Employment Relations (Collective Agreements in Triangular Relationships) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Employment Relations (Collective Agreements in Triangular Relationships) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Workforce Committee to consider the bill.

I, first of all, want to thank Adrian Rurawhe and Marja Lubeck for bringing this bill to the House, and I have inherited it from them. This bill is, essentially, about making sure that New Zealand workers have enough to eat and can actually provide for their families. In New Zealand, we’ve had a real issue with keeping our wages up, and we’ve ended up with a gap between rich and poor that is a real concern. But I want to just go through how we got there before I go to how this bill tries to address that situation.

In the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the real wages of New Zealanders fell 25 percent. In the mid-2000s to 2010—

Grant McCallum: Who was in power then?

HELEN WHITE: Yes, I take the point from the speaker who just interrupted. He said, “Who was this?” I think this is something that actually every—every—party in this House has to face. What has happened in this country, with regard to wages, has been a disaster for our people. It has ended up with a situation where people cannot meet their ordinary bills. In a cost of living crisis, we need to face that fact—all of our parties—and we need to put it right. So I’d like to continue.

In the mid-2000s to 2010, there was modest growth of real wages, but there was much less growth of wages than there was of productivity. There wasn’t a decent share of that wealth with the workers of this country. In 2023, we get the first real average, ordinary time increase—6.9 percent—and that’s not perfect, but it looks like something is going right for workers in this country. Let’s talk about what that really means in terms of wages. In June 2024, the median wage of a man in this country is $33.56. The median wage of a woman in this country is $32.08 per hour.

The work that I did as an employment lawyer got me across a lot of different industries. I saw the difference for people who earned well and had all the respect that came with that and had all the self-dignity that came with that. I worked for industries like the Dairy Workers Union. The dairy workers earn good money, and they’re about 98 percent unionised. It’s a really good business, but it shares with its workers the actual profit in that way. Ninety-eight percent unionised meant good terms and conditions. That was something where the workers of this country participate in the wealth. But I also had other industries, which were not well organised and didn’t have that kind of agreement, and some of those were the labour hire companies. They did not earn well, and as a result, the Government ends up topping up those wages. But also, people live in a state of constant insecurity. They’re the people who go to the supermarket and can’t necessarily get what they need to feed their families. It’s a constant state of stress.

What this bill does is say that for people who are in a triangular relationship, which is a relationship where there is an employer—say it’s the port—and then there’s a labour hire company on site—say it’s a stevedoring company—if they don’t actually have a contract of their own, a collective agreement, but they’re doing the same work as the port workers when they’re brought in, they are entitled to ask to be on those terms and conditions that the primary employer is actually offering its own workers. It’s just a way of making sure that workers doing the same work get the same pay.

And what could possibly be wrong with that? An employer signed a collective agreement saying it can pay $40 an hour to its workers. If it brings in labour to do exactly the same work and they do not have the protection of that agreement, they should be offering the same money. And that’s the difference between a decent wage and one that won’t pay the bills. That’s what is achieved in this piece of legislation, and I ask all the parties in this House to really consider that. Do we want a New Zealand where we’ve got a constant dipping down of wages to the lowest common denominator, or is it time for us to use what we have in this House, the ability to structure the way that people work in a way that means that people can work with dignity, they can pay their bills? That’s what this is about today. It would make a difference to all those workers who are coming in in that second tier. It would make a difference to their families.

We talk a lot in this House about self-responsibility. It comes up a lot. Well, I know that my life is a lot easier simply because I know that I have a decent income. It means I can pay my mortgage. It means I can plan for the future. The labour hire people who would be most affected by this—that’s our cleaners, that’s our seagulls, that’s all those kinds of people who come in and top up in our medical areas. Often, it’s our health workers. All those areas of sort of second-tier workers coming into a workforce which is already controlled and it is already a workplace where people are doing the same work—they will have a real bonus if you vote for this tonight. They will be able to earn the same money that that employer can clearly afford.

It stops a use of contract labour which is not desirable from anyone’s point of view. That use is to undermine the amount of wages that they share with their workforce. That’s what it does. It stops that misuse. And it means that New Zealand workers can survive on their own two feet. They’re doing the same work. That labour hire person is standing there next to someone doing exactly the same work, and they should be entitled to the same pay. It’s as simple as that. So I ask you tonight to think about our role in setting the system up, making sure that people are on a level playing field, but I also ask you to think about whether you could make ends meet on the kinds of money we’re talking about here. It is often the difference between $40 and minimum wage. That’s the reality.

