Fair Pay Agreements Bill

Members, the House is in committee for further consideration of the Fair Pay Agreements Bill. When we were last debating this bill, we were considering Part 7. This is the debate on clauses 130 to 163, “Finalisation of proposed agreement”, and Schedule 2, “Ratification process: number of votes for covered employers”. The question is that Part 7 stand part. The Hon Paul Goldsmith had the call. I see that he’s not here, so I’ll give the call—

💬 Hon Michael Woodhouse: He said he was not in a position to take the call—that would be a better way of saying it.

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): He’s not in the position to take a call—so Erica Stanford.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I want to move forward to a clause we haven’t discussed, but is in relation to what we have been talking about—151: “Chief executive to check whether coverage overlap exists”. Now, I want to ask the Minister four specific questions about this. The chief executive, in this clause, must take the fair pay agreement (FPA) that’s been concluded and one that is still under way and determine whether or not there is overlap.

My first question is: in this part, why—actually, in 153(2), there are two different time frames for making that decision: under subclause (1)(a) no later than 10 working days after the proposed agreement is submitted, or going back to clause 137, in accordance with that time frame, which is 20 working days. So I’m keen to know why there’s a difference there in terms of the time frames.

But specifically about this idea of overlap, as it relates to clause 151, the only thing that the bill ever talks about is there being a potential overlap of two FPAs: one that’s been concluded and one that’s under way. It doesn’t allow for any instances where that might be more than two. As we know, at the moment, the unions already are gearing up for this bill to be passed and getting under way, and so I think that the Minister might be surprised at the number of these that come through. I’m wondering what happens when there are more than two that have potential overlaps. It’s not talked about in these particular clauses. Will there be a different process than what’s outlined in this bill if there are more than two FPAs that are being negotiated or finalised that may have some form of overlap?

The other question I’ve got is around the very, very early stages of a negotiation between the parties. I guess the question there is: in order for the chief executive to determine whether or not there is overlap, how far down the negotiation would the parties have to be for the chief executive to determine that there is, in fact, an overlap? Is it something that she or he will be able to determine very early on in the process, or will it be something that comes as a result of the negotiations? I note in clause 151 here that the chief executive can request from the parties their proposed agreements that haven’t been finalised yet but are still under way. So at what point in the process would the chief executive be able to be aware that, in fact, there is an overlap? And if you do have, in the case that I was explaining before, a potential for three different agreements to have potential overlaps—they could all be at quite different parts of the process: one that was only just beginning; one that was halfway down, or close to being finalised; and one that, in fact, had been finalised. So how would the process then work in terms of identifying the potential overlaps? So those are my questions, but also around the difference in time frame.

Also, just before I finish, I wanted to go back to something I mentioned earlier, but I missed actually asking about it, and that is in terms of the exceptional circumstances. We talked about this earlier, Minister, around if there are exceptional circumstances, then the 20 working day time frame under clause 136 and clause 137 can be extended out. I understand that—the Minister made it clear as to what those exceptional circumstances might be—but then the question that I want to ask is: why is there no time frame given? Every other part of this bill has a time frame attached to it, whether it’s 10 working days, 20 working days, or five working days. This particular clause here has no time frame attached to the exceptional circumstances that might exist once there has been determined to be an overlap. I guess that that that decision could go on for an extraordinarily long amount of time, given that there’s no time frame in the bill—so if the Minister could explain why he hasn’t set a time frame in the bill for that.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I’m pleased to take a short call on this, to speak primarily to the tabled amendment in my name to make an amendment to clause 160A.

But first up, when we’ve been hearing a bit of discussion from some members—from the National Party, in particular—around the danger of unions, I want to take a quick second to celebrate the successes of the unions today. Winning against Uber and clarifying that Uber drivers are employees, which is a life-changing decision for people here as well as around the world. Power to the union, I say. And also for the Public Service Association’s win for social workers in the community towards pay equity. Evidence of the brilliance and benefit to our communities of collective organising, which is related to this bill.

💬 Simeon Brown: I hear the 1970s calling.

Cheer before your eyebrows go any higher. So back to the amendment to clause 160A. In the select committee process, we had a bit of discussion around application and effect of the fair pay agreement. And some of the discussion that was raised earlier around: how do you know which one—if there are two—to apply to?

The committee made some amendments to ensure that where at least 25 percent of an employee’s work is covered by a fair pay agreement (FPA), that employee is covered by that FPA. If two or more FPAs meet this 25 percent threshold, the FPA that covers the largest portion of the employee’s work should apply.

