time, and casual staff, and other staff who can be available if necessary in an emergency, without resorting to these.

So it was with that in mind that we came to what I think was a very strong start point with the bill as it was introduced—and even stronger when it came out of the select committee—but there were still concerns, and I acknowledge those concerns. For all of the noise around the fact that there were some who claimed that we had not removed zero hours but, rather, we had entrenched them—for all of that, I did not think we were that far away. I do want to acknowledge the Council of Trade Unions and the Labour Party members of the select committee, who were prepared to work together to come to an arrangement that I think strengthens the bill even further.

I want to come to the issue of availability, because Mr Lees-Galloway does have an amendment to the bill that reflects the question of availability, and, effectively, what it does is it says that an agreement should not have an availability provision unless there is a commitment to hours. Just to reframe that, the zero-hour agreements have two dimensions: one is the lack of a commitment to hours, and the second is the expectation to be available with no compensation. So when the bill came back out of the select committee, it had the second part.

I would suggest that at least one of the limbs of those two things needs to be fixed in order to get rid of the zero-hour agreement. So, for example, it is possible to have a casual employment agreement. Regardless of concerns about the casualisation of employment that some hold, I still maintain that casual employment agreements have a place in the employment relations landscape. On the other hand, it should not be an expectation that someone on a casual hours agreement be waiting by the phone—that is the availability expectation. The bill as it came out of the select committee allowed for there to be no mutual commitment of hours, but it did say that if you want your staff member to be available, there has to be a compensation for that.

Mr Lees-Galloway’s amendment, which I am sure he will speak to—and I do not want to steal his thunder on this; I just want to put on record my views on it—did, I think, eliminate zero hours. If one of the things that we needed to do was to take away one of those imbalances, then, effectively, requiring the employer to compensate for being available even if there were no hours of commitment in the agreement did that. However, I was open to the view that a minor change to the availability provisions that says you can have an availability provision only if there is first a commitment of hours still preserves the goal that we are trying to do, and may strengthen it at the margins—I am not convinced, but I do not think it harms things. So for that reason, the Government is prepared to support Supplementary Order Paper 155 in the name of Mr Lees-Galloway.

There are some other changes, minor changes—again, I think, at the margins—that provide better clarity around what the expectations are for reasonable notice, for example. This has been another area of complexity because both the availability provision and the reasonable notice provision for cancellations need to make sure that we do not, in our efforts to eliminate these punitive aspects of employment agreements, have the unintended consequence of ruling out that which is necessary and appropriate in our employment landscape.

For example, in terms of the emergency helicopter ambulance pilot, we do want that person to be available. We do not want him or her to be actually deployed, but we should compensate that person for being available. The New Zealand Police obviously needs availability provisions for things like the armed offenders squad and Special Tactics Group and so on. So to suggest that we could get away from the availability and on-call provisions, which are an important part of our industrial-relations landscape, is not, I think, what anybody would want. What we have to make sure is that in framing these availability provisions we do not leave ourselves with unintended consequences.

I just wanted to put on the record what my understanding of zero-hour agreements are. I am very happy to have that elaborated on or nuanced from other members of the Committee. But I remain convinced that this will eliminate those quite punitive aspects of agreements that are known as zero hours. I think that will be good for employees. It will actually be good for employers too—those who may have been a little lazy in their rostering practices. I think the effect of this, and I expect and hope the effect of this, will be more in the prevention than the prosecution, because this will prompt those who have been a bit tardy with their rostering practices and a bit lazy in their expectations on employees to be more diligent. It is not rocket science; it is good business practice, and I think that is what we have got here.

Before I embark on my contribution to Part 2 of this bill, can I also, like Minister Woodhouse, make a couple of acknowledgments. The first is to the Unite union. If it were not for the Unite union, this issue would not be a political issue. We would not be considering this issue this evening. The second is to the Council of Trade Unions, which was there at the beginning of this legislative process and which has been an enormous source of information and knowledge and support in the period of time between the select committee consideration and now, and before the select committee consideration, as well.

Assuming all goes well tonight, and going by Minister Woodhouse’s comments it sounds like things are going to go well tonight, I look forward to the opportunity to make a few more acknowledgments during the third reading. Can I also acknowledge the officials. The Minister is absolutely right—they have worked extremely hard on this legislation, and ought to be acknowledged for that.

I have a definition of a zero-hour contract. It is not unlike the Minister’s. It is “a permanent, part-time agreement with no fixed hours”. “Permanent”—i.e., not casual. It is permanent in that the employee does have to come to work when they are told to come to work by the employer. “Part-time”—not full time. “No fixed hours”—no guarantee of work. That, I understand, is the term that was actually used, particularly in the fast-food industry, for what we term a zero-hour contract: a permanent, part-time agreement with no fixed hours. The result of that is people are literally stuck at home, waiting for the phone call, and then must go into work when the phone call comes.

The result of that is people cannot plan their lives. They cannot get a loan from the bank because they do not know how much income they are going to have. They cannot get hire purchase agreements to buy a fridge or a bed or anything else like that. They cannot join sports clubs because they do not know when they are and are not going to be at work. They cannot be available for their children sometimes—you know, if their children have got a sports game on a Saturday morning but they are suddenly called into work, or likewise if the children have got a school play or something. Zero-hour contracts just stop people being able to live an ordinary, decent life. That is why we have got to get rid of them, and that is why I am so hopeful that tonight will go well and the result will be that we will get rid of them.

There is certainly a difference of opinion about how significant the changes are that we are talking about making tonight. The Government says they are minor. I am less convinced about that. To start with I would like to go to the first change made on my Supplementary Order Paper 155, which makes changes to new section 67E in clause 87, because this is what changes this bill from a bill that entrenches zero-hour contracts to a bill that eliminates zero-hour contracts.

I understand—I absolutely understand—that in the public’s mind that is a difficult concept. It is that a bill that we have been saying—and we are quite right in saying this—entrenches zero-hour contracts could actually be changed significantly by changing only a couple of clauses, and be changed so significantly that we actually do a 180-degree turn and end up with a bill that eliminates zero-hour contracts. It might be difficult to believe—I can barely believe it myself—but it is true, and that is what this amendment will do.

So the issue we had with new section 67E when it came back from the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee was section 67E(2), which said “an availability provision may relate to—(a) all work performed under the employment agreement;”. In other words, all the work you did under that employment agreement would be subject to an availability provision. In layman’s terms, you could be on call all the time, with no guarantee of work. That is a zero-hour contract. That is the very definition of a zero-hour contract. That was the fatal flaw in the legislation, and that is the bit that we have desperately wanted to change.

The other changes are important—there is no doubt about it—but the change to section 67E(2) is the linchpin. Without that, none of the rest of it really matters all that much, but with that it changes the context for the rest of the bill and it changes the context for the rest of the amendments that are proposed, both by the Government and by the Opposition. So this is the important one. For everybody out there who desperately wants Parliament to eradicate zero-hour contracts, this is the one that changes this bill from a bill that entrenches zero-hour contracts to a bill that eliminates zero-hour contracts.

Instead of the availability provision relating to all work performed under the employment agreement, the availability provision may, in my Supplementary Order Paper, “only—(a) be included in an employment agreement that specifies agreed hours of work and that includes guaranteed hours of work among those agreed hours;”. It also must relate only “to a period for which an employee is required to be available that is in addition to those guaranteed hours of work.”

What does that mean in real terms? It is the classic on-call situation that most people in this Chamber will have experienced and a lot of workers have experienced. To be asked to be on call—because that is essentially what an availability provision is, to be asked to be on call; in other words, when the phone call comes you have to go to work—can happen only if you have guaranteed hours in your employment agreement. So you will have your guaranteed hours, and then in addition to that you may be on call.

In my younger days I worked at a medical laboratory. I worked a shift during the day, and every fortnight or so I was on call overnight. I got an allowance for being on call, because you do have to put your life on hold. You certainly cannot drink, and you cannot go and play a game of football or whatever, because the phone call comes and you have to go into work. If you went into work then you got paid for the actual work that you did. That is a situation that we recognise well, and that is what is now going to be the case under this availability provision.

So people have previously been required to be available with absolutely no guarantee of work; now if you are required to be available that comes only on top of guaranteed work. That eliminates zero-hour contracts when taken in the context of all the other provisions that are included in this legislation.

In the time I have remaining in this call I want to address a question that I have been asked, and I really want the Minister to address this one, as well. The question that I have been asked is: what is to stop an employer giving someone 1 guaranteed hour and then putting them on the availability clause for the rest of the time? It is a fair question, and we have to answer that. The answer to that comes in new section 67E(3B)(c), which says an employer must have regard to “the proportion of the hours referred to in paragraph (b)”—which is “the number of hours for which the employee would be required to be available”—“to the agreed hours of work.” So it would be disproportionate for someone to have 1 guaranteed hour and 39 hours when they have to be under an availability clause.