What actually ends up happening is that, if people earn a decent amount, they have a decent KiwiSaver; we don’t end up picking up the pieces in our criminal system, in our welfare system, and, actually, at the end of their working career, at the time of their retirement. So we will be doing this country a favour, but we will also be doing all the families and workers who depend on this work a favour if we just adopt this tonight. Thus, I ask you to support this bill to its first reading. Thank you. I commend the bill to the House.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to speak on the first reading of the Employment Relations (Collective Agreements in Triangular Relationships) Amendment Bill. I read the title out because you could be forgiven for not knowing what this bill was about. The member who spoke prior to me, Helen White, talked a lot about increasing wages and really taking aim at labour hire companies. Really, this does something quite different to that based on what the bill is proposing. It’s very, very niche, and if the purpose, based on what the previous speaker has said, is to increase wages, surely there are many other ways to achieve this other than targeting labour hire companies in such a way.

It is our firm belief that this will have a far more perverse impact on small businesses. Yes, there might be large companies that make use of labour hire companies, whether it’s a port, whether it’s a mill. There are various reasons why companies engage with contractors, but at the end of the day, this is going to change the behaviour, the way the contractors operate, and that is going to have a strong onflow effect.

I will just run members through it. This bill seeks to ensure that employees employed by one employer but working under the control or direction of another business or organisation—for those that don’t understand what a triangular relationship is—are not deprived of the right to coverage of a collective agreement covering the work being performed for that other business or organisation. Now, that’s making the assumption that those labour hire companies are then contracting out their workers to companies that have staff covered by a collective agreement. That’s not always the case. But, of course, now those labour hire companies are going to have to change their behaviour, if this bill were to become law, in situations that aren’t covered by collective agreements, because they’re going to have to apply the same terms and conditions across all of the workplaces that they work with.

The purpose of this bill, as is written in the bill—but not obviously stated to us in the House by the previous speaker—is to provide greater security and rights to workers in such arrangements by ensuring that collective bargaining rights are extended beyond the direct employer in the employment relationship. So to hear that it’s about driving up wages makes me think that this is a solution looking for a problem, as is often the case with members’ bills from the opposite side.

We just want to go through some of these potential perverse outcomes, which I think are really important to run through because I think it’s important for people to understand. A very niche bill can only do one thing and that is take aim at an industry, and that is exactly what this is doing. That industry exists because there is a need for it. It is a need to serve businesses whose seasonal work ebbs and flows, whose contracts ebb and flow, and who need to take on contractors. All this is going to do is hamstring them and make our productivity more problematic, which is the opposite.

So this is, as I mentioned, likely to disproportionately affect small businesses and employers who rely on labour hire contractors. That is exactly the opposite of what we want to do.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Order! If the Opposition members want to have a conversation between themselves, can they please take it out into the lobby, thank you. I’m sorry for interrupting the member.

KATIE NIMON: Thank you, Madam Speaker. As we often get the chance to say, at the moment, National’s values are of limited government and personal responsibility. And again, this bill is another step in the direction of overstepping government, getting involved in the relationship between the employer and the employee, which we do not agree on. More to the point, our focus on productivity and economic growth would tell us that we need to oppose this bill, because it’s likely to impose unreasonable burdens on businesses.

Now, again, what this is going to do is change the behaviour, the way we contract an event and the way we contract seasonal work, and all of these things are absolutely necessary to our economy—to our tourism economy, to our horticultural economy. Every time we engage in this kind of work, it is for a reason. The Opposition are trying to make it sound like people use contractors to get away with having to use proper terms and conditions for their staff—it is completely baseless.

Come to Hawke’s Bay for a summer harvest and see why they have to use labour hire contractors for the seasonal work. Go to a wonderful concert, whether it’s at Eden Park in Auckland or whether it’s a Mission concert in Taradale—these are seasonal event-based contracts that need this kind of employment relationship.

