Fair Pay Agreements Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Fair Pay Agreements Bill.

💬 SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Fair Pay Agreements Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Workforce Committee to consider the bill.

This one’s for Mele and Malia and all the other cleaners who keep our offices, our schools, and our hospitals clean and hygienic. It’s for Jason and Wa’el and the security guards across New Zealand who work day and night to keep people and property safe. It’s for Connor and Muwela, and all of their colleagues across retail who have kept us all supplied with food and goods during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s for Morris and the thousands of bus drivers who keep our cities and our towns moving. It’s also for the major employer who told me last week how proud he is of his cleaning workforce, and how much he wants to end the race to the bottom so that his team can have fair pay and conditions and his sector can have a sustainable future.

The global pandemic has reminded us of the value of much of the work done in our communities that has been undervalued for too long. We’ve gotten through COVID together, and as we build back better, it is time to deal with some of the longstanding inequalities that have been exposed.

For 30 years, the critical work and contribution of Kiwis performing some of the most essential work in our country has been systematically undervalued. I ask this House why the cleaners who keep us in this Chamber healthy and safe should not have wages that allow them to live in dignity and their whānau to have security. I ask this House why the bus drivers who serve our communities up and down New Zealand should not have hours of work that enable them to participate fully in family and community life. I ask this House why aged care should not be a sector that attracts skilled and caring Kiwis through decent, sustainable pay and conditions. The answer is that for 30 years, our employment relations system has embedded low pay and conditions in a race to the bottom in many of these sectors. This isn’t necessarily about employers deliberately doing the wrong thing; it’s the inevitable consequence of a system that has incentivised competition based on low labour costs.

Almost exactly 31 years ago in this Chamber—and it’s here in the Hansard from 1991—we were told in the debate on the Employment Contracts Act that a highly deregulated market and the end of sector-based bargaining would improve New Zealand’s labour productivity. It did not. We were told that the wealth would trickle down. It did not. We were told that workers would not see their living standards reduced, but for many of them, they did.

Fair pay agreements (FPAs) are about creating a new, modern, sector-based bargaining system that supports fair, safe, and productive workplaces. The model is built on international evidence described by the OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs as the positive benefits that a level of sector-based bargaining can have in labour markets, but, most importantly, the FPA Bill is a uniquely New Zealand solution to the race to the bottom problems that I have described. The model was initially developed by a tripartite working group chaired by the Rt Hon Jim Bolger, whose careful and balanced work on this issue I acknowledge today.

FPAs will enable good-faith bargaining to occur at the sector or occupational level, and will establish a minimum floor for conditions in that area. In the same way that the Government establishes a minimum floor like the minimum wage or statutory sick leave, employers and unions will be able to negotiate and agree a bespoke minimum floor relevant to the issues in their sector. By establishing a floor underneath pay and conditions, competition based on low labour costs will be disincentivised.

Our 30-year experiment with a low - labour-cost model has not worked. Many workers have suffered, but, equally, our rates of labour productivity have been amongst the worst in the world under that regime: lower than the OECD average, and lower than many countries that have a level of sector-based coordination for worker terms and conditions. A model based on wage-based competition is focused on the wrong things. FPAs will incentivise competition based on the right things. The quality of goods and services offered, investment in skills and training, R & D innovation—these are the things that will drive productivity and prosperity for our country.

Inherent in this bill, we recognise that wealth creation is a shared endeavour. It takes the contribution of both those who provide capital and those who provide labour. Why shouldn’t there be negotiation, compromise, and shared vision for how a sector progresses and how the fruits of growth are shared, given that both parties have that stake?

The bill before the House provides a carefully worked through framework for how the FPA system will function. Some of the key design details include provisions for the initiation and bargaining of fair pay agreements. There will be two pathways for a union to initiate bargaining for an FPA: a representation test based on employee numbers, or a public interest test. Employees will be represented by unions and employers will largely be represented by employer associations. The process will be guided by the good-faith obligations that are well-known and established in the existing Employment Relations Act (ERA).

Once an FPA has been negotiated, it will need to be ratified by both employees and employers. This ensures that there will be support from both the industry or occupation for the new minimum terms of the FPA, and there will be a particular weighting for small businesses in that ratification process.

There will be certain topics which have to be negotiated as mandatory terms in FPAs, including base wage rates, ordinary hours, and penalty rates. Other topics such as flexible working conditions, redundancy, and health and safety will need to be discussed, but will not necessarily have to be agreed as part of a final FPA. FPAs will be longer-term agreements of between three and five years that provide parties with a platform for dealing with the long-term issues in their sector. The bill also provides for a dispute resolution system built off ERA provisions with access to mediation and, where necessary, determination so that fair pay agreement negotiations do come to a conclusion and provide certainty for all parties.

I acknowledge that this is a significant reform of our workplace relations system. Some will have questions and concerns, and I will continue to engage on reasonable issues that are raised. I know that the select committee will also work hard to hear submissions, and I have every expectation that they will recommend improvements to the bill at the next stage. Vigorous debate is good, and different views are to be expected on an issue like this, but I strongly urge debate based on the substance of the bill and debate focused on the labour market failures that we are trying to fix.

Sector-based bargaining is not an extreme approach to these issues. It is common around the world, including in our nearest neighbour. Australia has had a sector-based bargaining system in place for over 40 years, contributing to higher wages and an economy where average annual labour productivity growth has been 46 percent higher than New Zealand’s since 1991, when we abolished sector-based bargaining.

The arguments that FPAs and sector-based bargaining stand contrary to good productivity growth are false. Debate based on misinformation and scaremongering will take us nowhere, and it will be seen by New Zealanders as a desperate smokescreen to block progress.

So I want to be very clear about some of the disinformation that has already been raised by members opposite. Firstly, there is no compulsory union membership under FPAs. Existing voluntary unionism rights are affirmed in Part 2 of the bill. Secondly, there is no recourse to industrial action by employees or employers during FPA negotiations. Any claim to the contrary is factually false and is designed to scare rather than inform.

If the parliamentary Opposition want to create memes of me in an awesome 1970s shirt and bloviate about Soviet Russia, then so be it, but I think that New Zealanders deserve and expect better, given the issues at hand. I say further to members opposite that there is an honourable, conservative tradition in this country of supporting security and stability for people and communities. Much of that was ripped away by the tidal wave of reform 30 or 40 years ago. Both this Government and the previous one have had to try and deal with some of the social damage that resulted. FPAs, at their core, are about rebuilding the social contract, valuing work, and creating the stability and security that allows our communities to thrive.

This bill fulfils a Labour manifesto commitment that was democratically campaigned on at the 2020 election. It’s a piece of legislation that is in the best traditions of reforming Labour Governments that improve life for working New Zealanders and move our country forward, and it is in the best traditions of the Kiwi values of a fair go for all and working together. This bill will help stop the race to the bottom. It will enable good-faith bargaining at the sector level to overcome inequalities that have developed over the past 30 years. Through FPAs, we will build a more inclusive economy in which employees and employers can table their aspirations and negotiate as equals in good faith to solve problems and chart a fairer, safer, and more productive future ahead.

As I said before, this bill is for Mele, Malia, Jason, Wa’el, Connor, Muwela, and Morris. It is for those workers who help make our country, but who have been left out in the cold. It is about the dignity and the value of their work in our society. It is about fairness. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and it’s my pleasure to speak on this bill. This legislation, introduced today, is not about fair pay; it is about the Government imposing mandatory union deals on Kiwi workplaces. Well, let’s not make any bones about this: there’s no choice involved, either for workers or for business operators. The misnamed fair pay agreements will be imposed on our workplaces.

And we have this Minister opposite who has this dark view of the world—in the past 30 years, since 1991, what we have seen in this country is a consistent reduction in unemployment from the high levels of the 1970s and 1980s, when we had huge parts of the workforce unemployed in a rigid labour market situation, and, since that time, New Zealanders have enjoyed a jobs boom and the opportunity to have employment, to look after themselves and their families. And labour market flexibility has been one of the key elements of that success. So the key question for us is whether these mandatory union deals will make our economy stronger, and our clear answer is no: it will make our workplaces less agile, less flexible—at the very time when they need to be. More than ever. That’s why National opposes this legislation, why the overwhelming majority of business owners oppose this legislation, and why, I believe, New Zealanders will be concerned when they learn about how this proposed so-called fair pay agreement works.

Now, this bill arrives at a time when New Zealand is facing very significant economic challenges—perhaps the biggest for a generation. I mean, if we step back, globalisation is in retreat, if we look around the world, with a rise of protectionism over the past few years amongst big trading powers, those restrictions accelerated by the COVID restrictions over the past couple of years, and turbocharged by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Globalisation and, sadly, democracy, is in retreat. And what that means for a small trading nation, like New Zealand, remains unclear, but our prosperity has been underpinned by relatively free trade. And so the risks to our prosperity, right here, right now, are very significant. And that prosperity that we, as a country, have built over the past few decades is at risk. So now is not the time for economic complacency; it is the time when we should be focusing on building our economic strength so that New Zealanders have the opportunity to thrive and succeed.

