Employment Relations (Trial Periods) Amendment Bill

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, here we are at 20 to 12 on the same day that this bill was brought to the House, under urgency, removing again—the second week in a row—fundamental rights of working people.

💬 Hon Members: Shameful!

It’s absolutely shameful of this Government to prioritise taking away rights to natural justice for the majority of New Zealand employees through this piece of legislation.

There’s been quite a few comments on where this new Government is going. One of the common themes has been backwards, and there isn’t a clearer example than in this particular bill. This particular bill that the Government intends to pass tonight, but maybe they won’t quite get there, is exactly the same as a bill that was passed in 2011—exactly the same. Where’s the vision? Where’s the learning? Where’s the looking at evidence to see if this policy actually works? Where’s the consideration of how New Zealand has changed in 2023? It’s absolutely nowhere to be found in this piece of legislation. There is no vision about how a 2023 labour market is different from the labour market in 2011. If you just think about the technological changes, if you just think about how the world has moved on, you will realise how ridiculous that is.

We talked a lot in this debate about red tape. That’s what we heard from the other side. The Minister just said in her short contribution—I note all of her contributions have been extremely short, because she has nothing good to say about this bill, because there isn’t anything good to say. She calls the natural justice rights of employees to ask their employer why they were dismissed, to ask to be treated fairly, to ask for natural justice—she calls that red tape. I think that’s shameful. The right and access to justice is not red tape; it is a human right, and a lot of these things which are repealed through trial periods are actually human rights as well.

She didn’t have a lot of answers to our questions. We asked a lot of questions in the committee of the whole House stage and we were left with nothing. I asked about the contradiction, which I wonder if her colleagues are aware of, where people on accredited employer work visas are not covered by trial periods, but New Zealanders working here already are covered by trial periods, effectively giving people on those visas more access to rights than people here. I wonder if she has explained those differentiations to her colleagues and I wonder whether they in fact support that.

We also asked her questions about the benefits system. Would people who are dismissed—and there will be, make no mistake, more people dismissed because of the law that this coalition Government is passing; more people dismissed and not told why. So would they be entitled to some kind of support? What do we expect to happen to these people? All employees in the whole country are now covered by trial periods. What do we expect when they lose their jobs? We were not given any answers. We were told she’s not responsible for that, so she doesn’t know. Is that good enough? I don’t personally think that’s good enough.

There is no evidence for this particular piece of legislation. The world has moved on. Just like the fair pay agreements legislation that we were discussing only last week, there seems to be no recognition from this coalition Government of actual studies and evidence about workplace legislation and how effective it is or not. And in this case it’s not effective.

I want to take a moment just to thank the officials who have worked here, who have been here until 11.30 at night; the staff in Parliament who have been here through to 11.30 at night—quarter to 12 now—helping Parliament to debate this under urgency for no reason. The Minister has not given us a reason as to why this needs to go through urgency, why it’s so important that it has to happen under urgency, and with no select committee process.

I have read, in the previous readings, points that people have wanted to raise if there was a select committee process, but they’ve been unable to do that, and I just say again that an electoral mandate does not justify bad lawmaking—an electoral mandate does not justify bad lawmaking. I have not heard a single argument on the other side to justify why you couldn’t have a select—Christopher Bishop said you were going to have one, and now we’re not having one. Why? Where are the answers to these important questions? We certainly didn’t get them from the Minister.

I thanked the officials, but I also want to thank them for their sage advice that has been included on the regulatory impact statement. I want to take a moment to read this important clause. This is the conclusion in the regulatory impact statement: “We therefore consider that there are diminishing benefits from increasing the availability of trial periods to larger employers (from 89 percent of employers under the status quo to 100 percent of employers) and that this would not outweigh the costs of insecurity to a greater number of employees.” That is right—that is 100 percent correct. This is not radical thinking; this is sage thinking based on evidence, and there is no evidence that extending these trial periods works. It’s a step backward and it will simply make people more insecure in their work.

I also want to mention something else that has been mentioned a lot in this debate but perhaps hasn’t been given the exact attention it deserves so far, and that’s the study that Motu Research did after they were commissioned by Treasury. They found that 90-day trial periods, in terms of their objectives, have little effect. So it’s not helping anyone to do this. In terms of the macro scale in New Zealand, there is no impact of 90-day trial periods.

We need to look at this research and we need to see what the research has found. The main researcher, Isabelle Sin, who’s done a huge amount of research into employer—

💬 Arena Williams: She’s awesome.