Now, we always talk about the unintended consequences because these niche bills that aim to do one thing actually end up doing a number of others. As it stands, it means that if an employee is a union member and their work falls under a collective agreement that that employer is party to, the employer can be bound by that agreement and enforce that agreement against the employer, against the employer’s preference, against the employer’s structure of employment. Now it’s going to then bring in those businesses into a collective agreement relationship, whether it’s bargaining. A company that has no involvement in a third party’s collective agreement or union arrangements then becomes involved.

There are so many companies around New Zealand that do this as a service to our productive economy, to give employees freedom and flexibility, and, actually, in so many cases, the fact that they are working contract hours—they are working and earning more than others because they are on a contract arrangement. I would love to know the research behind the assumption that every person working for a labour hire company is earning significantly less. Because that is not the case.

So at the end of the day—and we have made this very clear—this is not a bill we support. This is a solution looking for a problem, and all we see this doing is discouraging businesses from hiring workers through third-party organisations. It is taking aim at an industry. It will have a perverse impact on small businesses. It will affect the seasonal and event-based industries that we thrive on in New Zealand and that are the backbone of most of our economies, especially in the regions, and this is a very important thing for us to make clear.

We do not commend this bill to the House, we do not recommend that it go to select committee, and with that I will take my seat.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Greens, in support of the Employment Relations (Collective Agreements in Triangular Relationships) Amendment Bill in the name of Helen White, and I acknowledge the previous members who she received this bill from, as well. The Greens see this as a practical, targeted reform that addresses a growing issue in our workforce, which is the exploitation of workers in triangular employment relationships.

I do want to agree with the member Helen White in terms of her comments around the inadequacy of the minimum wage and how wages are going down in real terms. We’ve just had the new minimum wage come in, and the increase is a measly 35c—it’s a measly 35c; $23.50 is what that is. What are workers going to do with their 35c? Actually, what we should be talking about in this context—in all of the contexts—is the living wage.

Here I want to acknowledge the Unite union. I had the honour and privilege of attending one of their Poverty is No Joke, 1 April, union gatherings. I’m sure some of the members on this side of the House were able to spend some time with them, talking about the living wage, as well. So I wanted to put my acknowledgment of that on the record.

For those that don’t know what the living wage is: “A Living Wage is the income necessary to provide workers and their families with the basic necessities of life. A living wage will enable workers to live with dignity and to participate as active citizens in society.” So this is what we should be focusing on, folks.

Under the current law, we have workers who are technically employed by one company but are based under the direction of another, often through labour hire firms. We heard some comments from both sides of the House about that. They can miss out on the protections of a collective agreement. So what that means, for the people that are listening, is that someone can do exactly the same job as their workmates, under the same conditions, and they might be excluded from union protections just because of who signs their contract. That’s not right—that’s not right at all. So this bill seeks to amend the Employment Relations Act to fix that.

It does that in two ways, as I understand it. It expands the definition of employees who can be covered by a collective agreement to include those in triangular employment relationships. It seems straightforward and a sensible thing to do, to me. It also ensures that if those workers are union workers, they can benefit from the terms and protections of a collective agreement already in place at the workplace that they’re directed by. So if you have a bunch of workers at a particular place and you’ve got one lot on a collective agreement, another lot come in and they’re doing exactly the same job, surely for a hard day’s work, a fair day’s pay, they should be getting all the same conditions. It’s this kind of pitting workers against each other which is why real wages are being driven down. That is something that this particular corner of the House—and I’m sure I can say that for the other Opposition parties as well—will oppose.

This is something that falls within the ambit of our workplace policy, which is that we support legislative protection for people employed by labour hire agencies and preventing triangular relationships from being used to dodge workplace rights. That’s the corner here: that people are going to try to find kind of nifty ways, via contracting, to not pay people properly. So this is what, I think, the member is trying to do, and that is something that the Greens will certainly support.

This is, I think, also about equity. Labour hire and triangular relationships are disproportionately used in sectors that rely on Māori, on Pasifika, and on migrant workers, often low-paid sectors. So making sure that there are those protections in place is really, really important for Māori, Pasifika, and low-paid migrants. So we will be supporting this bill. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m taking this call on behalf of ACT on the first reading of the Employment Relations (Collective Agreements in Triangular Relationships) Amendment Bill, which is a member’s bill, Helen White’s bill. Congratulations for the bill being drawn from the ballot.