Obviously, what is reasonable will have to be tested, but that would be disproportionate. That would be an onerous contract. Let this Committee be clear: that is not what we intend at all. If a judge has to look back at this debate and has to figure out what our intention was, I want it to be absolutely clear: we do not intend that employers would be able to give people a very small number of guaranteed hours and then require them to be available for a much larger number of hours. The weighting should be such that the majority of time is guaranteed and a few hours—the fewer number of hours—are under the availability provision.

That has to be our clear intention from this Committee, and I really want the Minister to contribute at some point in time this evening to make it clear that that is the Government’s view as well, because without that, really, we are potentially window dressing. We really need to ensure that that intention is the case. I am confident that it is the case; I just think we have to be absolutely clear in this Committee that that is our intention. Mr Chairman—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): No, you’re right.

I thought you were going to cut me off there for a second, Mr Chairman.

So there are certainly other aspects of Part 2 that I am very keen to speak on, but not being able to see your clock, Mr Chairman, I have got no idea how much time I have left—1 minute, OK. Well, I will talk briefly to the cancellation of shifts, because that is the other thing that my Supplementary Order Paper does. Actually, you need some bits from my Supplementary Order Paper and you need some bits from the Government’s Supplementary Order Paper 154 to deal with the cancellation of shifts issue completely. But what we do not want to have happen is the situation where employers can cancel a shift at the last minute. That was another aspect of the whole zero-hour contract regime that was inequitable and it was exploitative of workers.

We want to make it absolutely clear that workers must have a reasonable period of notice for cancellation, and if they do not get that reasonable period of cancellation, then compensation must be paid. Furthermore, that notice period of cancellation must be included in the employee’s employment agreement so they know up front what the situation is and what the period of cancellation is, and that must be a reasonable notice period.

I do promise the Committee that we will not turn this into the “Lees-Galloway - Woodhouse Show”, but Mr Lees-Galloway has raised some very important points that I think probably bear addressing now, and that will help frame the rest of the debate on Part 2. Actually, in doing so, my view is that in starting his intervention he suggested that new section 67E(2), inserted by clause 87, was so, so important because without it we would entrench zero-hour contracts, and he then went on to explain why that was not the case. I will explain what I mean because he has actually raised a very important concern that some listening will have, which is that if we came out of the select committee with a bill that allowed people to have an availability provision but no commitment of hours, why is it such a big improvement to have the commitment of even 1 hour of work and a provision for an availability of hours? Why does that make such a big difference?

He did allude, actually, to the answer to that question, because it is not appropriate—and he did not do this—for anyone to read the amendment in his Supplementary Order Paper 155 in isolation from two or three important clauses in this bill. With respect, Mr Lees-Galloway actually articulated the position of the bill without the amendment, implying that the availability provision would not be without fetter, and that is simply not true. There is no expectation that somebody should be available without other things happening, and I want to go through what they are.

Firstly, in new section 67E(3)(a) an employer cannot just make an employee be available. They need to have reasonable grounds to do so—genuine reasons based on reasonable grounds. I would suggest that saying “I might be busy on Friday night or I might not.” is not reasonable grounds because that is actually what has been happening, particularly in the hospitality industry. Then he went on to, quite rightly, point out the key to this, regardless of his amendment, which is new section 67E3(b), which states: “the availability provision provides for the payment of reasonable compensation to the employee for making himself or herself available to perform work under the provision.” It has to be in writing—that is what new section 67E(3A) says underneath it. It is not enforceable unless it is agreed in advance. That too is a significant change. These are all changes the select committee has made to strengthen the issues around availability.

Then Mr Lees-Galloway, quite rightly, points out the issue of proportionality, and that is the key to this around the guaranteed hour question. There will be a concern perhaps from union members and delegates that there is a risk that an employer makes a commitment to 1 hour of work and then has an availability provision. Firstly, it has to be on reasonable grounds. I cannot imagine for the life of me how that could be reasonable, but it would be open to them to demonstrate that. And, secondly, it has to be compensated for. But, thirdly, as Mr Lees-Galloway says, it has to be proportionate. So it is simply not lawful, once this bill has passed, to say: “I will give you 1 hour but you have got to be available for 39 hours.” Even if that compensation is reasonable, it is not proportionate, and therefore it would be ruled unlawful under the Act when it is passed.

So I think that is really important. I do not want to labour the point about availability or about whether this is a big change or a small change because I think we are going to get over the line anyway, but I do encourage members when they are considering these clauses—these crucial clauses—to look at them holistically both with the reasonableness, the proportionality, and the requirements to compensate for availability, and now Mr Lees-Galloway’s expectation that it should be a mutual commitment of hours.

I will just finish what I hope will be my last intervention—unless there are some quite specific technical questions—which is around the cancellation of shifts, because I think this is a very important issue that requires, in advance again, there to be very good reasons. We have worked quite hard again with officials to make sure that although we do not prescribe every situation where that might be appropriate, we do give broad guidance not just to the employers but to employees as well about when it would be appropriate in the circumstances. I am thinking about the horticulture industry, where weather disruptions are pretty normal, but the key to this is actually the commitment of hours. So with the cancellation of a shift, if you have a mutual commitment of, say, 16 or 24 hours, they would then have to be automatically put into the next day if you have got a commitment to work those hours of a week. There is also a requirement for compensation even if they are extra hours.

I call Grant Robertson.

Thank you—

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Good choice.

—yes, and thank you to my colleague Ruth Dyson for that support. Can I also begin my contribution with some acknowledgments. I am not a person who has been on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee or been close to this bill, but I do want to acknowledge my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway for the work that he has done, from our point of view, on the Opposition benches on this issue.

We went into this discussion deeply worried that we had a piece of legislation that was going to entrench what all of us know have been some of the most discriminatory and exploitative practices that I have seen, after hearing from people coming into my office, and I am going to return to a couple of cases in a moment. To now be sitting here tonight with a piece of legislation that will, effectively, outlaw those contracts I think is a real achievement, and I want, from our side, to acknowledge Iain Lees-Galloway for that.

I also want to acknowledge the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety for that, because I think the Minister has entered into this in the spirit of trying to find a way through getting rid of those most exploitative of practices. So I want to acknowledge the Minister for doing that as well. As he has noted, what is big and what is small is often in the eye of the beholder—maybe a topic the member knows about; I do not know—but it is a change that we think is important and valuable, on this side of the Chamber.

I want to talk about the same clauses and I do not think there is going be any difficulty in a number of members talking about these same clauses because they are the critical clauses within the bill. It is within clause 87 around the topics of availability and cancellation of shifts. My colleague Iain Lees-Galloway said that his definition of zero-hour contracts was “a permanent, part-time position with no fixed hours”. I think that is a nice, clear, concise definition. But, for me, it is the people I have met who have been in these circumstances who define what a zero-hour contract is. I have two cases that I have dealt with and I want to use them to explain what I think is being changed here and why I think it is important, particularly in new section 67E(2), set out in clause 87, around availability of hours.

A young woman who is a retail worker—or who is actually a student but was a retail worker over the last two summers—found herself in the position of being on call. It was precisely like the point that Mr Woodhouse made just before where the reasonable assumption of her employer was: “I might be busy or I might not be busy, but I want you to be ready at a moment’s notice for me.” This person who wanted work over the summer period, who needed work over the summer period and was struggling to find it, accepted a contract that, quite frankly, she should not have. Had she had advice from a union right off the bat she probably would not have either, but she did—this woman did do that.

She found herself in almost exactly the position we have just been discussing in the last two interventions of being told to come in, the employer would let her stay for about an hour sometimes if it was not busy, and—this is literally true—if it was raining or if there was a forecast of rain, she would be told to go home because people would not be coming out to shop. That is as bad and as ridiculous as it got for that worker.

My understanding of reading the availability provision here is of the vital importance of the linkage between availability and guaranteed hours. Agreed hours of work and guaranteed hours—that is the absolutely critical connection that has been missing. The ability of an employer to exploit a clause that did not link those two things together is the concern that we have had on our side of the Chamber. I take the point that there will be some employers who have just been a bit slack. They have not really tightened up on how to do this. That is a fair comment. Unfortunately, as we always find in employment legislation, there is that very small minority of employers who actually do this deliberately. They go out of their way to find the loopholes and exploit them and exploit the employees who work for them. We have to have law that stops that.

It is not about judging all employers as being bad—it is not; most employers want to do the best by the workers in their firms—but we have to make law that deals with those who have the worst intent. It is the sad thing. It is about what we have to do in this House from time to time, and tonight is one of those examples.

So new section 67E(2), in clause 87, is the provision—I do agree with my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway—that makes that connection and makes it understandable, I think, for people. I do take the point the Minister has just made, which is that the employer has got to have a good reason—[Bell rung] Mr Chair.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Grant Robertson.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Mr Grant Robertson.

Ha, ha! That is good. There was so much competition, I am so pleased you chose me, Mr Chair. The employer must have a good reason for requiring the employee to be available for work, and I do respect the fact that those two things go together. So the availability clause is not only about linking the guaranteed hours and the availability provision but also about making sure that the employer has that good reason.

That will be tested, I suspect, in time, but I think we have heard already in the debate tonight from the Minister and my colleague that the intent of what is being put on the table here is that it is quite a high threshold. I just want to reiterate that the point the Minister made is a very accurate one, about—you know, the employer says: “I might not be busy.” I think we have got to make the point that that is actually not going to be acceptable in the future, and that is a very, very good thing.