And the third point being assessments about which FPA applies to employees should be based on work done within a reasonable period of the date of the assessment, taking into account the employee’s particular circumstances.

We kind of went through a bit of interrogation on that in the committee, and I was alright with it. But on further reflection, I actually worry—and which is the point of the amendment that I’ve put up—that this may create a bonanza for our courts as we debate: actually, is it 25 percent of the job or not, and is it covering the largest portion of somebody’s job, as well as the point of the assessment being done within a reasonable period but then that assessment is made and then a few weeks later the employer makes some changes to the job.

And, actually, it could be quite easy for the employer to set this up to target their advantage, and that would require the employee to take the case to court to be able to ensure that they get the best possible outcome. So what my amendment is proposing is—and this has the support of the Council of Trade Unions and the collective voice of workers because they shared those and brought those concerns to me. So the proposal is: an employee meets the threshold to be covered in relation to a fair pay agreement if the employee performs work, or a type of work, that is within the coverage of the fair pay agreement, and if an employee performs work for the same employer that could be covered by more than one FPA, the employee may elect which FPA applies to their role.

So, in some ways, this is an echoing of what happens in Australia where their law is, basically, set up so that it’s what’s best for the employee and the best overall outcome. And the assessment of that overall outcome is from the perspective of the employee, so it really is giving them the power to make that assessment. It’ll keep it out of the courts, it’ll keep it simple, and it’ll ensure that the goal of this legislation—which is for us to raise the collective outcomes for working people in this country—is most easily achieved, I would argue.

And like, there are these examples of crossover, where supermarket staff may be stacking shelves and driving. And the assessment of 25 percent of their time could be quite difficult, particularly as that moves across time. An assessment may be done to benefit an employer at one point in time, and a few weeks later subtly, slowly the job changes and the cost to the employer is reduced.

Thank you, Mr Chair. It’s good to be able to rise here, and what I would say to my colleague Jan Logie over the way, who was just speaking then, is that you’ve raised some good points—though I wouldn’t often say that—around the issues that are going to happen in the modern workforce where the fact is that people don’t do just one job.

My colleague next to me—Maureen Pugh—noted that she’s got some friends who are hoteliers, and they had three cleaning staff come down with COVID. Now, under this arrangement, they would be covered by what is likely to be a cleaning fair pay agreement. Well, they had a maintenance man up the top and they called him up and they said, “Look, would you be able to bring some linen down?”, and he would, obviously, as a mechanic or a maintenance person, be under something completely different. So I fear that, through this, we are being too blunt, and I don’t think we’re taking into consideration all the different aspects—especially in smaller businesses—that people may do. I addressed this a little bit earlier, and I’m not sure if I got the answer back on it.

I move to clause 138. When you’re looking at assessing which agreement with overlapping terms, when considered overall, “provides the better terms for the majority of the covered employees”, why is it that the authority is determining this? Why can you not give flexibility and choice to the people who are directly impacted—that being the employees—to determine which agreement they want to fall under? I think people deserve the respect of being able to choose which agreement they want to fall under. I cannot understand why the Government would move that decision back to the authority, Minister, and I would like you to answer why that decision was made.

Erica Stanford touched on this a little bit earlier, but it was more around the framework. I would like to know more about what checks and balances are in place, because I feel that people are being put into this pretty blindly. So what options for review are there and what options for appeal are there? Minister, if you are able to come back on that, I would appreciate it.

On clause 139(2)(a)(i), where it talks about “of the need to change” into an agreement, what if they protest? What if they kick back? That goes back to my checks and balances piece before, and what I also mentioned earlier was: why can’t we just let them choose? So those are my points on that.

Thank you, Mr Chair. Running through a number of questions that have been asked by members both before and after the dinner break, we do have a number of questions relating to the overlap issue. I did explain to Mr Woodhouse previously that a number of the provisions around avoiding overlap as much as possible at an earlier stage had been dealt with in a previous part, so I will apologise to him. I think I might have referenced Part 3—actually, in Part 5 there are some of the operative parts. I do apologise. Clauses 104 and 105 provide some guidance there, but also at the initiation stage, there are also incentives through the consolidation process to avoid overlap as much as possible.

Mr Goldsmith asked about the ratification process and why there are different time frames for employees and employers. The reason there is more time allowed for unions is that there’s an additional opt-out process that is built in for employees at that stage. I think members of the committee will be aware that there is an opt-out stage at the beginning. After initiation, there’s another opt-out stage that occurs at this point, so a little bit more time is allowed there for unions to run that process.