We gave thorough consideration to this bill and we have concluded that we will not be supporting this bill. We are not supporting this bill because we know that this bill is actually not going to do what the member thinks; it is actually going to be contrary to what the member thinks. It’s actually going to create a lot of implications for employers—and employees, as well. What this bill does is, basically, it just extends the powers of unions to third parties in triangular work relationships.

What we note is that the policy statement of this bill says it “seeks to ensure that employees employed by one employer but working under the control or direction of another business or organisation are not deprived of the right to coverage of a collective agreement covering the work being performed for that other business or organisation.” So here this bill actually really undermines the flexibility that we have in our labour market through triangular work arrangements that exist. Also, there is this assumption that somehow anybody who is employed should be in full-time and permanent employment; there should be no casual contracts and there should be no temporary filling up of positions.

But the reality is quite different from both sides. From the employer side, sometimes employers need some positions to be filled on a temporary basis because there might be a sick leave that has come up, all of a sudden, and there is a position that needs to be filled that cannot be left without any person being at that position. For example, receptionists are important at businesses and some admin work people are important at businesses. And also, for employees, a lot of people become employees of labour hire companies only because they want flexibility. We know that people’s circumstances vary. Some people might have responsibilities like young children or maybe an elderly person they’re looking after. Or it could be just a matter of choice and that they don’t want to work full time, 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, or seven days. That kind of flexibility should be available to employees and that kind of flexibility is available through the triangular arrangements that work.

So this bill, as I said, is going to deliver contrary to what the member thinks. This bill is not going to deliver anything in regard to pay parity. But what it will do is it will create more cost for employees because if there is a claim, there are then two parties to deal with that claim rather than one party to deal with that claim. When there are two parties involved, we know it is going to take longer, it is going to be expensive, and there is going to be this big legal risk that the employee will have to go through as well. So we do not believe it’s going to deliver for employees. As I’ve said, we know that it is going to deliver for unions, because this bill is just about extending the powers of unions to third parties.

We see that there are a lot of potential economic and operational risks with this bill if it goes through. We also know that labour hire companies actually do a great job. They fill in that gap that is needed in the labour market. With this legislation going forward—if it goes forward—then some companies, to avoid or to mitigate this cost that I have talked about before of that extended period of dealing with the claim, instead of two parties involved, those who can deal with it in a quicker manner, now, with this bill, if it goes through, there will be three parties. So, obviously, the process is going to take longer.

To avoid that there might be some businesses who would go out and try to hire staff directly instead of going through labour hire companies. So it’s not going to actually help the labour hire companies that the member cited. Actually, it is going to provide a lot of disadvantage to labour hire companies because they won’t be able to survive because there will be businesses not wanting to hire staff through labour hire companies. It’s very important that flexibility is important, because what we want to see is—we want to improve efficiency. We want to improve productivity, and that comes with the flexibility that we have in the labour market. Making things rigid and making everything about unions is not going to improve efficiency and it’s not going to improve productivity.

So we need to be mindful of this, that unions, of course, they come in between the employer and employees. But employees can talk directly to employers if there are any issues, they don’t need to always pick up the phone and call a third person to get involved to resolve any issues they might have with the employers. So we do not support this bill because this bill is not going to deliver what actually the member thinks it’s going to deliver. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

It’s a pleasure to rise for New Zealand First on this particular Employment Relations (Collective Agreements in Triangular Relationships) Amendment Bill. New Zealand First always takes a very fair perspective on these bills. We agree with the member—Helen White—that’s proposing the bill. We do want to see real wages rising in this country, but we also quite profoundly believe in flexibility in the labour market. So I guess we try to balance those two aspects out. We have modestly described ourselves as Switzerland in these issues between the great blocs of the left and the right.

We have previously supported the primary Act that came to pass in 2019. I was actually on the Education and Workforce Committee when that bill came through and it was clear that we did have to tidy up these triangular employment relationships. That particular bill gave some accountability to the labour hiring company, to their workers, so that when they were contracted out, they could not be badly treated and not have any comeback on the actual labour hire company. So it did clarify some of those terms and conditions. We’re proud to bring that forward. We heard some pretty disturbing stories, as I recall, on that committee. Jan Tinetti was on that committee as well and that was a good bill. That was a bill that identified a problem and put forward a solution.