And we’re also facing the highest inflation in 30 years, where the price of goods are increasing at twice the rate of wages, so New Zealanders are battling to stay still. We also see a net outflow of migrants to Australia already happening, and that flow will increase significantly. So these are real, substantial economic challenges. And what is the Government’s response? Nothing but adding costs to New Zealand businesses, with no concept of the implications for our competitiveness. And there’s nothing major to say about impediments holding New Zealand back. We see a Government focused entirely on redistribution of our wealth through higher benefits, through higher minimum wage, through strengthening the unions, through the mandatory union deals—all of which may have their place at times, but they have nothing to say about how we grow the economy so that we can pay for it. And that is why middle New Zealand is worried and have very good reason to be.

This bill is indulging an ideological wish list that this Government came into government with. The return to national awards and the move to strengthen unions—despite no empirical evidence whatsoever as to either the problem or the policy response. Let me quote directly from Treasury and what they had to say about these fair pay agreements, so-called: “There’s been minimal identification of empirical evidence for the problem or the policy response.” But they did note that the proposed system could make structural changes to the labour market and have negative effects on worker conditions, employment, and productivity. So the rationale for the mandatory union deals is as clear as mud. And that is what we’re seeing from this Government. It’s consistent with Labour’s desire to centralise control and not trust New Zealanders to make decisions about themselves and what’s in their own interests. It’s certainly not based on evidence, and certainly no evidence that it will increase New Zealanders’ wealth, living standards, and prosperity.

So a question I have for the Minister is how does a return to national awards across industries and occupations help New Zealand businesses become more agile, more flexible, and competitive in a rapidly changing workplace environment, and, in a rapidly changing global environment? How will it lift our national income? And we will never get very clear answers on that.

So let’s just go through the bill and what it does. Are you sure it brings in this framework for industry-wide or occupational-wide minimal-employment terms? So any eligible union can initiate the bargaining process if it meets a test of only 10 percent of employees in the proposed coverage, or 1,000 employees—but 10 percent, yeah—or a public interest test based on low pay or bargaining power; so that, basically, could be it. So maybe you don’t even have to make it to 10 percent, I don’t know.

Then the chief executive of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment decides whether the process goes forward—so it can be either industry, so it could be all, I don’t know, transport workers, perhaps, or it could be all aged-care workers, or an occupation—it could be all sales workers, I don’t know. So that’s what we’re going to find in the next little while. And if you happen to be minding your own business operating a cleaning business up in Hokianga with five employees, you might not know anything about the process, you might not know if it even exists—you’re doing your own business, trying to make a living, and then, suddenly, whoomph, you’re part of a process and you just have to accept whatever comes out of the other side.

Now, if sides aren’t represented by an eligible union, or the two sides that are supposed to get down and do all this bargaining on a national level—there’s supposed to be a union side and a business side, or employer association. Now, Business New Zealand told the Government to clear off—“We don’t want to be involved in this and we don’t want to be part of a thing that we don’t agree with.” And so two days after the Minister introduced this legislation, that he’s been working on for four years and has been something that he’s dreamt about every night for a long time—two days after he introduced that, he brings in a change saying, “Oh well, actually, the bill that I just introduced didn’t do the job and so here’s a proposed change which is to bring in a backstop so if Business New Zealand or nobody else turns up on the employer side, well, we’ll just go straight to the Employment Relations Authority and they’ll make a determination.”

And so, basically what happens, if you do manage to find two debating sides, they get together, they argue, they negotiate, then it’s put to a vote on both sides, and if it loses that vote twice it ends up before the Employment Relations Authority. This, by the way, being an institution that takes about 300 days, on average, to come to a conclusion on any of its particular topics at the moment, so it is hardly the most efficient organisation in the world. And so that’s going to be interesting to see how they cope with this. They have enough trouble with personal grievances; just imagine how they’re going to deal with the imposition of fair pay agreements.

But, anyway, this organisation comes along, makes a determination, and that determination is binding on all businesses and employees who happen to be caught within it, even though, like I say, the cleaning business up in Hokianga might know nothing about it, have had no engagement with the process, who had never heard of it, doesn’t even know what a fair pay agreement is, and, all of a sudden, they have to have the same terms and conditions as everyone, or else. Now, there’s some talk of regional variation, but who knows what that means?

And so we’re left with this imposed fair pay agreement, so-called, what we would call a mandatory union deal, imposed on the business and the workers, on the workplace, and there we go. And so the conclusion is, well, how’s that actually going to help? How’s it going to make people’s lives better? Well, we, on this side of the House, believe that it’s best for people who are actually in the workplace, who go to the job, go to the business, know what’s going on in their community, to make arrangements that suit them, within the broad context of what we have, which is, already, one of the highest minimum wages in the world, lots of terms and conditions that have been set in order to protect the vulnerable. And New Zealanders, as a long tradition, have been concerned to do that. But this bill just adds another layer of mandatory control and rigidity, which is the last thing we need as a country.

So my final point is this is a time when New Zealanders need to be focusing on building our strength and, instead, what we’re doing is adding costs, and complication, and rigidity to our system.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I stand in support of this Fair Pay Agreements Bill and I think the former Minister Goldsmith and I have one thing in common: we should be using this point in time on building on our strengths and our competitive advantages in creating the sort of economy that is going to last us into the short, medium, and long term.

Before I came into Parliament, I was involved in business: large New Zealand corporates—Fletcher Challenge and Carter Holt Harvey—a small private but highly successful company involved in international trade, and the director of strategic developments in a large State sector organisation. I have Master’s degrees in law and management and forestry science. In fact, my forestry science thesis was in commerce and, as Minister for Small Business and Minister for Economic and Regional Development, it is my clear focus and driving challenge to lift productivity in this wonderful country, because we have so much to offer in this beautiful country that we go to the world both for those who live here, and those who seek to visit.

But there is one thing we don’t have, one thing that we have not managed to crack over the years, and that is a high level of both labour and capital productivity or multi-factor productivity that other small advanced economies have. We have, over the years, overvalued capital and undervalued labour. Instead of investing in plant and machinery to drive productivity, to proactively increase investment in innovation, that will drive and create world-leading companies, we have based our growth on labour. In fact former finance Minister Bill English stated that our global competitive advantage was our cheap labour. No more. Our global competitive advantage will not and cannot be built on the back of working New Zealanders earning low wages under poor conditions. Bill English’s vision was almost 19th century in its ambition and is the reason why economic growth under the previous Government was based on immigration, not innovation.

Every single management case study of innovative successful companies from around the world, let alone this country, highlights the culture created by owners/employers. It highlights that success isn’t built on the back of workers but achieved by management and employees standing side by side, working together to drive the type of growth, innovation, and productivity required to help deliver a strong, sustainable economy that will help deliver success in the short and medium and long term.

Good employers—and I freely acknowledge that the majority of New Zealand employers are good bosses—have nothing to fear from fair pay agreements. Most, I think we will find, will be able to use the provisions to benchmark what they are doing and how they are treating their staff, and implement in a way that actually adds value both as an employer and as a company. The former speaker, Minister Michael Wood, highlighted some case studies themselves of people who come into the place that we call almost home, that we call “our house”, and work incredibly hard and yet do not earn enough to be able to live with dignity. That is not fair.

As a businessman, I completely understand and absolutely buy into the value created by fair pay agreements and cannot understand why the National Party would be so against, would be so opposed, certainly at this point in our economic history. But then again, I was actually on duty in this House when the Hon Paul Goldsmith, National’s workplace relations spokesman, spoke on the Matariki bill. During his contributions, he spoke against increases in sick leave for workers—in the middle of a pandemic! He spoke against increases in the minimum wage. He wanted to get rid of the labour weekend holiday, and he spoke in favour of tax cuts that would give someone on the median wage $2, however someone on over $180,000 a significant windfall.

I genuinely believe that Chris Luxon, the Leader of the Opposition, misspoke when he called people “bottom feeders”. I genuinely believe that he is a better person than that, and he misspoke and he probably regrets that. But this is not the way, nor is it the rhetoric, to increase productivity or profitability. It is the tired words and out-of-date ideas from a previous time, and we need to do better. I refuse to buy into the National philosophy that workers are just numbers on a spreadsheet to be manipulated and characterised as mere factors in production to be minimised and traded in a way that is unacceptable to most. Former Prime Minister the Rt Hon Jim Bolger actually bought into the need for us to make change. And when I hear Paul Goldsmith talk about unions in the way he does, it makes me wonder what he actually truly believes about workers and their rights.

The thing I love about unions is that they are the voice for those who have not got a voice. We all know, in the vast majority of companies, whether they be large corporates or small businesses, that there is an imbalance in power between those who own or run the company and those who work in the company. And the thing that unions do is they represent workers in a way that addresses that imbalance of power. They provide a level of fairness which is crucial to a highly functioning workforce and a highly productive economy.

As mentioned, good employers have nothing to fear from fair pay agreements; in fact, quite the opposite. Great employers should welcome the ability to benchmark their practices against industry best practice. In fact, what the good and the great employers will do and, as mentioned, I acknowledge the vast majority of New Zealand employers—certainly every single employer that I have met—is a good employer who wants what is right for his or her workers and his or her company, and, in fact, the country. But what it will stop is, in fact, that race to the bottom that Minister Wood spoke about. It will stop the cowboys coming in and creating an environment which is uncompetitive and untenable to the vast majority who live in our communities.