I want to talk in the second part of my call about the question of cancellation of shifts. This relates to a different area of where someone came to see me, which is around the area of home care and those people who have contracts to do home care. The example that was given to me was around what happens to a home-care worker when the person whom they are looking after spends time in hospital, and what are they contracted for. This will be an interesting case to follow through over time with this new law, because the current status of the home-care worker if the person whom they look after is taken into hospital under emergency circumstances is that that worker is not paid. That is actually a direct result of the contract that is awarded to the provider, who then passes it on to the person who delivers that care.

The person who came and saw me about that really was struggling to make ends meet because our home-care workers are paid so poorly, but she was finding that the inconsistency of income and the cost on her was very, very high, and what that fundamentally comes down to is a question around the cancellation of shifts. I am not pretending today to say I know exactly what the outcome will be for that worker, but what I can see in the new section 67G, in clause 87, and the various amendments to it from both the Minister and Iain Lees-Galloway is that there is now a much more clear process and a series of steps that should, in most good contracts—and that will be the critical element for the case of the person I was dealing with—be able to eliminate people being exploited by cancellation of shift issues.

So let us be clear: we have not gone through this yet, so far. The new section 67G now reads that “(2) The employer must not cancel a shift of the employee unless the employee’s employment agreement specifies—(a) a reasonable period of notice that must be given before the cancellation of a shift; and (b) reasonable compensation that must be paid to the employee if the employer cancels a shift of the employee without giving the specified notice. (3) In cancelling a shift of the employee, the employer must—(a) give the employee the notice specified in the … agreement …; or (b) if that notice is not given, pay the employee the [specified compensation].” That is a critical change. It is a change that puts in place a regime that means there can be none of the last-minute cancellations because the weather changes, or whatever else it is. We will find that as this goes through, I am sure, in the cases that will come we will understand what “reasonable period of notice” is and what “reasonable compensation” is, but those words are critical in avoiding those problems.

So when we put together the availability provisions and the issues around cancellation of shifts, we cut to the heart of the big problems that the Labour Party had when this legislation came forward, and that was why we were concerned that it had actually become a charter for zero-hour contracts rather than the other way round. I respect the Minister’s different point of view on that, but that is certainly how it felt, from our side.

These provisions mean that as a Parliament we are making a very important statement tonight about what constitutes decent work in our country, and that means a lot to those people who work in the hospitality industry and the service industry, in particular. They do important work for us. We hear a lot from the Government at the moment about the importance of tourism and about how important tourism is. These are the people whom tourists see. If they feel that they are valued—if they feel that they have got decent work, that they have got guarantees that they will be valued and their contribution will be valued, and that they will be paid properly—they will be even better ambassadors for our country. In the same way, those who work in the service industry looking after older people and looking after the disabled—these are the people whom we charge with looking after the most vulnerable in our society, and we are giving them a chance at decent work tonight.

Before I make my contribution on Part 1 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill I also would just like to acknowledge the work and the support of the officials, not only to the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety but to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, as we went through the process of analysing this bill and heard from submitters from right across New Zealand—employers and employees. I was away when the second reading was heard last Thursday, so this is my first opportunity to speak after the select committee process. I just want to acknowledge the members of the committee, both from this side of the Chamber and from the other side as well, as we have worked to come to a place where we want, in particular, to protect some of the more vulnerable employees in our country.

I want to speak just briefly on the definition that has been articulated here this evening. I think the member opposite, Iain Lees-Galloway, made the comment that a zero-hour contract was a permanent, part-time contract with no fixed hours. I would like to add to that as well, because I believe that a zero-hour contract is more than that. It is a permanent, part-time contract with no fixed hours and a requirement to be available to the exclusion of other employment opportunities. We need to understand and recognise that right across this Committee, every single one of us opposes that definition of what it is. As we went through the select committee process the very principle of this bill that it sought to strengthen was the mutuality of obligation. If there are contracts with no fixed hours that are permanent and part time but have the requirement that the employee be available to the exclusion of other employment opportunities, then that is not a mutual obligation committed by the employer to that person.

As a committee, we looked at these measures and we came back and, as the Minister has alluded, we strengthened the obligations of the employer, and some of these have been spoken about this evening. They have been such that the employer must have a genuine reason, based on reasonable grounds, for including an availability provision in a contract. In fact, if they do not even put an availability provision in an employment agreement, they cannot ask a worker to do such. The availability provision provides for the payment of reasonable compensation to the employee for making himself or herself available to perform work under the provision. It is good that we are going to come to an agreement through all of this with the different Supplementary Order Papers that are coming through. I believe that, as the Minister and other speakers have said, if there are agreed hours and guaranteed hours, it is going to do no harm and potentially good in terms of this bill.

What I am saying is that all the work that we did in the select committee process that is now in the bill in clause 87, new section 67E(3B) and (3C) onwards, in terms of putting far greater obligations of reasonable compensation, means that an employer cannot expect somebody to be available without a mutual obligation towards that person and that there would be compensation—and reasonable compensation—made available if they ask that employee to do that work. Then the number of hours for which the employee would be required to be available would have to be proportionate to the agreed hours of work. All of these measures are there. They are strong measures and I believe they are achieving some really good outcomes in this area, which we understand is called zero-hour contracts.

My view is, and I am sure, that as we come through this whole process of working through the Supplementary Order Papers, we will come to a happy place of agreement. We will see that there will be minimum standards of employment that are reflected in what is written even now in the bill before the Committee, and then the added Supplementary Order Papers will add to them as well. We will see that there will be opportunities for people to work with flexibility—with the employers; with employees—but that there will not be that ability for the vulnerable to be exploited. I believe that that is a good thing and is a thing that members in this Committee would all agree with. Thank you.

I want to start in a similar vein to my colleague Grant Robertson. I remember watching some time ago a long form interview with Minister Michael Woodhouse around zero-hour contracts, and I did at that time detect a genuine concern about what was happening in the labour market. But, of course, it was our role as the Opposition to make sure that any expressed concern was translated into very explicit legislation, and that is where I join my colleagues in highlighting again the really important role that the Opposition, and particularly Iain Lees-Galloway, has played in making sure that we allow not one crack of light to be available for zero-hour contracts to remain in New Zealand legislation.

On first blush, that is exactly what this bill did initially allow. It allowed enough loopholes to remain so that zero-hour contracts as we know them would still exist in New Zealand, but this, of course, was the vehicle we needed to use. If we had simply voted against the bill we would be leaving the situation to hang, and that would mean that those contracts would still exist, as they do now. So we were as constructive as we could be through this process, and Iain has done a fantastic job of getting us to the point where, with the support of the Minister, we now have amendments on the Table that will bring these contracts to a close. So, Iain, that is fantastic work, but, obviously, having the Minister come on board with that has been critical to this process as well, and we acknowledge that.

I want to come back to some of the really excellent points that have been made in the regulatory impact statement around the clauses in Part 2, particularly around new section 67C, “Agreed hours of work”, in clause 87. It is quite difficult to size the number of employees who will be directly affected by this clause, but in the regulatory impact statement the officials have made an attempt to size the problem. We do know, as has been touched upon, that those workers most affected by new section 67C are likely to be those who are working in the service sectors—so, the retail trade, accommodation, and food service sectors. There are 314,000 people, roughly, working in those industries. We can drill down a little bit further than that, though. The centre for labour, employment and work found that 61 percent of the collective agreements in the food retailing sector did not state ordinary weekly hours of work—61 percent of collective contracts in that space. So that gives an indication of the scale of use in particular service sectors.

The reason we should be doubly concerned by that, of course, is the level of vulnerability for people who are working in those sectors, and the regulatory impact statement touches on that. But what baffles me is that although we are talking about retail trade, and particularly food retailing, there is a certain level of predictability around those sectors, in terms of demand.

I myself have worked in that sector. I was a checkout operator for a number of years. We knew when the busy times were, and anyone in this Committee who has been to a supermarket in Auckland on a Sunday knows there is a certain level of predictability around trade in that sector. I would say the same for the food retailing business, particularly fast food. Again, I had the dubious honour of being a worker at KFC for about 6 months. Interestingly, I was not employed directly as a KFC worker, but I was a contractor who job-trained people with intellectual disabilities. So I was there at KFC to job-train a young man with autism. I was in that place long enough to know the predictability of trade in that sector, as well. So you cannot tell me that it is impossible to give a certain degree of certainty for workers in those industries, and that is obviously what this legislation will now require and that is absolutely reasonable, but why is it that we are seeing that happening in these particular sectors?

Why is new section 67C so necessary to weed this out in those particular sectors? Well, I think what is interesting—and it is brought up in the regulatory statement—is the use of part-time employees over casuals as a way of securing employees. So it is a way of putting dibs on individuals and securing them for your business, but then giving them really uncertain shifts and hours. All that does, of course, is shift the uncertainty from an employer, who has the ability to make greater judgments about those ebbs and flows for their business and who is obviously in a more powerful situation than the employee—it shifts that risk from the employer to the employee, who is the more vulnerable in those situations, absolutely. Of course, where there are extremely tight margins or where there is extremely tight competition in a sector, that is where we are seeing these contracts being used, and that is utterly unfair because that is where the power imbalance is so strong.