However, we believe on balance this time that the flexibility in the labour market that contract work and that these labour hire companies and those arrangements add to the employment ecosystem; that’s important. It’s really important. There are businesses that need to scale up for short periods of time. We heard Katie Nimon talking about the horticultural sector. It is probably the biggest user of these types of contracts. That’s an absolutely fair and reasonable and good thing to have within our employment relations ecosystem.

So we don’t want to add complexity into that, to add a three-way type thing where there’s all of a sudden a collective agreement with a third party that’s separate or in addition to the relatively simple mechanism that we have now where the labour hire company and the employee are the mechanisms that fit together, that’s where the employment relationship is, and then they are contracted out separately to a third-party employer.

So it is quite a simple arrangement now. We think this adds unnecessary complexity. We have not seen any evidence presented to date that this will add to wages, to what would be our primary driver if we were to support this to lift wages, because I think in a lot of times these temporary workers are actually paid—there’s a premium. To get someone in at short notice, you actually have to pay a premium. So those workers are very valuable to those businesses that need some surge capacity, so often there will be a premium. So what actually is the evidence here is that some are paid in net. We are actually making some gains in adding this extra complexity.

We don’t think that bar has been crossed by the member in bringing this bill forward, as well-intentioned as it is. There might be a suspicion that, as some of my colleagues over here have alluded to, this is more about appeasing a union base and trying to gain them more influence—which is fair enough; they are the Labour Party after all—but it doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to buy into that narrative or into that purpose. So on balance, we think this bill adds complexity to something that’s relatively straightforward, if possible, for a not defined outcome. So New Zealand First will not be supporting this bill. Thank you.

Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I stand this evening as the spokesperson for workers’ rights for Te Pāti Māori but also as a wahine Māori and as a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter of a hapori who carries the weight of the country on their backs in the hospitals, on the building sites, in the factories, and in the fields.

This bill, the Employment Relations (Collective Agreements in Triangular Relationships) Amendment Bill, might sound technical on the surface, but, make no mistake, it goes right to the heart of mana tangata: the dignity, worth, and rights of every worker across Aotearoa. Right now, too many of our whānau are stuck in the shadows of the employment system, not because they don’t work hard and not because they lack skills, but because the system was never built to protect them. The bill seeks to change that.

Let me put a human face to this issue. Let me tell you about Hēmi. Hēmi is a Māori labourer. He’s employed by a labour hire agency. He does the same mahi as everybody else on the construction site. Every day, he walks on to the construction site run by a large firm—let’s call it Big Build Ltd. Hēmi doesn’t wear a different uniform and he’s not doing easier work, but, in fact, he’s hauling the same timber, pouring the same concrete, and taking the same risks as the workers directly employed by Big Build Ltd. But while those Big Build workers are covered by a union collective agreement with higher pay rates, proper cultural leave, and overtime compensation and safety protections, Hēmi gets none of that. Why? Because, he’s technically employed by someone else. He is doing the same mahi in the same direction, and is treated as less than. That’s the injustice, and that’s exactly what this bill addresses.

Under this bill, if Hēmi is a union member and he is doing work that falls under a collective agreement of the controlling company, then that agreement should apply to him. No more back doors for employers to undercut workers, no more tiered workforce, and no more treating contractors as disposable labour.

Let me be very clear: this bill comes at a time when workers’ rights in Aotearoa are under full-scale attack. Since this Government took power in 2023, we have seen the repeal of fair pay agreements, a move that stripped away collective bargaining power; they’ve brought back the 90-day trial periods for all businesses, allowing any employer to fire a worker without cause or consequence; they’ve proposed removing the right to challenge unjustified dismissal for those earning over $180,000, setting a dangerous precedent that links rights to income; and, more recently, they’ve introduced changes to the Recognised Seasonal Employer Scheme that will deepen the exploitation of migrant workers—workers who already face tough conditions in the orchards and the vineyards of this country. These changes will make it harder for those workers to leave abusive jobs or to speak out about mistreatment, trapping them in silence.

These actions are not isolated; they are coordinated ideological attacks on the working class, on tangata whenua, on migrants, on women—on those with the least power and the most to lose.