Most of us are here are mothers or fathers, and the thought of our children working in companies in a way that they were exploited is just not tenable, let alone our friends, our family, our colleagues, and those who live in our communities. Those who exploit their workers are on notice that their practices will not be tolerated, nor are they acceptable to the vast majority who live in our communities. The norms and practices reinforced by fair pay agreements are those reflected by our diverse communities. No longer should people have to work in a way that is unacceptable to the majority of New Zealanders and, to be honest, no longer acceptable to the vast majority of our trading partners either. As global consumers become more engaged, more educated and more enabled, they will want to know that they are buying products from companies that employ their workers, that treat their workers, in a way that is reinforced by these fair pay agreements.

We have a brand that is “100% Pure”. It is a brand enhanced by our Prime Minister, who asked us all to be kind, and we bought into this. In fact, those words resonated around the world to the point that we were acknowledged in 2020 and 2021 by a number of world-leading and reputable organisations as the country that dealt with COVID better than anyone else.

💬 Dr Shane Reti: How’s that going now?

It is now time that we also live this brand, and I think it’s going incredibly well, Dr Reti, because we have one of the lowest death rates in the OECD and, as a medical practitioner, I am astounded you are asking that question. But that aside, it is time that we lived this brand, we heeded the call in all our workplaces, across every industry, across our country. Our competitive advantage will not and cannot be built on low wages. Low wages is not a plan for the future, nor a strategy for prosperity. And disrespecting workers is not a way to treat other human beings. Fair pay agreements will ensure that workers are treated well and are treated fairly, that employers understand their obligations and, once again, we can take our place in the world as a wonderful place in the world to do work and to work. That is only fair and right. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. If ever there was a piece of legislation that clearly and decisively separated the differences in terms of philosophy and ideology between the socialist left and those of us on the centre-right of this Parliament, it’s this piece of legislation. This is nothing more than an ideologically driven piece of payback for the trade union movement. When my colleague Paul Goldsmith says that—

💬 Hon Michael Wood: Point of order, Madam Speaker. The Standing Orders are very clear that it is out of order for a member to suggest that other members might be behaving in a way as reflected by the member’s comments about payback just now.

💬 Chris Bishop: Speaking to the point of order, Madam Speaker. The member is correct, except for the fact that in the previous two parliaments his former ministerial colleague the Hon Phil Twyford made repeated references to the National Party doing particular things because of kickbacks, and paybacks, and other unsavoury allegations, all of which were allowed to stand and none of which were ruled out of order.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): I will allow the member to continue his speech.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. So the fundamental philosophical and ideological difference is one that sees—on this side of the House—people as individuals, as intelligent, smart people who can, and should, negotiate deals with their employer on terms and conditions that they negotiate directly with their employer. And over the last 30 years or so, that’s exactly what we’ve had. But on the other side of the House, on the socialist side of the House, people are considered to be little more than units of productivity to be herded, cajoled, and coerced into group actions that they may not want to participate in.

So for those of us who are of an age where we remember the bad old days before the Employment Contracts Act of 1991, we recall how bad what used to be called “national awards” were. And this mandatory union deals piece of legislation does exactly that. It takes us back 30 years, to a time when most New Zealanders thought we had well passed and would not be ever returning to. Because for the last 30 years or so, New Zealanders had a nimble, easy, flexible employment relations framework that has enabled employers and employees to come to terms with each other in a way that encouraged businesses to succeed and to thrive.

This piece of legislation is a road block to that continued nimbleness, that continued entrepreneurialism, and the handbrake will be well and truly put on—mostly small—businesses around New Zealand. Because this is a piece of legislation that seeks to pigeon-hole everybody, every business, every employee, into a pre-set, determined view of what their role in our economy should be.

I’m wanting to focus a little bit on some of the historical detail that has caused us to be debating this piece of legislation today. It goes back to the very formation of the parliamentary Labour Party. And those people who have studied their history will understand and remember that, actually, the trade union movement was formed towards the end of the 1800s, at a time when workplace reform was desperately needed. And the trade union movement around the word—not just in New Zealand, but in Australia, in the UK, in North America, and other parts of the world—developed to achieve those outcomes. But very quickly, just as in other parts of the world, they found that if they were to have true influence on decision making, they needed a role in a place like this—in a parliament. And so, out of the trade union movement was birthed the parliamentary Labour Party. Those connections are deep, they are historical, they are political, and they are of course financial as well.

So since the Employment Contracts Act 1991 and the abolition of compulsory trade-unionism, a couple of interesting things have happened. And one of the most interesting things is that New Zealanders have realised that, for most of them, trade unions are simply irrelevant—for most New Zealand workers, trade unions are simply irrelevant. Very few New Zealanders these days are members of a trade union, and so over that 30 years, of course, union membership and union financial strength has diminished considerably. And then join the dots as to why it should be that a parliamentary Labour Party in 2022 would want to wind back the clock to be putting through legislation, using it’s absolute majority in this Parliament, to ensure, actually, that unions have a continued future. Well, if unions were so important, New Zealanders would have joined them; they would have done that voluntarily. Actually, it’s something about like 14 percent of New Zealand employees are members of trade unions, and the vast majority of those are in the public sector. In the private sector, the percentage is very low indeed.

So for those who are younger than I am in this Parliament, and there are a few, but out there in the workplace, there are a whole lot of people who are, say, under the age of 40 who simply don’t remember the bad old days of demarcation disputes—which were not disputes between employer and employee, but actually demarcations between unions scrapping over which unions should have the right to represent a particular employee at award negotiations. Now, there’s nothing in this piece of legislation that prevents demarcation disputes occurring again. Yes, there will be, in this legislation, a provision that prevents employees and employers going to an industrial action dispute, but nothing about unions fighting over—in a demarcation way—who is going to represent a particular group of employees. And so we’ll be back to that. So there’s a whole group of younger people who don’t remember any of that bad old days stuff, but are soon going to be back in it.

And what happens for those younger people? Well they’ve grown up and are now used to a level of workplace democracy that is good, that is proper, and that is working very well for New Zealanders, and they don’t want to be cajoled and coerced into a template pigeonhole model that is of the sort that this legislation seeks to provide. And so, for most younger New Zealanders, they’ll be scratching their heads and saying, “Why am I being forced to negotiate—well, in fact, to lose my right to negotiate with my employer? Why is it going to be that decisions about my terms of employment, my hours of work, my rate of pay, and the conditions upon which I’m employed—why will it be that I no longer have a say in those matters and that those matters will be decided by big unions and big business, probably in a closed room in Wellington somewhere?” The only difference between that kind of scenario and what used to happen 30 years or more ago is that the smoke-filled rooms will no longer be there. But in secret meeting rooms behind closed doors, pay and conditions and terms, under this piece of legislation, will be negotiated by faceless people who don’t represent the interests and the best prospects for those people who they are purportedly negotiating for. They will be representing the interests of either business or unions, and there’ll be very little concern for individual employees.

And so the whole term “fair pay agreement” is just so wrong, on every level. The really proper term should be “mandatory union deals”. But there’s going to be fightback, because this Parliament will pass this legislation and it will do so on the back of the current Government’s absolute majority. But I want to give fair notice to the current Government, most of whom won’t be coming back in the next Parliament—fair notice to those few that will return, but a re-elected National Government will repeal this legislation. A re-elected National-led Government will repeal this legislation. So that’s fair notice to the employers, to the businesses, and to the employees around New Zealand who are fearful and worried about a trip back in time, a time that was less enlightened, a time that was less flexible, a time that was less nimble, and a time that—in workplace relations—was less democratic, less fair, and was dominated by big unions and big business. That simply doesn’t reflect a modern, future-focused employment framework, and it’s not going to be suitable for New Zealanders as we strive to make our way in a competitive world.

So mandatory union deals are going to be a feature of the New Zealand framework for a very short period of time. It’s my absolute hope, and I know that my colleagues on this side of the House will be working even harder with legislation of this sort to ensure that there is a change of Government at the next election so that this sort of old-fashioned, tired, draconian legislation—and, to use the words of the Hon Stuart Nash, “tired words and out-of-date” thinking which represents this legislation—will be repealed absolutely as soon as possible. And New Zealand employers, New Zealand employees, can take heart that that help and assistance will be forthcoming to them just absolutely as soon as possible, and that the use of a blunt instrument like an absolute majority based on nothing more than ideological principle and a relationship with—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! Order! The member’s time is up.

E Te Māngai o te Whare, tēnā koe, otirā ki ngā mema katoa o te Whare, tēnā tātou.

[Greetings, Madam Speaker, and greetings to all the members of the House.]

Wow—it’s a great day. It’s an absolutely great day. Pleased to take a call on the Fair Pay Agreements Bill on behalf of my constituents of Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, of which my auntie—and I come from a long line of freezing workers, who always told me that the freezing workers were the backbone of Aotearoa New Zealand. I’m proud to take a call on a bill that continues the modernisation of our industrial relations employment standards in Aotearoa New Zealand. We are 2022, not 1991. So I am pleased. Can I acknowledge the work of the Minister Michael Wood and his advisory group in getting this bill before us.

It’s unfortunate that we’ve had two very senior members on that side roll out the same old argument—“anti-union”. They didn’t address the issue around productivity and lifting wages and valuing staff and workers in the employment space—none of that. I listened intently to two very senior members—nothing. It’s a travesty that they actually haven’t understood the bill or come to this House and put up ideas around how they would lift productivity, how they would lift wages, and how they would respect workers in the workplace, because this is exactly what this bill intends to do.