Erica Stanford had a number of questions there. She asked, effectively, the same question about when an overlap is determined, which I’ve responded to in my response to Mr Woodhouse.

In respect of Jan Logie’s tabled amendment and the issues that she raised, I do hear what she is saying, but we have tried to strike a balance here to try and have a system that is as simple to administer as possible, and also that avoids absurdity. So, as I hear it, under the amendment that she is proposing, an employee could potentially choose a fair pay agreement (FPA) that was significantly beneficial to them even if that FPA only covered a very, very small component of the work that they did. We think that it is better and fairer and more balanced to have a relatively simple and objective test that focuses on the most work that the employee does as being the key criteria for which FPA they are covered by.

Mr Uffindell’s points, which he has made on a number of occasions, I think come back to a general debating point around the merits of having industry- or sector-based standards. There is just a disagreement between the Government and the Opposition in respect of that. He asked: why does the Employment Relations Act (ERA) have the role of determining these matters in respect of the better-off overall test? I think it’s important to note conceptually these are not employment agreements in the way that individual or collective employment agreements are employment agreements. Fair pay agreements are the establishment of a minimum standard, and so the function of the ERA here is to determine, for a group of employees overall, which is the better minimum standard to apply to them.

There was a fair bit in there, so I hope I haven’t missed anything there, but I think that probably responds to most of the points—there was one other point, sorry, that Erica Stanford raised and that related to the different time frames between clauses 137 and 153. This is because, in clause 137, the authority is undertaking two functions both for assessing compliance and for assessing the coverage overlaps. They have to do both of those things there; whereas, in clause 153, the compliance assessment has already been done. This is after the agreement is moving into the ratification phase. So it’s, effectively, a smaller task that the authority is undertaking at that stage.

Thank you, Mr Chair, and I appreciate the Minister—cognisant of the question coming before the maiden speech of our new member—coming back and clarifying that. It’s why I couldn’t find it in Part 3, I suppose. And that’s good. Now, the Minister says “belts and braces”; I’m not so sure. I think it certainly highlights the possibility that there would be coverage overlap, but I don’t know that that’s then going to prevent quite occasional instances where the chief executive then has to adjudicate on the impact of that and this dizzyingly complex process that then follows. And in the spirit of dizzyingly complex processes, I want to talk about ratification of the vote—clauses 143, 144, 145, and 146.

Now, I thought the overlap stuff was complex. The way in which one assesses the number of people who get to vote and the number of votes there are is absolutely ridiculous. If one looks at Schedule 2—now, I’m a big fan of universal franchise, and I know my colleague and friend Paul Goldsmith, who’s spoken a lot about this in his justice role, is a big fan of one person, one vote. Why on earth would there be 15 votes for 10 people or 17 votes for 12 people? That’s, essentially, what we’ve got for employers of small business in the ratification process. And my question is simply this: why did we make this so difficult? Why do we make it as if we need a degree—

💬 Simeon Brown: Well, we’re not making it, Michael.

Touché, Mr Brown. I accept. I withdraw that comment.

Because one would need to have a very good scientific calculator and a degree in mathematics from the University of Otago to actually work out how many votes constitute the ratification, at least by employers, of this process. The employee ratification does appear to be somewhat more straightforward, but the ratification process for the number of votes for covered employers ranges from two votes for one employee; 13.2—so they’re not even integers; we now are into real numbers for the voting process—if one has eight employees; right up to 20.9 votes for 19 employees. It just completely underscores what a ridiculously complex process this ratification will be.

And while I’m on my feet, I wanted to just address the comment that Jan Logie made about this being a great day for unions. When this bill is passed, this will be a crushing admission of defeat by unions: despite the fact that people are free to engage with a union and bargain collectively and have done so forever in this country, they chose not to. Union membership in this country is despairingly low—not because the unions are not valuable. I certainly in my employment value the contribution of the collective employment agreement negotiations and the relationships that I had with the New Zealand Nurses Organisation and what was then the Service and Food Workers Union and the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union. But very few private sector organisations have union membership, and this side would have you believe that it’s because of some kind of punitive employer and bad legislation. It’s not. It’s bad marketing by the unions of the value that they provide to employees. So instead of marketing their services and the value that they can add, they impose this ridiculous legislation—not even for collective bargaining at an individual level; it’s now a nationwide bargaining and arbitration system that takes us right back to the 1970s. So my main question—speech over, now—is: why on earth is the ratification process so incredibly complex? Why did we not just stick to one person, one vote?