Yeah, she is awesome. She said, “My research shows that the 90-day trial period isn’t helping people get jobs.” It isn’t helping people get jobs. This is the justification we have been given for this bill, and the researcher who did an actual study into it says it doesn’t help people get jobs. So why are we extending it? Why? Why does this coalition Government hate working people? Why does the Government hate them? I don’t understand why you would extend a policy that doesn’t work. It doesn’t give more people jobs. That is what the research shows.

I’ll tell you what it does do. This particular bill, for individual people, will be devastating. And I want to spend a moment just talking about that, because a lot of people, especially on this side of the House—and I’m sure maybe on the other side of the House too; I don’t know—they come to this place to make a difference, and one of the main reasons that we want to do that is we want to make a difference to people who face injustice. My colleague Jan Tinetti gave the most convincing reason for that when she made a contribution in the committee of the whole House stage. She had had someone that she knew in her life who had been dismissed under a trial period and they had tragically taken their own life. It’s not a joke. It’s a real story. It’s tragic. Everyone in this House agrees with that, and I don’t pretend to think that anyone else would say anything else about that situation. The reason that we have to take these decisions so seriously is these are the type of impacts that can occur when we take away rights from people.

I have a previous career as an employment lawyer, and I saw how important jobs were to people. Jobs are part of self-esteem. They’re part of how you identify yourself, how you find your place in the world, who you are. For many people, their identity as a human being is tied to the work that they do. To make it possible and to extend a policy that just doesn’t work for the objectives that this Government wants it to achieve, so that more people are in the situation where they may lose their job for no good reason and have no recourse—it is just a terrible policy to be putting on New Zealanders.

Let me tell you, every member of this House should be aware that you will soon get stories about trial periods. More and more people will be using them and more and more New Zealanders will be coming to your office and saying, “I was treated unfairly, and for some reason I’m told that there’s nothing I can do.” That is an absolute travesty and it’s an absolute tragedy, and we’re all going to have to look hard at the Parliament that we’re in at the moment that is passing this regressive law and justify to them why they don’t have any recourse to challenge unfairness. That is going to be something that everyone in this House is going to have to address. I don’t look forward to it. I think it’s going to be a sad day.

So I think this is a terrible bill. I think it takes New Zealand backwards, and I do not commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Ninety-day trials are hurting workers, and the extension of 90-day trials to larger businesses will hurt workers even more.

The previous speaker, Camilla Belich, was very generous in presenting to the Minister and to the members of the Government the evidence as to why 90-day trials have not resulted in higher wages, have not resulted in greater retention of workers, and have hurt people. I think it was very generous because it’s almost like we’re pretending the Minister doesn’t know. It’s almost like we’re insulting the Minister’s intelligence by assuming that she didn’t know any of this.

The Minister knows—she does not care. She came into Government to undermine workers’ rights. She came to Government to serve the interests of big businesses, and this bill is a statement of the Government’s intent to lower working conditions, to have a low-wage economy, and to put workers in a vulnerable position where employers are able to dismiss them at will in those first 90 days, without an ability to take that in a way that allows for justice.

Throughout the committee of the whole House debate, the Minister was unable to substantiate her arguments. She spoke in platitudes about how this will increase the flexibility in the labour market without actually speaking about the direct material outcomes that these workers will have as a result of this policy. The members opposite to me, all they could do, instead of taking calls in the speech, they just clap like seals to a nothing speech from the Minister.

Our communities deserve far more than a Government that is hell-bent on ramming through legislation that will hurt our workers—the same workers that serve them at the cafes, the same workers that serve them at the restaurants, the workers that serve the hotels when they travel around the country to do their mahi. But they do not care, because these members did not come to this Chamber to serve the workers; they came to serve the interests of businesses.

So, as we look forward, the Greens will continue fighting to put forward amendments to this legislation to expose the truth, which is: we gave the opportunity to the Minister to put in place reporting mechanisms. Because if the Minister was so confident that this bill would have resulted in better outcomes for workers, she would have not been afraid of having those reported. Because she claimed, and the members of the Government claimed that this Government was founded and was built to honour the facts and the evidence and the latest available research. But let’s face it: that is not a commitment that is being put into action, because the Minister could only speak in platitudes; could only speak in vague terms when she talked about the future work she may or may not do to ensure that there’s information gathering.

Chlöe Swarbrick: It’s all vibes.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: So it is all vibes, but it is more than just vibes: it’s cruel, neo-liberal, already-proven-to-not-be-true vibes, and our workers do not deserve this.