Look, another story I want to talk about in my acknowledgment of my freezing works whakapapa was pre-1991, where there were national awards. Everybody in my household, from my father to my mother to my siblings to my first cousins to my auntie, all worked in the freezing works and were part of the national awards. What happened in those times was productivity was very, very high. Wages were very, very high. In fact, people bought their homes by merely working in the freezing works, because that enabled them to look after their families. Communities were born out of national awards. The participation of employees on behalf of their unions derived benefit in the homes of the people that this bill is acknowledging. For too long, that side have ignored the contribution of our workers across the nation in the fabric of this country.

That’s why I’m standing in support of something that gives hope to many of our workers, be they freezing workers, be they shearing gangs, our cleaners, or our front-line workers, who have done it extremely tough in the last two and a half years. This bill is sending a signal to them that they matter, that we on this side care for them. But also the involvement of those progressive employers who continue to do the right thing by their employees—and I’m talking about the living wage, and the fact that they are acknowledging the contribution. Has the sky fallen in for those employers—has the sky fallen in? No, the sky does not fall in when you are doing a fundamental piece of legislation that looks after a key component of businesses and workplaces up and down this country, and it is in this Fair Pay Agreements Bill.

Of course, it’s the first reading, but it’s interesting to hear that side—and I’m hoping that the following speakers on the Opposition side will actually come to the party, will come to the debate, on how their side will address productivity and wage lift and how they will protect the roles of their workers. In fact, the former speaker talked about “It’s already happening”—it’s already happening. Mr Goldsmith talked about voluntary unionism. These are slogans. They’re not ideas of how you are going to lift productivity and wages and look after and treat workers fairly in this country. They haven’t offered that. Their two key speakers have not done that.

So my message to the ones that are following: get up and say what you would do so that when we take this bill out for full consultation, people will actually see what this side, what the Government, is putting up, and by comparison what that side is putting up. Rubbishing unions and rubbishing that “It’s already happening” and keeping flexible labour market practice—and we know for many employees, they do not have a voice. They do not have the ability to sit across from their employer and bargain a deal that’s in their best interests.

What’s happened to the collective responsibility? We’ve seen this during COVID, where the nation has come together as one to look after each other. But what we hear on that side: no, it’s up to the individual. If you’ve got a stronger, bigger voice than anyone else, you’re likely to get a better deal. But what about the many who do not have that ability? What happens to their rights and their ability to advocate—“Well, if you give that deal for that person, why can’t I get that deal?” What is wrong with sharing a collective agreement that all workers in the workplace benefit from? So this bill is attempting to do that by putting minimum provisions during the negotiation—[Interruption] There you go. We’ve got an ACT member yapping over there. I’m looking forward to ACT’s contribution to this debate. I want to particularly hear what they are going to do around lifting productivity and wages. I bet you it’ll be some empty slogans that are, in my view, lazy around the lack of research into what this bill is actually doing.

So I’m proud to be on this side of the House, who put our workers at the forefront of a modern industrial employment system here in Aotearoa New Zealand. It is well overdue. It is to return the ability to acknowledge that national awards pre-1991—and I’ve got to say, for my sins, I was actually working in the Department of Labour as a very young—yes, I might have been 10; OK, I was a bit older. In the Department of Labour, we actually had to do the policy work on the Employment Contracts Act. I can tell you that many, many of my colleagues were very upset that we were changing and decentralising the system out, and the flexibility. To my analysis, for the time I remained at that department, it did not lift productivity. In fact, it spiralled many, many workers up and down this country with the introduction of the Employment Contracts Act.

But here we are. It’s a better day. It’s a new day. We’re now in 2022, and we are acknowledging the Fair Pay Agreements Bill in this first reading. I too look forward to it going to select committee. I too want to give the message to all those employers and employees: please take the time to read the bill. Don’t listen to the easy slogans that the Oppositions are throwing at it. Have a look at the bill. See yourself in it. See the benefits it will derive your business as well as your staff and workers that work in the workplace, because this is what this bill does.

I’m really pleased, like I said, to belong to a party that does put the people at the forefront, but I too want to add my support in the economic development space that we need to have a modern workforce that acknowledges not only the cost of the labour to do the job but also the value around discretionary effort. When you go into a workplace where you are valued, not just in terms of what you get in your weekly pay packet, but when the practice and the values of that employment and that employer values you as a person, you will always go the extra mile—you will always go that extra mile. We have not valued discretionary effort and the contribution it makes in the economic sense of that business. It’s now time that for some of us, on this side, we talk about and acknowledge the discretionary effort and the value it returns to the business, to the employer, at the end of the day.

It’s a great day. I’m proud to stand in support, and I commend the Fair Pay Agreements Bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m pretty stoked to get to stand up and take a call on this piece of legislation, finally. Sitting in this part of the bench, we’re not always in agreement with the Government, but I can tell the House this evening that tonight we are 100 percent celebrating this piece of legislation.

The Green Party believe that at the heart of a fair society, one of the key cornerstones are decent wages, stable jobs, and safe working conditions. All of those things have been significantly under threat in this country for the last three decades. We’ve seen international evidence—and I’ve heard from the National Party members this evening about how great and how much better things are now than they were before the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Things are so much better! We are so prosperous now—so prosperous—that the incomes of the top 1 percent have doubled in that time period—prosperous! But the disposable incomes of the poorest 10 percent have flat-lined, basically, since the 1980s. The money, rather than trickling down, has funnelled and been pulled up to the wealthiest, to the point when 50 percent of the collective wealth in this country is less than 1 percent of the wealth held by the top 1 percent. Like, I can’t even get my head around those numbers. It has been an absolute transfer of wealth from the majority of us to the minority of us, and that is the prosperity that the National Party has been talking about and they are fighting to protect this evening. That is not something the Green Party wants to support.

We believe that our collective effort, the benefits of it, should be shared across those who are doing the work. And the international evidence is really clear: strong unions and collective bargaining frameworks are the best tools for delivering decent pay, stable jobs, and safe workplaces. And they are our best tool for reducing inequality as well as, not at all magically, improving performance and productivity. We’re being told by the National Party that the interests of working people are in opposition to productivity and collective effort. It is just simply not true. The reverse is true. Since the 1980s—and we’ve got to a point where now less than one in five working people are covered by a collective contract in this country, compared to the 70 percent that it used to be, and before those radical right-wing reforms of the 1980s and 1990s.

I just want to also challenge the idea that’s been put forward by the National Party that this is left versus right. This is radical right-wing versus, actually, the majority of the rest of the world, and including conservative right-wing people like the Hon Jim Bolger, who led the working party that came up with this proposal. This is not right versus left; this is radical thinking versus the rest of us. The Greens are very happy to stand by the restoration of decent conditions, because those reforms from the 1980s and 1990s that took a sledgehammer to our social structures and employment laws resulted in more people being in precarious work; more people being on low wages; the voices and experience of working people—and most of us will have had this experience—not being valued or heard in their workplaces; and poor decision-making happening as a result; an entrenched, what I would describe as a, health and safety crisis, where our rates of workplace injuries and deaths are so much higher than comparable countries; where productivity has not kept pace with other countries.

And we heard from the Minister how productivity growth in Australia, where they have sector-based bargaining, is 46 percent higher than it is here since we got rid of sector-based bargaining, and where employers have been competing actively on wages, not service, not innovation, not product—on wages; where a previous National Party Prime Minister was proud to say that we were competing internationally on the benefit of our low wages—on the benefit of our low wages. And the consequence of that has been two out of five children living in poverty in this country were in working families where parents did not and do not now have the time to spend with their children that they need to, where they don’t have the time to engage in their community, to return to their homes to reconnect to their marae, and do not have the time or the money to be able to keep a roof over their head. We’ve seen increased transients and poor educational outcomes as a result, and we’ve seen a crisis of mental health. These things are not disconnected; this is the result of policies that undermine our sense of collectivity as a country, that undermine the voice and the value of working people in our country.

And through the pandemic, to me, it’s been incredibly obvious that the country has come to a realisation that, actually, things have been a bit out of whack, that these essential workers—there’s cleaners and security guards and bus drivers and retail workers—who have put themselves and their families’ lives on the line on the daily to look after us have been undervalued. We’ve seen such strong support for an increase in wages to ensure that they are all on a living wage. But we’ve had no mechanism as a country to be able to do that, because we have no sector-based bargaining model. This will enable us as a country to say thank you, to enable those employers and those employees to be able to work together to come up with some decent wages and conditions to say thank you, that essential jobs in a pandemic are essential jobs every day that we need to be valuing the work of every person in this country, and that exploitation has no place in a decent society.

So the Greens are so pleased to be supporting this bill. I will say there will be some things that we will be looking at in select committee that we want to explore and maybe see if we can strengthen. So, for the Greens, we know that the Government has other work going on around contractors, but penalties will apply for employers who try to avoid fair pay agreement coverage by misclassifying employees as contractors. This is a really important area. We do not want to have any system that enables employers to create more precariousness by moving people into contracts out of employment to avoid this. And we need to make sure that the work around the rights and employment conditions for contractors goes alongside and is connected to this work.

We also would like to see the restoration of the recommendations of the fair pay working group around what should be mandatory in agreements. The current proposal is that it’s wages, hours, and overtime. The initial proposal was that it also include redundancy, flexible working, skills and training, and leave. And we would also want to see health and safety because of the crisis that we have in our country around health and safety in our workplaces. So that is something we’ll be exploring.