Thank you, Mr Chair. Just following on from that and just in regards to what Jan Logie did say earlier on as well, I regularly catch Ubers, and I ask every one of them, “What do you think about this stuff going on involving you guys?”, and they don’t want a bar of it. Everyone that I’ve spoken to doesn’t want a bar of it. “Stay out of my life.”, they say. But you know best—you know best.

I just want to look back at it, clause 139 Consequences of Authority’s determination. I just want the Minister to consider those employees who are actually really happy at the moment. Take the hospitality industry, which was mentioned earlier on. If we’ve got someone doing some bar work on the weekends, they do some cleaning during the week, and even when the manager of the place wants them to drive down to Mitre 10 and pick something up, they hop in their car and they do it, no problem at all, and they are really happy. Then we look at this clause 139 and it’s: “If a fair pay agreement (agreement A) and a proposed agreement (agreement B) have [a] coverage overlap … as a result, the Authority determines ….”, it is so complicated. Even the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment admitted that it was so complicated. I just, sort of, want an acknowledgment from the Minister that many—many—in fact, I would suggest most, employees actually don’t want this.

In amongst the previous two speeches, there are a couple of specific questions that I will respond to. First, from Mr Woodhouse, which relates to why there is a voting formula for smaller employees. To do this, it takes, I think, an Excel spreadsheet with a small formula in it rather than a degree in mathematics, to be quite honest. But the reason for this is that we think that it is important and we have received representations and, indeed, calls from the Opposition in the course of this debate for smaller employers to have a reasonable voice in this process, and one way that we can do that is to give a little bit more weighting to them in the ratification process. The Opposition can’t really have it both ways; they can’t criticise the Government for supposedly not having a reasonable role for small employees and then criticise us when we give them a slightly outsized vote in the process to ensure that their voice is heard.

In respect of Mr Baillie’s comments, again, the member significantly over-eggs the complexity here. It’s comparing one agreement with another and determining under which employees will be better-off.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I wanted to discuss clause 160A in a slightly different way than my colleague Jan Logie has talked about it. This came up in the Education and Workforce Committee, and I was one of the people sort of scratching my head early on around how this could possibly work when these days you have employees who can often fulfil many tasks in their role. So I think I remember at select committee taking the example of someone who works in the hospitality industry, maybe for a hotel chain. They may be on the bar, they might be doing laundry, they might be changing rooms, they might be on the front desk; they’ve got a variety of different roles, and their employer is able to be flexible depending on the season, how full they are, sickness, and move people around. So we had this quite lengthy discussion at select committee around how much of a role you would need to do in order to be covered by a fair pay agreement (FPA). The result is, in this bill, in clause 160A(1)(b), 25 percent or more of your role. So, in effect, a quarter of your role, if it’s covered by an FPA, will require you to be under that FPA.

Now, in a workplace where most employers value flexibility, I have similar concerns. This is where my questions intersect with Jan Logie’s, in that you are, essentially, driving employers to become less flexible, in a time when we need flexibility in order to work their way around this, if they choose to do so, by not having employees cover multiple roles; instead having certain employees do certain roles to have them covered and the others not. So I can totally understand Jan’s point where there might be a workaround there for employers.

My question, which is different than Jan’s—she’s talking about her tabled amendment. My question is: why the 25 percent? Why is it that the majority of someone’s role, if it’s covered by an FPA, so 50 percent or 51 percent of that role, then it’s covered by the FPA—25 percent or a quarter of what someone does to be then drawn into the FPA and eventually covered by it seems like a very, very low threshold, and I would like the Minister to answer as to where he came up with 25 percent and why it wasn’t the majority of a role.

The other question that I’ve got is around determining that 25 percent. So it’s a little bit of a sort of grey area in the bill under clause 160A(2)(b), where it talks about the percentage of the work that must be assessed based on the work that they’ve done in a reasonable period prior to the date of the assessment. Now, I guess I want to ask the Minister what a reasonable period is, because if you think about the example I was using earlier of an employee at a hospitality business, it’s extremely seasonal. So in the summer months, for example, in some areas when they’re very busy and very full in that particular hotel, then it’s more likely that those employees who have flexible working arrangements and do a number of tasks are more likely to be doing one task than others, whereas if you go back, say, eight months or 12 months, that could be completely different. So my question is: what is reasonable? Would the Minister consider that period to be an entire year, given the seasonal nature of the tourism sector, in that particular case, or are we just talking about the last three months? Because if it was the last three months, I could imagine that an employee would have very different work split between jobs; if you took it over a year, they may have been doing lots and lots of other jobs.