So in the regulatory impact statement around the problem definition, I believe the officials are absolutely right to say that the root cause of this problem is an inherent power imbalance, but, even having said that, to claim that where there is a more powerful employee—that is such a subjective thing to determine, whether an employee has the power to push back on an employer around guaranteed hours. It is very hard to distinguish when someone is in a situation where that is going to be an easier position to negotiate from. That is why, regardless of the sector and regardless of the power relationship, it needs to be removed, because it is inherently unfair—it is inherently unfair.

I think it is also useful, though, that the problem definition around why we have come to the point of having new section 67C is fleshed out even further in paragraph 18 of the regulatory impact statement. To anyone who has not read it, I really recommend it. It talks about the fact that, actually, this becomes problematic for the labour market generally. A labour market is not able to function efficiently if employees and their extra capacity are locked into an arrangement with a singular employer who then is not giving guaranteed hours. That may—and I would be interested in this because I am not sure whether it is true. To what extent is our increasing figure of those who are under-employed courtesy of this kind of practice in the employment market?

Of course, the figure that we see for the underemployed, which is growing, is people who would like additional hours but who cannot find them in the market place. To what degree are those people unable to find those additional hours because their employment arrangement basically means that they are unable to go out and seek that additional work? They are locked into an arrangement that gives all of the power to an employer, which deems them unable to fill the unknown quantity of work because they are, essentially, constantly on call without any compensation for that. So if we did not have new section 67C redrafted the way it is, it would contribute, ultimately, to a labour market failure.

But I do think it is also interesting to see that there has been some analysis to say that these unfair provisions have been used in place of proper due process where an employer has performance issues. So, instead of sitting down and working through those performance issues and using the process that is set out in legislation, employers were using these powers that, essentially, pushed people out of work, without having to go through due process. Another reason—because it was never the intention of this Parliament that, rather than have due process, someone would simply be forced out in almost a pseudo-dismissal process.

Another point that I think is really important to make is the impact that this will have currently on people who have an interface between their work hours and their income support from Work and Income, and who have such uncertainty about their work. How do they get their income support from Work and Income, if that is required to be topped up, when they have that level of uncertainty?

Many of us will have seen this in our offices. I have had an individual come to me at one point who had total uncertainty around their hours—absolute uncertainty. The hours for that individual were not guaranteed and they required a top-up from Work and Income. Work and Income told them to quit—it told them to quit. That is what that individual employee was eventually driven to do because they could not support themselves and Work and Income found it too difficult to work around the uncertainty of their contractual arrangement with their employer.

That is the flow-on effect of legislation that we are amending today, and why it is so important. Absolutely, we support it.

It is a pleasure to rise and take a call on Part 2 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. It is kind of hard to take this call without starting it off by saying “Well, we told you so.”, because on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, we on the Labour side tried very, very hard to convince the National Party members. We hoped that they were talking to the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety at the time to actually do the right thing and tighten up the provisions so that zero-hour contracts were gone from legislation. I think, Minister Woodhouse, to be fair, if that was just a small amount of distance, then we ought to have been able to sort it at the select committee. It should not have been reported back to the House needing all these Supplementary Order Papers that were negotiated afterwards if, in fact, it was just a small divide.

The truth is that the things that have been subsequently agreed to make all the difference in terms of a level of job security and the ability of people to have certainty over some guaranteed hours of work. Having the provision in here to have guaranteed hours of work is no small matter for those people who have been sitting on these zero-hour contracts with no option otherwise. For them to have guaranteed hours of work that will be proportional to the hours of work that they are to be available for is the crux of the matter. That makes all of the difference in terms of how vulnerable they are, their ability to plan, their ability to be involved not just in paid employment but also life—because that is important as well—and their ability to be able to go to a bank and talk about their guaranteed hours of work and to talk about what their salary will definitely be as a minimum every week or every fortnight.

Those things matter. They make a big difference to people’s ability to be able to participate fully in society. For the Labour Party, having people being able to participate fully in their society is a very important thing. In fact, we go further than that and say that we want everyone to have access to the Kiwi Dream. Certainly, sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring because that is your only opportunity of getting any income at all that week is not elevating for this country.

In fact, I will just say, very honestly, to the National members that they are lucky that they had Iain Lees-Galloway to be dealing with over this, to help them through it, because Iain Lees-Galloway tried that once before with the Health and Safety in Employment Amendment Bill. The Government failed to take our advice on that count, and that turned into a complete and utter shambles. So perhaps those members learnt something through that exercise, but I am going to say that they are very lucky that they had Iain Lees-Galloway to work through this issue with. Of course, I have been one of the other two members from the Labour Party on that select committee. I am still in the “never trust a Tory” category after having been done over by them once, when I took them at good faith around paid parental leave, so they are very fortunate indeed to have Iain to be dealing with.

The loopholes that have been used by—and I will call them lazy employers—lazy employers to not roster work appropriately and, therefore, give people some certainty and some security will be closed down by the provisions that we are recommending here for Part 2. Should those lazy employers—well, you know, that is probably being nice about them actually, because there are lazy employers. Sorry, I will start from the big group. The big group is the good employers, actually, who understand that people’s livelihoods and the way they earn those livelihoods is a huge part of their lives, but it is part of their lives, and they have another part of their lives as well. Most employers get that.

In fact, the fascinating thing about the select committee process was when employers came to do their submissions. I have got to say almost all the questioning of those employers was happening from the Labour Party side of the equation, to find out exactly what was going on. Those employers—almost all of them told us that, actually, they did not need zero-hour contracts. They did not want them.

💬 Phil Twyford: They didn’t like them.

They did not like them and they do not need them. They said “What we need is the ability to have a permanent workforce for the work we know is permanently available. We need the ability to have fixed-term contracts for the occasion when there is a particular project that we want to take on, or there is a seasonal need for increased work. And we need the ability for properly casual work, to”—I was going to say “to deal with the peaks and troughs”, but it is actually the peaks that is the reality—“to deal with the peaks.” That is what they said they needed. Those are the good employers.

What was surprising about that, in a good way, was that the employers who were most clear about that were the employers from the home-care sector, which a few of my colleagues have raised already. They could have been the employers whom we expected would need the maximum amount of flexibility in their labour market, but what they have learnt over the years is that if they require that level of flexibility from their employees, they end up not being able to guarantee getting the quality work done that they need for their clients. So they have gone through a process with unions and are working out how to actually maximise the most guaranteed hours that they can for their workforce, and I commend them for that.

But we did have the odd employer who came in—and the one that sticks in my mind, I have got to say, and perhaps it is because I did once work for them a long time ago in the past, is McDonalds, which said that it did not use zero-hour contracts. But what it ended up describing to the select committee—under intense scrutiny from the Labour Party, I have got to say—and, in fact, what it was using, was the definition of zero-hour contracts that both sides of the House have used, which is permanent, part-time work, with no fixed hours.

💬 Jonathan Young: And?

Despite the fact that it knows—end of story. Despite the fact that it knows that its restaurants are going to be open for a certain number of hours, that they are going to be open on certain days, and that there will be a minimum number of employees it needs to staff those restaurants on those days and in those hours that they are open for, it would not even guarantee those permanent shifts as being available for employees. That keeps people vulnerable—that keeps people vulnerable.

People listening to this debate may be starting to get concerned about the complexities of some of the amendments that are being made. I have a simple message for those people: join a union—join a union. That is the best way to get job security because it is the unions that will be able to negotiate their way around all of these issues. It was the unions that raised the zero-hour contracts issue at the outset and so that this Parliament could deal with them. In order to get work that is decent work that people can have certainty about, where they will know that they will get the good provisions negotiated into their employment agreement for availability and for cancellation of shifts, join a union. That is going to be by far and away the best way that people can make sure that this piece of legislation works for them.

I want to put on record that the position of the Labour Party is that we believe that this will deal with the zero-hour contracts issues because it guarantees people minimum hours of work. That is incredibly important. That will change this situation for thousands of these workers. I also want to put on record that should those lazy or unethical employers find loopholes around that, Labour will find those loopholes and it will close those loopholes if they ever present themselves. So that is the commitment that we give from this side of the House.

People might be surprised to learn of the types of submissions that we heard on Part 2. They might be surprised to learn that, yes, it was some of the hospitality sector and some of the accommodation sector employers who came to see us but it was also lawyers. We actually had a submission from a female lawyer who told us that she was on a zero-hour contract. She described the situation as one with lots of law graduates looking for work, where employers were taking advantage of that situation by using the skills, experience, and the education that the graduates had invested in for themselves. Graduates were using their law degrees, but employers were not prepared to give them permanent hours of work even though those permanent hours existed. We have got more work to do on this.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to take a call on Part 2 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. I just want to start my contribution by saying that there have been a large number of fantastic contributions in the Committee tonight. I do have to say I had a smile on my face on the news tonight with regard to the Māori Party, Labour, and the National Government all trying to take credit for fixing this problem up. In actual fact, credit really needs to go to the people of New Zealand, who have clearly stated that they actually want zero-hour contracts removed from legislation and not to have them legitimised. So well done, New Zealand—well done for speaking up. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank a number of the people from the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, which has worked with New Zealand First along with some of the other parties to come up with better ways of addressing some of these problems, particularly around zero-hour contracts.