What we are creating is a condition where we’re not setting up young people to succeed. We’re not creating the conditions where those young people going into their first job are supported to succeed. We’re creating the conditions where young people going to their first job can be dismissed at will without any reason for them to even—if they had an issue that they genuinely had to resolve, we’re not going to give them the opportunity to genuinely give them that recourse. Something that we actually did try to negotiate with the Minister, but she wasn’t even willing to meet us in the middle. Because, again, she knows what she is doing. She knows that she came here to hurt workers’ interests, and throughout the committee of the whole House, she has proven all of that to be true.

Chlöe Swarbrick: Yes, she’s cruel.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: Yes, the Minister is cruel. The policies are cruel, and it is a bit of a change of tune, right? We had what we called the “politics of kindness”, and the Greens were always quite clear that the politics of kindness needed to be matched with changes into material realities. But this Government has done a full 180 and has now instilled the politics of cruelness and the politics of greed—and this bill, again, speaks to that.

I want to mihi to the workers who, as they change employment, will now be subjected to this policy. I want to assure those workers that the Green Party will be here to listen to the experiences of those workers who are now undergoing 90-day trials in larger businesses. I want to honour the contributions of countless workers who made submissions back when the 90-day trials were being clawed back, who made submissions to remind us that 90-day trials were not working.

We’ve already heard the voices of workers. The Minister is not interested in hearing the voices of workers. She thinks that she can justify poor policy making, poor lawmaking, poor process because it’s in the coalition agreement. But let me tell you what: there’s a reason why we have these processes. It’s so that we can’t hurt our communities through just going through the whim of a paper that was signed by three parties that all they want to do is serve the interests of businesses and the service of workers.

As I have this privilege of taking the last call of the night, I want to remind the members that as they go forward and debate these issues in relationship to the workers, they may want to consider adding some substance to their words. I listened very carefully to the contributions they made—and sure, some of them may have been in a rush to go back home to spend time with family over the holiday period, and some of them will get a holiday period with family and friends. But those workers who are now going to be subject to those policies, they’re going to be subjected to potentially feeling they’re going to have to work longer hours and be subjected to strenuous conditions over the Christmas break—and the summer period—particularly as this policy comes into place. Because if they don’t take these strenuous conditions, they could just be fired at will with no good reason.

One of the other things we tried to put as an amendment was the ability to make it clear that employers would have had to add justification, to add a reason at least that they were dismissing those workers in a 90-day trial. We thought that was a reasonable thing for the Minister to take up because, once again, if the Minister is so confident that when there’s not a good match, 90-day trials are a way to actually get rid of those workers that are not a good match, then there is nothing to hide. Those employers should give a reason to those workers, and she didn’t even want to compromise in that regard.

Those amendments were not for us to be happy with a middle position. They were there to expose the Minister’s intentions, but she was not interested in any of the evidence. This was not at all about reaching a sort of middle ground with the Minister: this was about showing the Minister her own true colours of greed, of her inability to see workers in the face. I hope that our workers confront the Minister throughout the term for her decisions; that they are able to tell her directly what impact this policy is having on them, because she clearly was not interested in hearing this through a select committee stage.

Look, I finally just want to pay tribute to our union movement, who—

💬 Hon Member: Of course you do.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: And of course we do, because this side of the House supports our workers, Because that side of the House only wants to listen to the business interests. That side of the House, at no point in the debate talked about workers—the people who actually build their economy, the people who actually create the profits of the employers that talk about the people who are foundational to our society. The employers that the people on the Government’s side talk about should be reminded that without their workers, they are nothing—without their workers, they would have no profits. And they should be careful, because the more they undermine workers’ rights, the more they’re eroding social cohesion, and the more they’re creating a situation by eroding social cohesion, we’re continuing to have discontent.

They themselves are manufacturing a crisis of inequality by keeping wages low, by preventing working conditions from improving, and the next time they talk about their concerns about social cohesion—and I hear the next lot of National Party members making maiden speeches about their concerns about discrimination and racism and inequality—they need to remember that it was their parties who created the conditions for those things to happen.

The Green Party will continue fighting throughout the term against the politics of cruelty. All the snarky comments that this side may make can’t hide the fact that they have no substance to add to this bill. All they had to add to this bill was snark. It was baseless arguments, and yet they’re quite willing to put in the energy to go until midnight to add their pettiness to the debate instead of being able to put the facts into this place. The Green Party will fight this till the very, very bitter end.

Members, the House is suspended until 9 a.m. this morning. Haere ki te moe. Pō mārie.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 12.01 midnight to 9 a.m. (Thursday)