We’ll also be exploring the denial of the right to strike, because the Green Party are very, very proud to continue to support the importance of the right to strike. And we’ve seen the impact on Allied Health workers recently on them being denied that right to strike, and how it protracts and extends wage negotiations when that right is taken away. We want to make sure this works, though we do support the right for determination.

Anyway, finally, it’s a bloody good day and we’re very happy to support this.

I rise on behalf of ACT to speak on the first reading of the Fair Pay Agreements Bill, and there are certainly going to be two sides in this debate. It will come as no surprise that ACT will be opposing this bill and making it quite clear that it will be gone after the next election.

This bill amounts to unionism by stealth and will simply make it tougher for businesses who have struggled to keep trading through a one-in-100-year pandemic, and who continue to struggle with the never-ending costs imposed on them by this Government. New Zealanders are free to join a union if they want to. It shouldn’t be forced upon them by Labour’s blind ideology. It’s anti-democratic and anti-freedom. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has warned against fair pay agreements, saying they’ll reduce productivity and make it harder for employers to grow, especially coming at a time of another minimum wage increase, collecting the youth tax, and another statutory holiday.

What we heard from Minister Wood earlier on today, intentional or not, was just not correct. The “race to the bottom” rhetoric is very disingenuous. The fact is that after declining through the 1980s, employees’ pay and conditions have improved substantially since the introduction of the employment contracts agreement in 1991. We’re going to constantly hear from Minister Wood about how fantastic these agreements are in Australia, but everyone, especially hard-working employees, should be very sceptical. Despite what Jan Logie just said, union membership in Australia and throughout the world is declining, as workers prefer to be treated like adults who are more than capable of working out their own conditions for employment.

This legislation will take us back to the 1970s, as has been alluded to a couple of times this afternoon. I was in my teens in the 1970s, and they were great times. The Benny Hill Show was one of the most watched TV programmes. How do you think that would go in today’s times? Banned from TV—we’ve moved on. Caning and getting the strap was common in schools. I think it’s widely accepted that it probably didn’t do much of us too much harm, but I don’t think it improved productivity that much at all. We’ve moved on. Computers were something we saw on The Jetsons, and now people even work from home—unheard of back then.

Unions were also dominant in the lives of many New Zealanders in the 1970s, but not for a good thing. I grew up with a father who was a staunch union member. He was a marine engineer on the Cook Strait ferries, and I vividly remember the constant talk about “the award,” which at the time seemed like a union version of the Bible. Strikes always seemed to occur just before the school holidays—maximum leverage to get their demands. But even as a 12-year-old, I couldn’t help thinking that going on strike because your beds weren’t being made just wasn’t quite right.

I know that a lot of the current Government have not experienced this time but it wasn’t all roses. Does the Government seriously believe that the fair pay agreements would’ve helped New Zealand get through this one-in-100-year pandemic? We’re in an environment now where employers and employees work things out to cater for their own situation. Sealord has a parentship from 9 till 2 so their workers can work while their kids are at school. COVID showed us and continues to show us that we need a flexible workforce, one that can pivot—that’s a popular word. Or is it so popular now? Because these fair pay agreements will make things much more difficult. How do you think organising workers to work from home would have gone with the bureaucratic nightmare of fair pay agreements?

This Government uses COVID every time it suits their agenda when their incompetence is shown and the blame needs to be laid. Poverty: blame COVID; homelessness: blame COVID; inflation: blame COVID. Just today, the Prime Minister said that these are trying times. Grant Robertson said they’re extremely challenging times. But from the start of this pandemic, they’ve kept attacking businesses. Two weeks into it they put the minimum wage up. It’s just bizarre. Hard luck—just deal with it: “COVID doesn’t matter, you guys. No excuse.” And we find out today that Michael Wood wanted a higher minimum wage—just amazing. Let’s make the minimum wage $50 an hour and everyone’s problems will all be over! The Government must realise that businesses that do survive are doing so in spite of the Government, not because of it. The small business Minister should hang his head in shame. When Business New Zealand refuses to have anything to do with this bill, you’d think it would be cause for some concern.

New Zealand’s workforce has improved from the 1991 introduction of the employment contract agreements, and fair pay agreements are a backward step. One of my employees said to me last week, “What else are they going to do to business. Do they want us all to end up on the dole?” Good employees will suffer. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard a leader from the Public Service Association recently say that they didn’t believe in performance pay, meaning everyone should get the same. Hard-working New Zealanders should be very concerned about this legislation. Everyone benefits from your hard work.

ACT believes that New Zealanders are more than capable of talking to employers and working out pay and conditions that suit both parties and, most importantly, are affordable. The mechanisms in place in employment contract agreements to support employees have worked fantastically over the last 30 years. Labour just doesn’t understand business—profit is a dirty word; productivity a misunderstood concept. This bill will go to select committee and we’ll get lots of submissions. Consultation will be seen to be done, and it will be very interesting to see if this will be another example of Labour’s very specific definition of consultation—namely, “Thanks. Now we’ll do what we want.” For the sake of hard-working New Zealanders, ACT will be campaigning to dump 19th century compulsory unionism immediately after the election.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a real privilege to be able to take a call in the first reading of the Fair Pay Agreements Bill. Now, it’s clear, as we’ve heard, that parties across the House seem to be agreeing that there are cost of living pressures on Kiwis, and global economic pressures making it even tougher for many to make ends meet. Since we have come into Government, in fact, we’ve lifted wages and done what we could to reduce those pressures for Kiwis, with many measures, including, of course, recently, the 1 April ones, increasing support for 1.4 million New Zealanders. But, as we always say, there’s more to do.

So we were elected to take action on Aotearoa’s long-term challenges, and that includes making sure that we don’t leave our lowest-paid workers behind. For a very long time now, working life for so many working people has been really tough. Many have struggled to make ends meet, and it’s not a matter of just working harder, because New Zealand workers already work some of the hardest and longest hours in the OECD, but they’ve also seen their share in the economy decrease over the last decades.

The problem—and we heard that from Minister Michael Wood very eloquently earlier—is that we had the start of the Employment Contracts Act in 1991, and, of course, what we saw then was an individualised bargaining framework as a model to supposedly come to higher productivity, but that model has absolutely failed. While the economy grew, we saw that growth was not being equally shared amongst employers and employees. So productivity grew and workers worked harder and longer, but their wages and salaries didn’t keep up. Over that same period, we saw good employers being forced out of the workplace by bad employers because there was this continued drive for flexibility and cutting costs, and we had inequality grow.

We refer to this as the race to the bottom. It has been mentioned already several times by several speakers, but the race doesn’t actually benefit anyone. It doesn’t benefit the workers. It doesn’t benefit existing business owners, because those are the ones that are forced into bad practices by other employers—bad employers—just because everybody supposedly needs to compete.

Now, we all know people affected. They have been mentioned today. We see them every day in our supermarkets. They are our security guards keeping us and our property safe. They are the cleaners in our offices making sure that we have healthy and safe environments to work in. They are the care workers looking after our vulnerable, and the drivers on our buses. Lifting the wages of our most vulnerable working people has to be a priority for New Zealand.

Sector-wide pay agreements have the potential to distribute the wealth that New Zealand produces more fairly, and, while they do that, we can then protect businesses that actually want to compete on quality, on innovation, and on investment in their people. When companies can only win a contract by putting in the lowest bid, the impact of competition on wages and labour costs is borne by those workers.

People have mentioned hard-working employees and how well they’ve done under this current system in place. Well, let me mention some of those hard-working employees like Leava, a solo mum of three working 70 hours - plus a week. After three years, she is still on a casual contract, earning minimum wage. She had to give her eldest child to her mum and gets a babysitter to look after the youngest one when she does the night shift. She hardly ever sees her family because, when they are awake, she is asleep, and when they are asleep, she is awake and working. She said she feels like a failure as a mum, and her kids miss out on family time. Leava recently had her cleaning hours cut, but at the same time her workload remained the same.

We have Jess, a solo mum of a six-year-old. They live with her mum in a small apartment. She works in the supermarket. She starts at 1 a.m., she works till 8.30, then she goes and takes her child to school, and then she goes back and works till 10 o’clock. The business recently had to let some staff go, but the work remained the same, and when anyone on the shift is sick, they just need to work short-staffed.

Sui, a security guard, used to work in excess of 60 hours a week on minimum wage just to get by. But then one day, her contract was changed. She’s now part-time, but no reasons were given. She’s not allowed to leave the site during a shift, so that means that because there’s no toilet, she can’t drink while she is at work. She often works at car parks or in railway stations, and she doesn’t always feel safe. She’s casual. That means her roster can change at any notice, really, and she can be sent all over Auckland. She says she can’t plan anything in life, because of that uncertainty in her work. When you ask her, she describes her life as being in survival mode.

Now, these workers have many things in common. They all struggle to make ends meet. They’re too afraid to speak up, for fear of losing their job. They describe similar feelings of helplessness and increased levels of stress, fatigue, and feelings of isolation. There’s little job security, no training, and no career progression. These workers are all in industries that share the same problem: they are trapped in a race to the bottom.

It’s important to know that many employers would actually like to offer fair terms but they’re unable to, because they get undercut by competitors that are offering only the bare minimum. So look at supermarkets, for example. Countdown is unionised, but Foodstuffs has little unionisation because how it is structured is as franchises. Countdown workers are told by their employer that they have to compete against the lower-waged competition, and then that pulls the whole sector down when it comes to terms and conditions. Connor says about that that “A fair pay agreement across the supermarket industry will do a fantastic job at setting a level that can’t be undercut and allowing, as a result of that, for better conditions, better wages, and better livelihoods.” But poor working conditions in these jobs lead to higher risk of injury at the workplace, and then you get reduced quality of work and service, increased sickness, and reduced motivation to work hard or even remain in the job.