I have to say, just finishing off what Ms Sue Moroney has just been speaking on about one of the submitters who came into the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee to talk to us about her concerns—what Ms Moroney was saying was not actually 100 percent correct. It was actually a casual employment contract that the submitter was on, which was turned into a zero-hour contract. She was, basically, in a casual employment agreement with a law firm and, as a very intelligent woman who is a solo mother looking after her young people, she found herself exposed to being vulnerable in that there was no guaranteed number of hours and she was pretty much just a casual—as and when required. It just shows the vulnerability of even our educated sector, because we stereotype people so that if they are vulnerable, they have got to be uneducated or they have got to have low-earning jobs, but that is not the case.

So my question to the Minister in the chair, Mr Woodhouse—if you could indulge us to stand up and take a call on this, I would very much appreciate it—is what are we going to do about the people who are vulnerable under casual employment agreements? Because we understand that in a modern-day workplace, the importance of having casual agreements—we understand part-time and we understand full time. We have heard the commendable result in today’s discussion with regard to the outcome of getting rid of zero-hour work contracts, and to that end New Zealand First is in a position of support—so that has changed from where we have come from. But we are still very concerned about the involvement of casual employees being exploited, not through zero-hour availability clauses but through just being sort of as and when needed and as required.

As we step into Part 3, I would urge you to take a look at Supplementary Order Paper 150 put forward by New Zealand First with regard to that, because we believe that that will clear it up. We have support from Labour—it has been given to me today that it will be supporting it—the Greens will certainly support it, and we would love to see Government support for that because it is very important. We will get to that in a moment, but, Minister, if you could explain what steps the Government is going to take to indemnify, if you will, those vulnerable workers under casual employment agreements.

I could not speak more positively than on this change—this much-needed change—in our working environment. I think we have seen over the years a direction that is getting towards having a better working place, where there is a balance for workers and bosses, employers and employees—whichever way you want to say that. A real balance of relationship, in any relationship—whether it be a personal relationship, a supporting relationship, or one with a friend, but certainly in an employment agreement—is when both parties have equal power. I think what this employment agreement amendment does is it actually restores the balance of power for the employees, to empower them to be able to stand up and rightly say: “This isn’t fair. I am not happy about that.” That takes me into some other parts of the bill, because I do not want to readdress what has already been strongly spoken about, which is the removal of those zero-hour contracts.

What I also think is that Part 2 has got some very, very positive aspects, and one is that the inspectors and the individuals now have the power to enforce. Once, it was just down to the labour inspectors; now individuals can actually take umbrage and take action towards an employer if they feel there has been some injustice or an imbalance in their agreement. I think the higher penalties that have been put forward are another huge incentive for employers to act more responsibly in their working environments towards their employees—those penalties for an individual are now going to be up to $50,000, and for a body corporate up to $100,000, or three times the amount of money that has actually been sought or lost by the employee. I think those are certainly some good, punitive penalties coming through there.

We have got declarations of breaches in new section 142B in Part 2 of the bill, and compensation orders made by the court. What I like to see are these banning orders that have been brought into Part 2, with some very, very hefty penalties of $200,000 if there has been a breakdown and a continual abuse of these parts. The parts around the requirements to keep records are, I think, very, very important, and I do actually look to support the Greens’ Supplementary Order Paper 151 with regard to that because even salaried workers can find themselves in a position where they do a little bit extra here, and they do a little bit extra there, and all of a sudden it becomes normalised—it becomes just what they have always been doing. So for salaried workers there is a potential loophole there, coming from employers not keeping a record of the hours that they work, where the employer could actually take advantage of them. We do support the fact that all records of employees should be kept and should be available for scrutiny to make sure that there is not a disadvantage for anybody, salaried or otherwise. It is not an onerous expectation.

I also like the fact that there is no ability to indemnify the employer by insurance, to let them get away with malpractice of employment. I think that, as opposed to parts of the Health and Safety Reform Bill, which did not allow this to happen, this is a completely different situation, where I think it is necessary to take that availability to indemnify themselves with insurance away from employers. Again, another part of Part 2 that I think speaks very, very strongly of the new direction is the inability of employers to take unlawful deductions from employees. We have heard many, many cases where staff have had deductions taken, whether it be a restaurant worker with a table doing a runner or whether it be a fuel station worker—or a petroleum dispenser, as they like to be referred to—where somebody has run off without paying, and then those deductions have been taken away from their wages, which is unreasonable. Certainly, this new piece of legislation addresses that.

I would also like to say, to wrap up my contribution, that Part 2 shows some very, very positive changes. It has certainly been a long time coming, and we look forward to Part 3 and a contribution from the Minister in the chair himself with regard to casual employment and how that is going to minimise any exploitation of those workers. Thank you.

It is a pleasure to rise and speak to the bill before us. I want to start first by congratulating my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway on the excellent work that he has done in getting this bill across the line. It speaks to basic Labour Party values, of course. The course of action needed was clear. But, actually, it is often hard to achieve the kinds of things we would like to achieve, from the Opposition benches.

I got a little taste of that with my Mondayising bill, to Mondayise Anzac Day and Waitangi Day, which became law eventually, but against the Government’s will. When the Government did not want to make those changes, it took a great effort to get the smaller parties together to recognise the importance of making the change and, perhaps even more important than that, to get the public of New Zealand behind a change, and to enable them to understand the complex laws that get put through Parliament in a way that boils it down to the basic stuff.

What we have got here in terms of zero-hour contracts has been put out there, into the wider realm, and 56,000 people, I understand, signed the petition to bring an end to them. Iain Lees-Galloway has led that work, and we now have this positive change before us. So I congratulate him and others who have worked towards this end.

How does this come to pass? How does it come to pass that we are in a world where we have this kind of insecure work? There were submissions made to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. I have flicked my eyes over a couple. I have also seen the submission, which people carried and used as a resource, from the Council of Trade Unions on vulnerable work. Part of it is, of course, around the fact that we live in a globalised economy. Labour’s Future of Work Commission project is designed to deal with the issues that that presents, in terms of shifting to a higher value, diversified economy; the research and development tax credits that we know would make so much sense for our economy; the investment incentives to grow businesses that are in the weightless sphere; and capital debt.

But I come back to this particular aspect, in terms of the zero-hour contracts that are no longer going to exist, as a result of the excellent Supplementary Order Paper in the name of Mr Lees-Galloway. That is there to protect the downsides of globalisation, which we know will be there in the transition to this higher-value economy that we want to have. It is to look after the vulnerable workers, to make sure that those who are in the position that they cannot negotiate against a global trend are protected. So in the Supplementary Order Paper there is a very clear set of provisions that will be put into law to make sure that those people are protected, that the vulnerable workers are looked out for, and that decent wages and decent working conditions can be guaranteed over time.

Let us face it. Nobody wants their kid or their workmate or their family member to be on a contract where they cannot guarantee to pay the rent or the power or for the food every week. Nobody actually wants that for anybody they care about. I do not believe that the majority of New Zealanders want that, and that has been shown in the incredible support for these changes that have been brought through in Part 2 of the bill, in the wider social movement that has supported that, and in the support within this House, eventually, for getting rid of zero-hour contracts.

So, again, my congratulations to Mr Lees-Galloway. His Supplementary Order Paper amends clause 87 to ensure that there are guaranteed hours to start with, to make sure any contract that has flexibility within it does actually have those guaranteed hours. You cannot start with zero hours guaranteed. And then if you are going to have some on-demand aspects of a contract, the employer is now required, through the changes being proposed, to be specific about when and how those changes would take effect. So they cannot just pluck something out of mid-air. They cannot pluck something unreasonable out of mid-air.

Most employers, we all know and would acknowledge in this House, would not do that. This legislation, like much of the legislation we put through this House, is designed to guard against the worst abuses that can happen when employers who are not good employers, and often are not very effective or profitable in their businesses, resort to the weaknesses that they can see in order to make ends meet. That ends up harming people and stopping them meeting their ordinary, everyday commitments, such as their ability to commit to a mortgage. We know we have got the lowest homeownership rate in New Zealand since 1951, and that problem is just getting worse every year. It is because of labour provisions like this that people cannot commit to that future expenditure. That is why this Supplementary Order Paper from Mr Lees-Galloway is so important.

The second thing his Supplementary Order Paper does is ensures that there are genuine reasons. There must be reasonable grounds for having an availability provision at all in an employment agreement. So they have to meet a test of reasonableness. They have to have specific provisions. There cannot just be provisions that they can vary. They must specify why and for how many hours. That is clearly specified in Mr Lees-Galloway’s Supplementary Order Paper. The third thing that is very clear to me is that a shift cannot be cancelled at all unless the employee’s agreement specifies it. It must be done with a reasonable notice of cancellation.