So two questions there: why are we taking 25 percent rather than the majority of the role, which would have seemed to be the sensible thing to do? And then around the reasonable period and what he expects that to be, and could that, in fact, go back an entire year, and on what basis would you be able to argue for a whole year? So if the Minister could address that, it would be useful.

Oh, thank you, Mr Chair. We’re looking here at—for people who are just tuning in for this debate—Part 7 of the 11 parts in the Fair Pay Agreements Bill, misnamed “fair pay agreements” because, it actually is around about mandatory union deals.

One of the mandatory elements about it is in Subpart 2 of Part 7, which deals with the ratification process. So what happens is the unions and the employers—going back a little bit, you know, it only takes a tiny fraction of the potential workforce to start this process. Once this process starts, the unions and the employers have to get together, bargain, and come up with a proposed agreement. Then, that proposed agreement needs to be taken to (a) the employees and (b) the employers to ratify.

Now, if it doesn’t pass that test, and if 50 percent of the employers, for example, don’t agree—and I can think of all sorts of reasons why they wouldn’t agree. In fact, I just got an email from Bernie in Te Awamutu, for example, who said, on fair pay, “At no time I’ve had anyone refer to the pay gap between tradespeople and unskilled workers. I do not think the living wage should be close to a trained person’s pay and living wage.” And the point he’s making, of course—and this might be one reason why an employee group wouldn’t support this is—is that it’s all very well for the Minister to say, “It’s all just about lifting the floor”, and we lift the floor so everybody earns a certain amount and the minimum wage is what the country has, which they’ve been lifting enormously—they’re going to lift the floor even more.

The problem is, if the business is trying to operate in an internationally competitive environment and you raise the floor, it means that the company has nothing extra to pay people, who have spent a lot of time developing and learning and practising particular skills, more. So the gap between people who have just rocked up—you know, 18-year-old kids who have just rocked up to work—and somebody who might have spent 15 years working on the skills specific to the industry is becoming smaller and smaller and smaller. That is causing all sorts of tension within the workforce, and it’s something that’s not acknowledged by this Government. It’s one of the reasons why many employers might not be keen on this idea.

So, anyway, we get to the point that you come along, you’ve got the agreement, and 50 percent of the people don’t vote for it. Then, what happens? Well, then we go through and the chief executive of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has to go through that, and if he’s not pleased with the ratification that hasn’t been met, he goes and does it again. And so the whole process starts again and you have a revote—a bit like the Scottish nationalists; if you don’t like it, you have it again. But, then, if you still don’t get the 50 percent, then what happens? Well, what happens is that it just goes off to the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) and they decide what the agreement is. So the whole thing is a farce because the employers are asked whether they agree with it, they say, “No, we don’t agree with it. We don’t like it.” “But you’re going to get it anyway”, says the Minister, “I don’t care.”

At that point, the thing doesn’t die. There’s no freedom about this, it’s all mandatory in the sense that you go in, you’re forced into a process, you have the process, you develop a fair pay agreement in negotiation between the unions and employers, then the employers vote against it, they say, “We don’t want a bar of this. We don’t want a bar of it.” And then they go off to the chief executive of MBIE and he says, “Yes, they’ve voted that they don’t want a bar of it. That’s not good enough; do it again.” If they vote again and they don’t want a bar of it, then what happens? It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t go away. There’s no, sort of, point to the vote. What happens is that then it goes off to the ERA—a bunch of appointed judicial officers, as it were, in Auckland—and they decide what’s going to happen, and so the thing happens. So the point is: what is the point of this vote? Because it doesn’t really mean anything. Because you can vote against it and you still get it. No—

💬 Hon Michael Woodhouse: Did you not know democracy’s changed?

No does not mean no. And, yes, perhaps it’s possible that this Minister, Michael Wood, has been talking too much to Willie Jackson, who thinks that democracy has changed and, you know, there’s this old-fashioned notion of people voting for things and having equal voting rights, and all that sort of stuff is not relevant.

Then we come to the question—Mr Chair, I’ve got two seconds to go—[Time expired]

To be honest, there was very, very little in that address that actually was related to this part—most of it was about the determination functions of the authority, which are not covered by this part. I assume that if the member is outraged by the idea that employment agreements can be reached without the true agreement of both parties, he’s also utterly outraged by the fact that under the individual employment agreement bargaining situation, for many workers it’s a “take it or leave it deal”, but I’ve never heard him be particularly concerned about that previously.