Now, that is in very stark contrast to the fact that New Zealand has one of the worst productivity performances in the world, as the Minister mentioned before, but what we see in countries like Germany or in Australia is that it’s the opposite. But these agreements have been operating in those countries—and, in fact, in Australia—for over four decades. But Australia continues to outstrip what our Kiwi workers are getting.

So what would a fair pay agreement (FPA) do? It would enable the parties—the unions and companies—to negotiate a set of industry standards, a decent floor that upholds pay and conditions and covers things like pay, training, qualification, and thereby it would uplift the overall capability of that whole industry. FPAs, by putting a floor on the price of labour, encourage competition on the quality of services, of product, and of innovation, instead of focusing on competition on wages and labour cost. Morale, staff retention, and skills would all be improved, and these jobs that we talk about as low-skilled would actually become sustainable careers.

But, actually, it is much more than just jobs; it is about protecting the basic human rights of workers: the right to be treated fairly and with dignity, to feel respected, and to feel valued. When people are engaged, there’s positive energy, and that then translates to higher discretionary effort. As my colleague Minister Whaitiri said, it’s going the extra mile—you get better productivity.

So the key is that people in these industries are best placed to tell us what they need to have fair, decent, and secure work. They should be able to sit around the table with the employer and negotiate the things that they need to achieve fair and safe working environments. It’s about giving workers a voice in the setting of their work conditions.

When we talk about giving workers a voice, it reminds me of the time that I worked for Air New Zealand, and I was president of the flight attendants’ union and, later, head of aviation of E tū. In 2013, with the arrival of a new CEO, we began to work with High Performance High Engagement (HPHE). It’s a workplace democracy model where people closest to problems in the workplace work together to find long-term solutions. I know that the Air New Zealand CEO at the time really became heavily invested in the process. In his words, he wanted to get away from the Punch and Judy show, because the HPHE process was a way of ending decades of distrust and hardball industrial relations.

That Air New Zealand CEO for five years worked collaboratively with unions, giving workers a voice: unions, workers, and the company sitting around the table, working on solutions. That CEO is now the current Leader of the Opposition, and if the National Party has turned the page, as the Mr Luxon has said before, then this is Mr Luxon’s prime opportunity to show that. But having listened to some of his senior speakers, senior members of the National Party, I am not holding my breath.

As I’ve said earlier, we all seem in agreement that it’s tough for many Kiwis to make ends meet, and National have frequently mentioned the difference in wages between New Zealand and Australia. So, rather than spouting slogans and rhetoric, now is the time to actually do something about it, because let’s be clear that any party that votes against FPAs is, in fact, voting against higher wages.

I would like to thank Minister Michael Wood for the leadership and determination shown. FPAs will make a huge difference to New Zealand workers. As chair of the select committee that will work on this bill, I’m looking forward to receiving and hearing the submissions. It’s therefore a great privilege to commend this bill to the House. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

The next call is a split call. I call the Hon David Bennett—five minutes.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I find it quite disgusting and reprehensible what Labour and the Green Party are doing here today. They are actually going out there to the most vulnerable workers in our community and saying to them, “Look at us. We’re looking after you. This is a plan for you.”, when it will do the exact opposite. This is a failed policy that, basically, sent the country bankrupt in the 1970s and it was the Labour Party that actually turned that around by having the reforms of the mid-1980s. We can’t wind the clock back and say that those reforms were wrong; they were followed around the world. And the economic growth and success New Zealand had in the last generation has been a direct result from those changes.

It really gets me that the Labour Party comes in here and does these speeches about how they’re there for the most vulnerable workers and “Look at us. We’re going to look after you.” What it’s actually going to do is actually hurt the most vulnerable workers, because what’s going to happen from this is there’ll be less production in New Zealand, there’ll be higher costs, and the people that actually take the hit on that occasion are the most vulnerable workers.

There will be inflation out of this. They’ve just said it’s about raising wages. That means inflation. OK, you want inflation at a time that you’ve got more inflation? The only people that really get hurt are the ones that have no assets, low incomes, and are stuck at the bottom. That’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to hurt the very people that all these speeches are saying you’re trying to help.

Then what is going to happen next? It only needs 1,000 workers in one industry to set this up. This enables compulsory unionism in areas that the Government hasn’t been able to get into. Michael Wood’s eyes just raised then. He was on TV this weekend saying he wants to get rid of the contractors in certain cases—don’t you? We know that’s the plan. This is part of that plan. They want to take away the competitive pressure of the New Zealand economy. They say competition doesn’t matter. Competition is bad. That’s what we’ve heard from all these speeches. Well, let’s go out in the world and sell our products and say on them—and put a little logo saying—“We don’t compete.” How are we going to sell those products? Do you think they’re going to buy our milk and our other products just because we say we don’t compete?

💬 Anna Lorck: Quality.

Quality—quality? Quality is about price and value. If you take up the price because you’re doing this, then you’re going to artificially destroy the New Zealand economy. It’s what happened in the 1970s. The rest of the world has thrown it away. They do not believe in this because they know it does not work. This is blind ideology from a Labour Party that has to pay back the unions. We all know that the Labour Party is now dominated by the union movement. It’s not the Labour Party of the old that actually represented a mix of New Zealanders; it’s a Labour Party that the unions control, they fund, and they own it. And this is the payback to the unions.

💬 Hon Michael Wood: Point of order. For the second time in this debate, an allegation has been made that members of this side are owned and controlled by a force outside of this Parliament. That is in direct contravention of Speakers’ rulings.

💬 Hon Todd McClay: Point of order, Mr Speaker. Speaking to the point of order. Just for clarity, perhaps the member could tell the House the selection process for Labour MPs where unions are sitting there selecting.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): I remind the member that is not a point of order and—

Well, let’s look at the selection of the leader. It’s done by the union movement.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): The member will just be seated. So I just remind the member, and I’ll ask him to withdraw and apologise because he was accusing him—he’ll know what he was saying. I’ve asked him to withdraw and apologise.

What was I accusing—Mr Speaker, what was the problem?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): I’ll ask you to withdraw and apologise and if you don’t—

I withdraw and apologise.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): Thank you.

What other business is their leadership determined by an organisation, is funded by an organisation, and doesn’t have any control over that organisation? Maybe that’s the world we live in where there’s no competition. There’s this ideological place that lasts.

This is dumb policy. It’s going to hurt the most vulnerable, and the Labour Party and Green Party should be disgraced and disgusted in the way that they use these people in these speeches to try and promote plans and policies that are only for their own personal gain.

It is a great privilege to stand here today and bring the worker’s voice to this Chamber. I’m very, very proud to be able to speak for a few moments on the Fair Pay Agreements Bill. It’s really interesting hearing previous speakers talk about blind ideology and, when we ask the OECD what they think about combined sector- and enterprise-level collective bargaining, they kind of like it because they know it helps with productivity. They know it is associated with higher employment, better integration of vulnerable workers, and less wage inequality. They also see it as linking to skills and training pathways with the aim of increasing productivity and sharing its benefits.

This isn’t about ideology; this is about evidence-informed best practice. This is about building a modern, future-focused industrial environment that will support processes where an entire sector can come together and have a really good debate about resolving issues that face the sector. This supports employees and employers. We have seen that this is especially important. I come from Taranaki where we are constantly grappling with the challenges of a just transition, and we have seen sectors come together in arrangements like the workforce development councils where they realise they’ve got to collaborate to resolve industry-wide issues, and fair pay agreements are a really great way of enabling a bright future for our employees and our employers. It will help to improve productivity, sustainability, and inclusiveness.

We see that the productivity is improved, not just by improving wages and goodwill. We see reduced staff turnover. We see workers being seen as an investment, not a cost. We constantly hear from the other side of the House about the cost to business of employing labour. When do we hear about the investment in our workers—making sure that they are safe, that they can turn up to work and have a day’s work with dignity, and get a fair pay? These are fair pay agreements, not outrageous pay agreements. This is about investing in our workforces.

We know—we know—people say we shouldn’t be talking and bringing the voices of workers to the House. Well, I’m going to bring a couple of voices for you; some of our security workers. So, when you talk to Jason, he says each company is cutting each other to the lowest cost: “We get the scraps.” How is it the worker gets the scraps? Wa’el: “I get really anxious and very stressed sometimes before the shift even starts, because I go without being provided with proper gear, without proper training, and without proper support.” These workers are often working alone at night. They need support and training to make sure that, when they are confronted by people who are anxious or angry or drunk, that they’ve got the skills to be able to handle that—that they’ve got a radio so they can get some backup. It is absolutely not just acceptable but more than appropriate that workers are looked after to have a safe day at work.

I’m really looking forward to this coming to the select committee and starting this process of collaboration. This is how we build a future-focused, nimble, responsive industrial environment that will help us to meet the significant, seismic challenges that we are being faced with—with climate change, with the changes in the global economy. When we go to select committee, we will be hoping that employers and employees turn up in good faith, and help us to ensure that this bill—that we’re trying to build something that is a sophisticated and nuanced industrial environment that works for everybody, that everyone—employers and employees—deserve nothing less: fair pay, fair conditions, that work for everybody. It isn’t “workers win and employers lose”. You look after your worker, you invest in your worker; everybody wins. You want productivity ideas? Talk to the workers about that. I recommend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou katoa i tēnei rā nui, rā whakahirahira mō ngā kaimahi o Aotearoa.