First of all, I would like to congratulate Iain Lees-Galloway on the fantastic work he has done on standing up for those who do not have a voice, who are disenfranchised, or who are unable to stand up for themselves—I say, very much, congratulations. The interesting thing is I put a post about this on Facebook. There was one negative comment. The reply to those comments from a whole lot of different people was astounding. The reason I say that, is that you do not have to be on a zero-hour contract to think that they are simply unfair. I think the foundation of New Zealand is built on fairness. We do not like to think that we are being treated unfairly; nor do we like to see others being treated unfairly.

Back to the bill. I would like to talk about clause 83, which amends section 3. Replaced section 3(a)(v), inserted by clause 83(1), states: “by promoting mediation as the primary problem-solving mechanism other than for enforcing employment standards;”. I am a huge fan of mediation, for a number of reasons. It saves costs. It saves time. It does not clog up the courts. It is non-binding. It is different from arbitration. Arbitration is binding; mediation is not. So if you really do not like the outcome, there are other remedies you can seek. But it is an incredibly effective way to solve disputes and nip them in the bud.

But one thing I would like the Minister in the chair to talk about is how this is going to take effect. We have a very effective organisation within the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and it is called Employment Mediation Services. The problem we have is that on 1 December last year Employment Mediation Services put out a proposal saying it was going to restructure: “The location of our offices does not always correspond to where the demand is, which means we are unable to respond to regional challenges over time.” The thing about this, though—at the moment there are mediation services in Auckland, Palmerston North, Dunedin, Hamilton, Christchurch, and Wellington. These are widely used. It shows that clause 83 is actually very relevant, because mediation services are a very important part of the whole employment process.

But what the proposal put forward by Employment Mediation Services outlined was that it is going to do away with the Palmerston North office, it is going to do away with the Dunedin office, it is going to do away with the Napier office, and it is going to centralise these services in Auckland, Manukau, Hamilton, Wellington, and Christchurch. In terms of mediation, let me outline the importance to the regions of effective mediation. In Napier, for example, in 2010 there were 256 mediation cases heard. In 2014 there were 332. In Palmerston North last year there were 232 cases heard, Hamilton 615, Dunedin 266, and in Auckland there were 1,541 cases heard. The point I am making here is that mediation is an incredibly important way to resolve disputes between employers and employees. This is not always an employee with a grievance against an employer. It can be that an employer has a grievance against an employee. Either way, we need to retain these mediation services in the form and the locations they are in at the moment.

According to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment website, the restructuring was going to be known in mid-March 2016. If I look at my watch, mid-March 2016 is about now. So let us hope the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety can actually tell us what is going to happen to Employment Mediation Services, especially in light of this. And this is the first clause in the amendment to the Employment Relations Act, where it talks about promoting mediation as the primary problem-solving mechanism—the primary problem-solving mechanism. And what the initial proposal put out by Employment Mediation Services said was that it was going to contract services out. So this was a further hollowing out—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): OK, I am now going to interrupt the member. He has been very repetitious, when he is not being irrelevant. So I want to encourage the member, in the 10 seconds he has got left, to try to stay within the rules.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I suppose—and you are right, Mr Chair, I have been repetitious, but the reason I have is that I want to make a very clear point: mediation services are vital, not just in the big city centres but right across the regions.

Tēnā koe, Mr Chair. Tēnā koutou e Te Wharenui ko tēnei pō. I really want to congratulate the people outside this Chamber tonight, as well as the people inside this Chamber who are making this work. I want to stand up for the value of organised labour, because without the organisation and the challenges put out by the people on the streets, through this campaign, I doubt that we would be here tonight. So I think it is a matter of congratulations due to the organised labour, to the union organisations that took this to employers, and said, before it even came to Parliament: “We don’t need this in this country; this is not what we’re about.”

And so Part 2 is an example of sensible policy responding to the leadership of the people on the streets. For example, when the Unite union went to Restaurant Brands and said to them “This is not good. We do not need these multinational food chains to take advantage of vulnerable workers.”, it was actually really encouraging to hear Russel Creedy say that when the union approached the company about providing better certainty over working hours, he immediately saw that change was needed. So to quote him: “Having permanent staff who stay with us—loyal, long tenure—is part of a successful business model for our industry,”.

So that is leadership on both sides: the people who organised the workers and approached the unions, and then went to the employers and got that kind of buy-in, and then there are the people who have had to go further. For example, although Burger King and Restaurant Brands, which owns KFC, Pizza Hut, and Carl’s Jr—I do not know these companies because I do not eat this kind of food—actually, they were good but McDonald’s was a problem and Wendy’s was a problem. There had to be protests and demonstrations. There had to be an international day of strike action by fast-food workers. And that is a tribute to the fact that people need to be organised.

One of my fears about this country is that young people do not understand, at the moment, what a union is, and do not understand the value of it, until they have an experience like this. Many young people are responsible for this bill, and for Part 2, because they got involved, they stood up for themselves, and they pointed out that being on minimum wages with uncertain hours—people who walked into these places, coming to all shifts, but not given any more hours. These people stood their ground, protested loudly, and slammed zero-hour contracts. So they helped us do the right thing.

We do not live in this magnificent, moralistically pure, ethical bubble where we make great decisions on behalf of the country. That is actually not how change happens in this country. It happens because people will not be silent, because organised labour will represent them, because they join unions, and because they stand up.

I also want to pay tribute, in part, particularly to the work that a number of people across the Chamber have done on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, but also to Denise Roche for putting up her earlier member’s bill, which had some very clear provisions related to Part 2 that, again, were a serious contribution that needs to be acknowledged. It would have guaranteed employees a contract with fixed minimum hours for employees who are in the practice of working regular hours, after a period of 90 days of work, unless the employee opts out of the arrangement. Notice where the power lies: it lies with the employee having the ability to opt out.

Denise’s bill, which she withdrew when she saw that the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety was making public statements in support of getting rid of the zero-hours contract bit of this bill, also had a part in her bill that said “remove the ability from employers to put in exclusivity clauses in casual contracts which forbid workers from seeking other employment from other employers.” And I have heard good speeches tonight, from right across the Chamber, about why that is anathema. And so all credit to Denise Roche, and to everyone else who put up Supplementary Order Papers, but also put up bills during this process in response to the great work of the people on the streets saying: “This is not good enough.”

I just want to make the hair stand up on your head, or the back of your neck, or wherever, a bit. In the United Kingdom, where this legislation went through some time ago, the Office for National Statistics said that last year the number of people reporting they work on contracts with no minimum hours has risen to 744,000. It has increased by almost a fifth in the last year, spiking concerns that employers are turning to this arrangement to cut back workers’ pay and conditions. So it is great that these Supplementary Order Papers on Part 2 will not allow this to happen.

It is my pleasure to take a call on Part 2 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. I have no doubt that the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety, when he first mooted this bill, was absolutely genuine in wanting to address the whole issue of zero-hour contracts and the other areas of employment where workers were being exploited. Other people have spoken about those things, like where garage attendants were having to pay when people had run off with the petrol without paying for it, and it had come out of their wages. All those sorts of issues were indicative of an industrial relations environment where the power was skewed towards the employer, where the protections that had been built up over generations through the union movement had, basically, been eroded. We know that the employment relationship is not an equal relationship; this is acknowledged in the Employment Relations Act itself. I believe the Minister in his absolute genuine attempts to want to address those inequities, and I applaud him for it.

I also, like others in the Chamber before me, want to acknowledge those who have worked on this bill, particularly the officials and particularly the work that they have done in the last week, which must have been, at times, quite demanding. But, particularly, I want to acknowledge the union movement. The Unite union was one of the first unions to take on the campaign around zero-hour contracts, and it did this with its members in the fast-food sector. It was their work highlighting the impact on everyday working New Zealanders who were guaranteed no hours whatsoever, who had to sit and wait to be contacted by their employer, who could not pay their bills, and who could not plan their lives. It was their work in highlighting this—and, I might add, John Campbell on one of his last shows—showing the public of New Zealand that this kind of bad treatment of employees happened right across New Zealand. I believe that is what sparked this whole movement towards shifting this Government to a situation where it decided that it had to—it absolutely had to—take some action to address what is, essentially, incredibly unfair action from employers.

I just want to talk in detail about Part 2. In the second reading, when this bill came back to the House, I said that this bill was a different beast from what had been introduced in the first reading, and it was. In the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, there had been great arguments, some fantastic submissions—particularly the 10,500 written submissions from working people right across New Zealand—good submissions from employers who also said they do not want zero-hour contracts. During the select committee process, we did actually manage to strengthen the clauses in the bill around compensation for shift cancellations and around notice, but, actually, Iain Lees-Galloway was correct in his statement earlier tonight that when this bill came back to the House, it did not actually address zero-hour contracts; what it did was enshrine them in the legislation.