In respect of Erica Stanford’s question—she did at least ask a genuine question about this part. The question that she asked related to the “reasonable period”. It could vary depending on the particular circumstance, and she raised seasonality, for example. Ultimately, in this case, that would be for the employee and employer to determine between themselves. Ultimately, if that was not successful, they would have recourse to the labour inspectorate.

I move, That the question be now put.

Thank you, Mr Chair. The Minister just got up and answered part of my question but ignored the rest of it, and that is around the 25 percent. I think it’s entirely reasonable to ask why it is that only 25 percent of the work means that someone falls within the coverage of the fair pay agreement.

💬 Dr Duncan Webb: This was your last speech.

I asked this question and I’ll ask it again because it’s not been answered, Mr Duncan Webb. Why is it that it’s not 50 percent, or the majority, of the work that somebody does?

It’s caused such a problem that the Green Party have acknowledged that this is going to be a problem—that employers will try and shift around their work—so the Green Party have lodged a tabled amendment in Jan Logie’s name. It doesn’t have a number on it, so I’m not sure, but it was lodged at 12.24 p.m. The Green Party way of getting around it is just to have no threshold. If you just do any part of the job, then you get to pick which fair pay agreement (FPA) you come under. But it’s not something that we would support, because it means that if you just did it for an hour or a week, you could fall under that if you chose to, as I understand it.

But the question for the Minister—and the one that he hasn’t answered—is why is it only 25 percent? That’s a minority of the work that someone might actually do. Surely it makes more sense that most of what you do—over a reasonable time frame and I get that; that can be negotiated. But 25 percent is only one-quarter of someone’s full week and they will be pulled into an FPA and paid at a higher rate when the majority of the work that they do—75 percent, in fact—is not included in this FPA.

So I want the Minister to answer where he came up with only 25 percent, and would he consider an amendment to that—if I were to put a Supplementary Order Paper through—to change clause 160A(1)(b) to 50 percent, and then that would have to flow through into 160A(2)(a) as well. So if you did 50 percent of one job and 50 percent another job, then you got to choose. But if the Minister could explain to the committee why only 25 percent rather than the majority of the role that you do?

The 25 percent threshold is in response to submissions we received, actually, from both employees and employers who wanted some clarity built into the legislation to assess when a fair pay agreement (FPA) applied and when it did not apply to an employee’s work. And so that’s been recommend by the committee. The 25 percent figure is about striking a reasonable balance between—as I described it before—if it was just, for example, up to the employee or you had a very low threshold, you’d have situations where a tiny amount of a person’s work brought them within the ambit of an FPA. Equally, if you had a very high threshold, potentially, you would open it up more easily to gaming and people’s work duties being reduced in order to avoid coverage of the FPA. And we thought that, in the end, a 25 percent threshold—bearing in mind that is the minimum threshold—is a reasonable balance to strike, all things considered.

I move, That the question be now put.

Thank you very much, Mr Chair. I’d like to follow on, and I think the part it’s going to relate to is clause 144, and it follows on from what my colleague Erica Stanford was talking about, the 25 percent threshold. But also in relation to the contribution that Sam Uffindell made earlier on, around the scenario that he talked about with the hotel worker. So can the Minister clarify, if that worker is employed 25 percent of the time as maintenance, 25 percent of his time as housekeeping, 25 percent of his time in reception, and 25 percent as a chef in the kitchen, how then do they manage which fair pay agreement (FPA) he will come under? And is that a complication in terms of any voting that he might have, and where will he be able to cast his vote in terms of his entitlement for whatever FPA that he may be assigned? So how does he choose which FPA he will come under? Will there be several FPAs that he will have to align himself with? And how does that impact on his entitlement to vote when it comes to the holding of that ratification vote in his workplace?

So I can see that for some employers this may be a way that they will have to operate in order to ensure that there is flexibility within their workplace so that they can have employees doing jobs that are probably not their primary job, but that they can employ them on a part-time basis for several jobs so that they can actually be more flexible within the workplace. Is that something that the Minister has anticipated and has a solution for? Thank you.

I move, That the question be now put.

The question is that the Minister’s amendments to Part 7 set out on Supplementary Order Paper 264 be agreed to.

Jan Logie’s tabled amendment replacing clause 160A is out of order as being inconsistent with a previous decision of the committee. The question is that Part 7 as amended be agreed to.

Part 7 as amended agreed to.

Part 8 Variation, renewal, and replacement of fair pay agreements