[Greetings to everyone on this very important day for workers in New Zealand.]

It is my absolute pleasure and honour to speak at this first reading of the Fair Pay Agreements Bill. To start with, I want to emphasise two key points. The first is that this is a significant change that will bring decent working conditions and fair pay to workers in industries throughout New Zealand. It would be and will be the most significant change to our industrial relations framework since the Employment Relations Act in 2000, and it further reverses the devastating changes for working people brought about by the Employment Contracts Act in 1991. But the second point is that minimum standards or the basic level entitlements that the fair pay agreements will bring are not new to New Zealand. Most of the standards that we take for granted and accept as part of a civil and democratic society are already minimum standards, like sick pay, like the minimum wage, like the right to take a personal grievance. So fair pay agreements, while they may be revolutionary for those that they will cover, will not result in fundamental changes for the people that they don’t. These changes are about workers and fair and decent conditions for working people. It shouldn’t be threatening. It’s just fairness. The clue is in the title of the bill.

Of course, it will be up to sectors in industries to determine where fair pay agreements are established, but a group of workers that has often been discussed as some that may benefit from this proposed legislation are bus drivers. Bus drivers are part of a mature industry in New Zealand, and fixed costs are very similar across operators. This has left terms and conditions as the only real point of competition and differentiation between operators. Penal and overtime rates have gradually been removed from bus drivers, and with them, workers control over their own hours and conditions.

I wanted to mention a particular bus driver: Morris. Morris has noticed that his colleagues have struggled after the removal of penal rates to make a decent wage and to spend time with their families. He says—and this is a quote—“Flat rates just mean drivers work more and more hours to make ends meet. They’re on split shifts. They can be doing 14 hours a day, but not getting paid for these hours. It leaves people with no time for their families and it creates fatigue.” We know we will need bus drivers like Morris more and more in the future as we move towards a different way of travelling, to meet our climate goals. We know that public transport is essential, and we have seen this through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Morris deserves fair wages and good working conditions, but the members opposite are labouring under a misapprehension if they think a single bus driver is able to negotiate his own or her own terms and conditions individually with a strong employer. That is just not the reality for these working New Zealanders. It is not correct that this occurs regularly within our economy or our society. As I said, Morris deserves respect and dignity at work, and this should be the experience for all New Zealanders, and fair pay agreements can deliver this.

We also know, when you increase wages for people on lower incomes, this money is more likely to be spent creating greater prosperity for our economy. Fair wages are not only the right thing to do, they are the road to prosperity for all. And this is not a new idea. In fact, in 1938, the then Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, told an enthusiastic audience, packed into the Wellington Town Hall—and I quote—“No one can say that reduced wages will help trade or bring about prosperity. When workers have money in sufficient quantities, trade, industry, and production are buoyant, but the moment that wages are reduced, the very reverse is the case.” Labour still stands for fairness. We did then and we do today. Labour stands for high wages and for a strong and prosperous economy. We stand against those who would drive down wages in the race to the bottom, as has been mentioned, or who would take the labour of workers and leave them unable to spend time with their families or take care of their children.

Fair pay agreements will not take us back in time as alleged. This is a modern solution to a modern problem of low wages and low productivity, and is a further real and substantive step to the realisation of the dignity of workers and the recognition of working people’s huge contribution to our society. This bill is the culmination of years of work in the labour movement and union leaders such as Helen Kelly and John Ryall. The Employment Relations Act reversed the worst of these changes, but it is not enough. Collective bargaining these days, even for multi-employer, multi-union collective agreements, still only covers those who work in places that are covered by these agreements. And it didn’t stop the race with no winner: the race to the bottom. So workers are still vulnerable, and this is why we need this legislation. Employers cutting wages and conditions to try and win contracts pits too many New Zealanders against each other. Instead, we want a clear and open pathway to better conditions, to higher wages for more prosperous and a fairer society.

I, at this point in my speech, want to reflect on the legacy of one particular union leader and my friend and mentor, Helen Kelly, who sadly passed away in 2016. Her commitment to working people and fairness did not die. It is here in this bill in front of us. In her excellent book Helen Kelly: Her Life, the journalist and author Rebecca Macfie reflected on Helen’s work towards what we now know as fair pay agreements. She mentioned—and I’ll summarise what Rebecca has in her book about this time in Helen’s life: “She put a prestigious amount of work into policy that would drive minimum wage and conditions across whole industries. This was informed by her work [Helen’s work] at the International Labour Organization, where she had collected a bulging file about wage and bargaining systems from around the world. She was particularly interested in regimes—common in Europe—where agreements were negotiated with large employers and extended across entire sectors, establishing uniform standards of pay and conditions. She was also aware of international research that showed that there was a clear link between income inequality declining and declining rates of collective bargaining.”

By 2011, Helen had drafted up a new law providing mechanisms for industry standard agreements. But this wasn’t like the old award system that we had in New Zealand. Under her proposal, workers could be covered by the industry standard, but they wouldn’t be forced to, so as long as their terms and conditions were no worse than the industry standard. The proposal in this bill is not identical to what Helen had proposed, but the concept and the objectives are the same. I wish Helen was here to see the work that Michael Wood and others have done on this proposal prior to the 2020 election, and to be listening or even participating in the debate today.

In 2020, this Government was democratically elected with a strong mandate from New Zealanders to implement fair pay agreements, and this is what we will do. Before Helen died, I remember Helen saying to me, “How can I stop fighting?” And she never did, and we won’t either. Fair pay agreements are also Helen Kelly’s legacy. On this side of the House, we will always keep fighting for decent working conditions and fair pay for people like Morris and the thousands others like him that will benefit from this legislation. However, I do think if Helen was here, she wouldn’t care for the praise. She wouldn’t care for the accolades. She would most likely tell us to get on with it and implement the change that needs to be made to ensure more workers in New Zealand have decent conditions and the fair pay that they deserve. So, with that, I proudly, and without hesitation, commend this bill to the House.

I’d just remind members, if they are going to read a speech, don’t do it so I can tell they are.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I was going to read my speech until you said that; now I won’t. It’s very easy to confuse passion with anger, and, in this case, many speakers in Government who have spoken on this bill have seemed angry, not because of injustice but because of an ideology of “We are the Government. We know what’s best. We got a great big mandate at the last election on this one issue alone”—that I think was mentioned once for about 3.5 seconds on the campaign trail—“and don’t worry. We are the Government. We can do anything we want with our majority, and just watch us: we will.”

Members opposite said they look forward to this legislation coming before the select committee. Well, here is a prediction: they won’t make a single meaningful change from anybody other than those who agree with them or are members of a union. Anybody that comes forward from the business community, a small business in New Zealand that has a relationship with their workers, who looks after their workers, who invests in them, who pays them well, who doesn’t believe the Government needs to be involved in that relationship—members opposite, with their majority on the committee, won’t listen; won’t make a single change.

This piece of legislation creates mandatory union deals around the country. In fact, it’s worse than that. It mandates union deals around the country.

💬 Hon Member: It does. Of course it does.

Now, what’s happened from the very back of the Government benches is a whole lot of noise there. Any moment now we will hear from them. “But this is a fair pay agreement.”, they will say, and they know that because it’s in the title.

Well, many, many years ago in Africa, a president of a country—President Mobutu—ran Africa. He said it was democratic and it wasn’t. They had one of the worst economies in the world. Mr Mobutu every year would decide how much people were paid. The country was called Zaire. Then one day the world started putting pressure on him to say “But you aren’t democratic and this isn’t working, you deciding by yourself.” Why can’t businesses and employees have a relationship where they can negotiate and decide how they will work together? Do you know what President Mobutu did? He changed the name of Zaire to the Democratic Republic of Congo. To members opposite, here’s a hint: if you have to put “democratic” in the name of your country, you’re not democratic. If you have to put “fair” in the name of a piece of legislation when it comes to pay agreements, it is not fair to anybody other than making it easier for your union mates. That’s it.

So the unions find it hard to go around the country and to get New Zealanders to sign up and pay them a fee, and if they don’t get those fees, it’s very hard for them to provide money by way of campaign funding to the Labour Party. So together, when they were in Opposition, they came up with a plan and said, “What we should do is go back to the time”—and we heard this from a Green MP—“when 70 percent of the country was covered by bargaining rounds, which meant every year the Government would have meetings for a moment with the sector, and for hours and hours and hours with the unions, and they would come up with the pay rates and all of the conditions, and they would announce it from the Beehive, and it would be rubber-stamped and put everywhere.” Well, this is what this legislation will do: take us back to the days where union-mandated agreement and deals are rolled out for employees and employers who have a perfectly good working relationship and they don’t want the Government involved.

Think of it this way. We have restaurants and bars up and down New Zealand who have struggled as a result of the restrictions this Government has placed upon them in the last two years. We heard yesterday the Prime Minister say, “Actually, because we haven’t invested properly or sorted out the health system, those restaurants and bars—actually, we’re staying in red. They still need restrictions on them for at least another month.” They’re doing it tough. They’re having to bear the costs of the Government’s inaction and not actually when the Government hasn’t sorted out the health system. All right? So it’s very hard for them. They’ve taken on debt. Many of them have closed.