So it is incredibly heartening to see and to hear Minister Michael Woodhouse say tonight that he will support Supplementary Order Paper 155 from Iain Lees-Galloway, which does actually put in place a guarantee of minimum hours. It goes hand in hand with the other provisions in the bill around notice, compensation, and proportionality—that is, the number of guaranteed hours versus the number of hours that a person may have to be available. And that deals with the whole issue of exclusivity: the whole situation where a worker, an ordinary working person, may have no guarantee of hours but may also be prevented from finding alternative work, which leads to all sorts of difficulties, as you can well imagine.

The commitment to guaranteed minimum hours is a major step forward, and it is the crux of destroying any attempt to legalise zero-hour contracts. I also want to address some of the issues that are in the Supplementary Order Papers, particularly in the one that I am putting forward, Supplementary Order Paper 151. One of the issues that did concern me was around the availability of hours for workers on salaries—and I was concerned about this during the select committee process, as well—and that is that, within the bill as it came through to the Committee of the whole House, salaried workers would have been able to be on call for a non-specified number of hours and not receive compensation within their whole salary payment. I do not think that is reasonable, because it puts them into a situation where they could be working many, many, many hours beyond what they had signed up to do.

We have seen exploitation of salaried workers time and time again, in the hospitality sector in particular, where I think it was the Masala restaurant that employed a whole bunch of migrant workers on salaries. They were working 70 to 80 hours a week and they were on call for extra hours, and, actually, the hourly rate turned out to be around about $2 an hour. This was for a whole pile of workers who worked there. So I was concerned about the whole protection for salaried workers, which is why I have also put up a Supplementary Order Paper in Part 2 and, I think, in the next part as well.

I think we have to recognise that the industrial relations scene has shifted significantly since this National Government has been in power. We have seen more and more and more cases, and every MP—on this side of the House, at least—will be able to give you examples of ordinary working New Zealanders who have been exploited at work; who have not been able to pay their bills, because they have had illegal deductions from their wages or they have had no guarantee of hours; and who have been told by Income Support that the job offered to them, despite having no guarantee of hours, was, in fact, a job, which took them off their numbers, and so made their statistics look a lot better.

I think we have to recognise that in this business, in this House, our duty is to provide laws that are for our most vulnerable, and that is what industrial relations law is about. There is already flexibility within lots of legislation around industrial relations, which enables things like casual workers, permanent part-time workers, and fixed-term workers, as well as being able to be on call. We have had that throughout our industrial relations systems for decades and decades and decades, and it has been tested in our industrial relations legal framework. The rise of the zero-hour contracts that we have seen over the last 10 years has been because employers have felt that they could get away with it. That has been led by the Government and its attitude to legislation.

I want to thank the Minister for stepping back and stepping up for the most vulnerable here, but we all have to recognise that power is never handed over voluntarily. It is the fact that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of New Zealanders who have supported this that has shifted you into the right place, and we thank you for it.

I appreciate this opportunity to take a brief call on the stuff that is at the heart of this Employment Standards Legislation Bill, and that is the stuff on zero-hour contracts. I want to reflect on the changes that have been achieved: firstly, what they are, why they are bad news, and how this bill, as amended, seeks to make sure that they never darken the doors of our employment relations again. It is well known, I think, by people out there that zero-hour contracts are iniquitous because they are unbalanced. The employer can require an employee to be available at any time, and the employee has no guaranteed hours of work, and that is a completely unsatisfactory state of affairs. It reduces the employee to the stuff of an object, and that is not OK in this country.

One little example, on the boundary of my electorate, is Kelston Girls’ College, which tells me, on this International Women’s Day, that its absenteeism has gone through the roof because of casualisation of labour, meaning that parents cannot plan their household stuff, so children are required to stay home to look after the elderly. Casualisation is bad enough; zero-hour contracts make that even worse by making it a completely unbalanced employment relationship.

I want to acknowledge Iain Lees-Galloway and the Labour team that have worked constructively with other parties on this bill. I think it is no secret that the stuff that is at the heart of this is the fact that the Government has moved because it had to, because minor parties came to our position, which was very clear: that the original draft of this bill did not deliver on the Government’s stated commitment to outlaw zero-hour contracts. We will not actually know until the third reading—the end of the Committee stage—whether, in fact, the fine print measures up, but we will be watching like hawks.

In particular, there are three things that we are concerned about: firstly, we want to remove the ability of employers to put people on contracts where they are on call with no permanent hours. Being on call can be fine in some contexts, provided people are fairly remunerated, and the stuff that goes with that. Secondly, employers should not be able to cancel shifts at the last minute. The idea that an employer can simply cancel a shift when they like should not be normalised in law. Thirdly, where practical, hours of work should be included in the stuff of employment agreements so that people can plan their lives with some security. Zero-hour contracts are an unmitigated disaster.

This set of changes that has been negotiated by my good colleague Iain Lees-Galloway centres on new section 67E, inserted by clause 87—the availability clause. The clause, when amended by Supplementary Order Paper 155, will end zero-hour contracts. The amendment is absolutely vital because it changes the bill from being one that entrenches the ability to write zero-hour contracts to one that, effectively, outlaws them—and, we hope, for good.

That means that an employer can no longer demand that the employee be available all the time without giving them guaranteed hours of work, and what is really important—and it will need to be tested in the courts, we recognise that—is that there are provisions for the reasonable stuff of compensation to be paid when somebody is required to work. Secondly, it means that the employer must have a good reason for requiring the employee to be available for work in the first place. That cannot be to the point of changing shifts at the last moment without paying reasonable compensation. The notice period for changes or cancellation of shifts must also be reasonable—an objective test in the courts—and, crucially, must be included in the employment agreement. So it is now much clearer in the law that having agreed hours in an employment agreement is an expectation that will be upheld by the courts.

There are other clauses that contain vital stuff for this bill, records relating to minimum entitlements in clause 84, “4B Employer’s general obligation to keep records relating to minimum entitlement provisions”. The employer has an active obligation to keep records and stuff that allow and require those records to be bona fide, to be categorical, and to be on the record so that there is nowhere for the employer to hide. It reminds me of one time when I was holding the immigration portfolio and we were looking at people rorting the system with foreign fishing crews, and somebody’s employment records were on a computer that just happened to jump overboard off the ship.

It is my pleasure to speak to Part 2 of the Employment Standards Legislation Bill. I have got in my hand here one piece of A4 paper with two sides to it. It is probably one of the most important pieces of paper that we have got in this House for workers this year. It is Supplementary Order Paper 155, in the name of my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway. The first two of his amendments to Part 2 have been well traversed, the functional one being one of the changes to clause 87 that provides for a new section 67E(2), which many of my colleagues on this side of the Chamber have spoken about. Basically, that does away with zero-hour contracts. I do not want to concentrate on that one, but I do want to speak to the third and the fourth amendments on Supplementary Order Paper 155 that Iain Lees-Galloway has put forward in his name.

I think it speaks to one of the concerns that the member from New Zealand First Clayton Mitchell raised in his contribution earlier on in this debate, in that the fact that we have got a clause that does away with zero-hour contracts is good—technically, we cannot do that—but it also, I think, tightens the noose to prevent employers from essentially doing the same thing by any other means.

The part of Supplementary Order Paper 155 that I want to first look at is, again, a change to clause 87. The amendment replaces new section 67E(5) with a new passage that says: “an employer and an employee who is remunerated for agreed hours of work by way of salary may agree that the employee’s remuneration includes compensation for the employee making himself or herself available for work under an availability provision.”

That is one way that I think Supplementary Order Paper 155 is very pragmatic, in the way that it is saying: if you are a salaried worker and you have got guaranteed hours but you are expected to be available, then we can work that expectation of availability into your salary. Rather than wait for it to come along later, we are going to make sure it is dealt with at the very beginning of your contract that you sign with your employer, and we are going to work some more money into your contract to make sure that you are compensated for if you are made to be available and you are not asked to work in those hours.

Again, I think that is one really good way that Iain Lees-Galloway has protected workers from not being, I guess—for want of a better term—screwed by their employers by another means. We have taken away that main clause that says that we will do away with the zero-hour contracts, but there is not another loophole that the employer can go through to not pay that employee as much money if they have been asked to be available during other hours but they are not actually either warned that they are going to not work during those hours or compensated during those hours. So that is one way that I am really happy that Supplementary Order Paper 155 protects the workers out there.

The other amendment I want to talk about in Supplementary Order Paper 155 is the one that amends new section 67G. Please bear with me because I am going to read it out. I think people at home would want to hear this, because the concern, as we have heard in this House, around zero-hour contracts is real. I had one father call me on a Friday night worried about his daughter and the unfair practices of her employer at the time, which was a shop not too far away from here. If anyone wants to have a juice, it is TANK down on Lambton Quay. He was really concerned about the practices of that employer just down the road from here. He was saying: “It is not fair that my daughter is asked to be on call and given close to no hours of availability. How is my daughter expected to work, if she does not know when she is going to work or how much she is going to get paid?”.

I think that the new provision that Iain Lees-Galloway has got within Supplementary Order Paper 155, new section 67G(2) and (3), will speak directly to the concerns of that parent. He was not actually from my electorate. He called me—I do not know how he got hold of my number; he was outside of my electorate. He just wanted to make sure he could speak to someone, to tell someone in this Parliament how outraged he was that his daughter was being treated this way. I think that that is fair that he did that, and I am glad that his voice is being heard. I am glad that Iain Lees-Galloway has worked on those concerns.

I want to talk about new section 67G(2) and (3), because to do so, hopefully, will put that father at ease as he may think that there is another loophole within this legislation that will disadvantage his daughter.

Mr Chair, thank you very much for your patience and indulgence. I think it is a sad thing that these Supplementary Order Papers we are debating tonight, and these changes to clause 87, are built upon, sadly, a falsehood.

I want to join with my colleagues who say that it is lamentable that we see employment arrangements with enormous power imbalances in New Zealand: people who find that their options for jobs that people offer them that they can do are very limited, and, on the other hand, employers who find that there are, conversely, quite a large number of people who wish to do the jobs that they are offering. That does lead to the situations that we have heard about tonight and that have been reported widely in the press. If we were to very quickly try to diagnose why that is, we might say that it relates to, first of all, globalisation, the collapse of communism, better technology, bigger economies of scale in various industries, and much more competition for jobs around the world—and low-skilled jobs in particular.

Let us be very clear that if we accept that diagnosis, nothing in these Supplementary Order Papers is going to change that basic balance between the number of jobs that the people we have all been talking about have at their availability, and the number of people whom employers find trying to get those jobs. In fact, sadly, this particular series of Supplementary Order Papers around clause 87 is actually going to further restrict the range of jobs and opportunities available to precisely the people whom so many have stood up tonight to try to defend.

It is sad because there will be a couple of winners from the Supplementary Order Papers being debated tonight. The first are the people who have stood up and lauded, often in a sort of circular way, themselves and those who have helped them get this particular series of changes over the line politically, because although the conditions faced by the people they purport to help will not fundamentally change, the people championing these changes, of course, will no longer have to worry about the circumstances they have lamented tonight. They will not exist anymore, because this House has used its power to ban them. So bully for them. Will they not feel better about themselves for having done it!

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): The member will resume his seat when I stand, and I am now going to ask him to address the part and the amendments thereto. This is a detail discussion, not a broad discussion.

I would conclude my statements, because I think I am being as specific as I need to be about these particular clauses, except to say, in reference to the debate that we have heard throughout this evening, that there are real uncertainties about what will be a reasonable basis for cancelling a shift, for instance. I hope this is being specific enough now, Mr Chair. Several members, many in favour of the amendments, have gotten up and said: “Well, of course, that will have to be addressed by the courts and interpreted by the courts.” We may ask what a reasonable level of proportionality is between guaranteed hours and hours where the worker is required to be available.

There is another set of winners from answering those particular questions, who I am sure are popping champagne corks all over New Zealand tonight, and those are the employment lawyers, who will tell you that new rules always mean new opportunities to help their clients. Not only will they benefit from the uncertainty that those proposed amendments introduce but they will introduce a dead-weight loss of uncertainty into the New Zealand labour market, once again, that is most concentrated on the employment opportunities of the very people that these amendments were designed to help.

So it is a sad day, first of all for the problem that the amendments sought to solve, but also, and all the more so, for the ineffectual nature of the amendments and the dead-weight costs that they are going to introduce into New Zealand’s labour market by introducing new uncertainty, sadly all necessitated by a political cop-out. Thank you.

It has been a while—thank you, Mr Chairman. I would like to speak to a clause that I actually do not think has been addressed in the debate at all so far this evening, and that is clause 86A of the bill—not something that is going to be amended by any of the Supplementary Order Papers this evening. What clause 86A does is it amends section 65 of the Employment Relations Act, which relates to the form and content of individual employment agreements. It amends section 65(2)(a)(iv), which says that an individual employment agreement must include “an indication of the arrangements relating to the times the employee is to work;”. That is a very weak statement about having the actual hours that the employee is going to work included in their employment agreement.

Going back to when we first were trying to think of ways to address the issue of zero-hour contracts, some amendments around that particular clause of this bill were actually what we initially started working with. What clause 86A does is it actually adds some new words to that clause, so it will now read that the individual employment agreement must include “any agreed hours of work specified in accordance with section 67C or, if no hours of work are agreed, an indication of the arrangements relating to the times the employee is to work;”. That is considerably stronger than what we have in the current legislation, although if I had my way we would probably strengthen it a bit more than what we have got.

What we have now got is a much stronger indication—really a much stronger hint to employers—that the default position in employment agreements ought to be that hours of work are included. The hours of work should be agreed between the employer and the employee, and those hours of work should be included. Later in the bill, new section 67C(2), in clause 87, says that “hours of work includes any or all of the following: (a) the number of guaranteed hours of work: (b) the days of the week on which work is to be performed: (c) the start and finish times of work: (d) any flexibility in the matters referred to in paragraph (b) or (c).”

I think about the dispute that is going on between Bunnings and its employees who are members of the FIRST Union, and that is all around this matter. It is something, I guess, finer than the zero-hour contract issue: it is the issue of being able to mutually agree what their days and hours of work and their start and finish times should be. What Bunnings wants to do is basically to be able to dictate what those are. At the moment that is mutually agreed between the employer and the employee; Bunnings wants to shift that balance of power to the employer and away from the employee.

Although these changes in the legislation certainly take us in the right direction and give a much clearer indication to the employer that those hours of work—those start and finish times—and the days of work ought to be in the employment agreement, it does not say that they must be. In fact, actually, the amendment that I would have liked to see would not have said that they must be, but that, where practicable, they should be, to make it absolutely clear that that is the default position for employment agreements, particularly individual employment agreements. Collective employment agreements will have this sorted, because unions will bargain that for their members. It is the individual employment agreements, where people are having to bargain for themselves, that really concern me. Although this is stronger—and I am pleased to see any strengthening, no matter how incremental it is—we could have gone further.

I will be watching very closely to see what the impact of the changes introduced by clause 86A will be: how those actually work out in practical terms and how they are implemented. Certainly, if we do not see the response from employers that I am sure the Government also hopes to see from these changes, then we need to look at something a little bit stronger than what we have in there.

I would also like to just briefly speak to Denise Roche’s Supplementary Order Paper 151, because I think Denise Roche is the only person who has spoken to her Supplementary Order Paper so far.

I would like to just address some comments to Mr Clayton Mitchell’s Supplementary Order Paper 150. I believe, as a member of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): No, no. I do not think you want to yet. I think you want to wait until we get on to Part 3. All right?

Right. Thank you.

I would like to speak to Denise Roche’s Supplementary Order Paper 151, because I do not think anybody other than Denise Roche has had a chance to speak to her Supplementary Order Paper. I particularly want to speak to her proposed amendment to clause 89(2), which is to delete new section 130(1C).

Section 130(1C) has to do with the wages and time record-keeping. Keeping good wage and time records is really important, particularly for people who are salaried and whose salary is, effectively, very close to the minimum wage, because if those people end up working more hours than their employment agreement indicates that they are supposed to be working, there is a very real risk—and this does happen—of people actually ending up earning less than the minimum wage. They work more hours, do not get any more pay for it, and end up earning less than the minimum wage.

I appreciate that there are amendments in the bill that are designed to address this issue, but Denise Roche has raised the issue of section 130(1C), which says that “an employee’s usual hours include any reasonable additional hours worked in accordance with the employee’s employment agreement.” So that is actually leaving the door open a little bit to saying that an employee’s usual hours actually include any reasonable additional hours—just a few extra hours here and there, and they are reasonable, and they probably often happen, or they often happen under certain circumstances. It does just leave the door open a little bit to the exact kind of exploitation that the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety and the Government are trying to clamp down on with the other parts of clause 89. So I agree with Denise Roche, and Labour will be voting to support the deletion of section 130(1C) from clause 89.

It seems contrary to the purpose of clause 89 to have section 130(1C) included in there. Yes, that probably means a little bit more record-keeping for some employers, but I think it is the kind of record-keeping that is actually valuable from the employee’s point of view, because it is the kind of record-keeping that helps us to prevent exploitation of workers, and I think that is worth doing. I appreciate that getting the words right around this has, again, been something that the officials have taken great care over: to make sure, for instance, that for the chief executive officer of ANZ—who, let us face it, is nowhere near in danger of being on the minimum wage—there is not loads of record-keeping having to be done around his or her hours.

But we do need to make sure that the people whom we are trying to support—the people who we are trying to make sure are prevented from being exploited—are genuinely protected, and that we do not leave loopholes. Let us face it. What we are doing with Part 2 of this legislation is closing a series of loopholes that were exploited by bad employers and resulted in zero-hour contracts.

So let us not leave any more loopholes. We sometimes do that by error, but in this case we have noticed one and we can get rid of it. I will certainly be supporting Denise Roche’s Supplementary Order Paper in that regard.

I move that the question be now put.

No, I did not hear it—there is no point in moving it if no one else is going to call. I am going to put the question anyway.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 154 in the name of the Hon Michael Woodhouse to Part 2 be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 151 in the name of Denise Roche to clause 87 be agreed to.