Here’s another guarantee: 10 percent of that workforce, or 1,000 workers, will be approached by union officials, who will get them to sign a paper, and restaurants and bars will be one of—probably not the first, but one of—the first that will have to go through these mandated union deals legislation, the so-called fair pay agreement. For the restaurants in downtown Auckland, who continue to struggle, there will be a decision about how much they have to pay and what they have to do when it comes to leave and whether or not, if there is a 10-minute rest break, the employer and the employee can reach agreement to take it now or take it later or finish 10 minutes early. Well, actually, under the Government, they won’t allow that. The Government will make an announcement of what is happening for the whole country when it comes to the payment for those restaurants and those bars.

But the legislation has been changed slightly to say, “No, no, there can be regional differences.” So if you drive in your car south of Auckland and you get to the bottom of the Bombay Hills and you see the sign that says you’re entering Waikato, there could be different rules set by the Government for there—another area where the restaurants and bars have done it tough. It makes no sense at all for the Government to be that involved in the business of employees and employers that is working well and doesn’t need Government involvement in it, with the exception that this is a Government that thinks it knows best. They’ve brought their ideology here. That passion that was anger is because these guys have always wanted to do this, and they will take New Zealand backwards.

Just think of it this way. Think about what’s happened to the New Zealand economy—putting COVID aside for a moment—over the last two years. We’ve lost the America’s Cup. That’s a billion dollars, when the American cup is held here, for the tourism sector alone. It’s gone. It’s out the door. Do you know why? Because the Minister pledged just $31 million and a whole lot of other stuff in kind that would have to happen anyway, and that deal walked, and it’s overseas now. Thirty-one million dollars—that pledge is less than the Government spent on the Auckland cycle bridge they’re never going to build, which was $50 million.

Think about The Lord of the Rings that’s no longer made in New Zealand by Amazon, the tens of thousands of jobs over a decade or more that will be lost. Think about the high number of people that are on benefits in New Zealand today, more than actually before COVID, yet we have record low levels of unemployment. Think about the cost of living and how hard it is for working Kiwis to get ahead—not because of what they’re paid, because there are people that are earning $80,000 or $90,000 a year that can’t afford to live. They too have to choose between paying their rent and their bills or feeding their kids, because of the huge cost increases that have been piled on consumers in New Zealand through businesses who have had to pass it on, because this is a Government whose ideology says, “We know best.”

If there is a problem to fix here—

💬 Hon Member: Who wrote these talking points?

Who wrote the talking points? I’m writing these myself, and therein lies the issue—therein lies the issue. These guys over there don’t actually care about hard-working businesses. They don’t care about New Zealanders that are working that are struggling. They want to drive this ideology through, and they’re disguising it behind that word “fair” when it is anything but fair. If they actually, this Government, want to do something about employees who are not being treated properly, focus on them alone and the employers who are not treating them well. Don’t come up with a blanket rule that says, “Whether you are a good employer or not or you have a good relationship with your employee or not, we are coming after you because we are a Government that knows best.”

The final point here is actually when this was raised before the last election and in this House previously, the Prime Minister backtracked very quickly. She said, “You don’t have to worry. There’ll only be one or two industries that probably would be part of this.” Well, if that was the case, why would they need to put in place a rule under this legislation that says the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) would be the gatekeeper of which fair pay agreement negotiations go ahead unless they were concerned that they would be swamped by five or 10 or 15 of these all at once? There would be no reason otherwise for MBIE to do that, to be the gatekeeper. What that suggests to me is when the Prime Minister stood in this House and she was on TV saying to the public, “You don’t have to worry, because this is going to be fair and there will only be a few.”, she either hadn’t been advised properly by her advisers or she wilfully knew she wanted to kick it for touch so they didn’t have to talk about it before an election.

This will harm the New Zealand economy. It won’t help workers the way that this Government says it will. If there’s a problem to be fixed, they should actually focus on fixing that problem rather than burdening hard-working small businesses of New Zealand who treat their workers very, very well. It is not a good piece of legislation. We will be opposing it and we will be repealing it when we get to Government.

Salaam alaikum, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a final call on this historic bill, but, boy, the hatred and the disrespect for working people. When you trash unions, you’re talking about 300,000 workers, Mr Simpson, across the country—

💬 Hon Todd McClay: Point of order. I know it’s not for me to say, but I didn’t hear you as the Speaker say that once to this member.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): I apologise to the speaker.

But none the less, for us on this side of the House, it’s an historic day—we will be celebrating it.

There is an old Māori whakataukī which says: “He rākau wāhi rua he kai nā te ahi.” [A tree split in two is food for the fire: unity is strength.], which means, if workers are united, they will win, improving working conditions. If they are split into a number of small groups, they will lose working conditions.

And this brings us to why collective bargaining in this country is so slow and ineffective. Why is the Government forced to do the heavy lifting around lifting minimum wage when, historically, this country has relied on collective bargaining to carry out the role of the wage distribution. The answer is in the report of the Fair Pay Agreement Working Group, chaired by the Rt Hon Jim Bolger, who said, “New Zealand sits at the far end of the decentralised spectrum. Although our current system permits voluntary sector bargaining, in practice most bargaining takes place at the enterprise level, although there is some bargaining among groups of employers within a sector, through a MECA.” multi-employer collective agreements (MECA) are mainly found within the public sector—mainly in health and education. Workers have tried consistently over and over again to bargain, but they failed. They failed, but this bill is going to improve that.

The introduction of this bill makes the same point as Mr Bolger did. While New Zealand’s labour market has some strengths, it also has a systematic weakness. This includes a significant prevalence of jobs in inadequate working conditions, low wages, and low labour productivity.

The leader of the National Party has publicly spoken about how low-paid workers are having it tough, but he won’t say whether he supports the minimum wage increase, and he doesn’t have any plans on whether he allows workers to be able to negotiate fair wages. The National Party considers low-paid workers who clean our toilets, our offices, keep us safe, drive our buses, look after our elders, bottom feeders—what a shame. The National Party have been beating drums about the cost of living in the last few weeks over and over, yet they are opposing any major step that’s designed to help make low-paid workers lives easy. What a hypocrisy. The National Party has no plans.

Labour supports the regular increase in the minimum wage and through our fair pay agreement system is taking pressure off large minimum wage increases by getting industry, employers, and unions to negotiate their minimum working conditions in low-paid industries. Fair pay agreements will allow employers and unions to be able to negotiate minimum conditions that are appropriate for their industry and to help good quality employers from being undermined by ratbags who pay as low as they can and treat their workers as expendable. Our workers are not expendable; they’re valuable.

At the heart of this bill are people—real people, hard-working people, but yet for years and years undervalued, underpaid, and overlooked. Our security guards, our cleaners, our bus drivers, supermarket workers—these are some of the hardest-working people. Every day, they go on doing 50, 60, 70 hours just to make ends meet, yet they fail because they’re not getting paid fairly.

Competitive tendering is driving down wages. This was stopped by Part 6A but then companies started tendering on the basis of putting more work into the same hours. Malia, I’m going to quote her. Malia to me is not just any worker that I have seen her story on the media, we have worked together. Malia, myself, and Mele have taken a plane to Auckland to negotiate and bargain with employers. After three weeks of hard negotiation, the only thing we got was 18c—18c. Malia said, “Every time we change the contract, it will always be our hours that will be cut down. Hours cut down, still more work to do.” And Mele: “When a contract is tendered, the new company comes in. They all come with their price. They have to cut something to make a margin of profit in there, and they look at who? At cleaners. They cut our hours, yet the work remains the same, even sometimes more.”

Malia, Mele, and many other friends today—my colleagues and the Minister mentioned many names—they are real people. They are not just a number. They are not just numbers to be dismissed or to just muck around with. They are real workers who are making a difference in this country every day, and the last two years have showed us that. While all of us stayed home, keeping safe, Malia, Mele, and their friends would go on every day and get their work done, and often putting their lives at risk and the lives of their families at risk.

And today, the Labour Party and this Government has recognised their hard work, and we have decided to put an end to the misery and the unfairness. Today, these people have a new hero. We’re talking about thousands of people throughout this country, and that hero is called the Hon Michael Wood, who in the last few months went out through the country and virtually engaged with them, he listened to them, he respected them, and, to them, Michael is their hero.

Finally, what I wanted to say is that it’s OK to disagree on things. It’s OK to say no to things, but the disrespect we have seen today towards our hard-working cleaners, bus drivers, supermarket workers, and the many more—300,000 people today have been disrespected over and over again by various speakers in this House, and that is not OK. We can do better. We can disagree, we can be political, we can disagree on things, but disrespecting the hard-working people, and their only wrongdoing is they’re hard workers—nothing more, nothing less.

Today is a good day, and I look forward to having this bill through the select committee process, which I will be fortunate enough to be sitting on with my colleagues and our hard-working chair, Marja Lubeck. And we will be looking forward to engaging with the public, with submitters, and we will be making amendments if needed—if needed. But this bill as it is is a good bill—it’s good enough. And finally, I’d like to thank everyone who contributed today, including those who shamefully insulted the hard-working people. I appreciate you. I’m not going to call you names, just like you did, but today is a good day. I highly, highly, highly commend this bill to the House.

The question is, That the Fair Pay Agreements Bill be considered by the Education and Workforce Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Education and Workforce Committee.