Because we believe in kotahitanga and collective strength and because we believe in a future where every worker—no matter where they come from or who they work for—has the right to dignity, protection, and fair treatment, to every Hēmi out there, this bill says, “We see you, we value you, and we will fight for you.” Te Pāti Māori stands in full support of this bill, and we call on every member of this House to stand with the workers across Aotearoa. Tēnā koutou.

Kia ora, Madam Speaker. I’d like to start by acknowledging my colleague Helen White and congratulate her on bringing this bill to the House; and, prior to her, my colleague Adrian Rurawhe who had the bill drawn from the ballot; but really, really want to acknowledge former colleague Marja Lubeck, who saw some issues in the triangular relationship and had this bill drafted to ensure that we were moving in the right direction.

I’d like to just say that, yes, I was part of that select committee that the member the Hon Mark Patterson mentioned, and I think you’re right about 2019. We did hear, during that time, some terrible, terrible stories around what was happening in that triangular relationship. We heard about people who were entering into workforces where they were alongside people who were on collective agreements, doing exactly the same work—exactly the same work—and earning less money but being treated, as the member rightly pointed out, with terrible conditions and much worse conditions.

At that time, we sorted that out, but there is still something missing—and that is the pay conditions. It is not right that two people can be working on the same work site and doing exactly the same job and earning completely different pay. That is fundamentally wrong in this country, and that needs to be sorted. If this bill doesn’t go through tonight, then I would hope that members would collectively come together and think of a solution. Because it is absolutely wrong.

To say that “Oh, it’s not really happening; companies aren’t doing that.”, that is wrong as well. We, unfortunately, have some companies—and I’m not saying all companies—who are going through and making the promises through collective agreement bargaining and then, unfortunately, using labour hire companies to then withdraw on their promises that they made throughout that collective bargaining time. That is fundamentally wrong. We need to protect our workers. We need to protect them to ensure that they have the same rights, the same pay as the workers doing the same job as them in the same company.

Now, to say that “The collective agreement is extending the rights of the collective agreement to all is just not right” is unbelievable to me. The collective agreement protects workers’ rights and pay conditions. It stops the race to the bottom. It stops workers being exploited. Surely every single member in this House wants to see workers protected. Yes, we want to see growth, but we want to see the workers protected—growth not at the expense of workers. So I urge people to think carefully about that; I urge people to think that if this doesn’t go through tonight, we still have a problem tomorrow and it still needs a solution. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Before I get to the matter at hand, I just thought it was appropriate to thank the member of the press gallery who’s retiring very shortly, Claire Trevett. I think she’s done a great job at servicing our democracy. So she’s now got her name officially on Hansard. There we go.

To the matter at hand—

Hon David Parker: What did you say about the cow?

GRANT McCALLUM: Ha, ha! No, I’m not going to say that, Hon David Parker—that’s not the part that she would want in Hansard. Ha, ha! Very good, thank you—no.

Look, let’s get to the guts of the matter here. I find it really ironic that I’m standing here now after having the mover of the bill stand up and talk about the damage that was done to people’s wages in the late 1980s. Well, guess who was in power in the late 80s? Oh, that’s right: it was the Labour Party. It was a Labour Government, and that is what the mover was referring to. At that point, by the way, they had compulsory unionism, and let’s not kid ourselves here: this is, by stealth, trying to quietly bring back more and more compulsion around the union movement. So I just have to wonder: who actually wrote this member’s bill? Ooh, might it be the Council of Trade Unions? I would have to think there’s a high chance of that, wouldn’t you?

What are we going to achieve by actually bringing this in? Well, the member talked about the cost of living and the struggles that workers have because of situations like this. Well, actually, what affects the cost of living more than anything else? Inflation. When this Government came into power, the inflation rate was over 7 percent. That’s what makes it hard for households to balance their budgets.

The other thing that we had to deal with was high interest rates. That makes the mortgage payments high and high rents, and those are the sorts of things that will make a real difference to people, not just fiddling around with trying to bring back compulsory unionism by stealth.

If we go back and think about that, you know, the challenges that we would have if we went down this track of trying to work out who gets paid what for what, in a lot of cases when you employ contract labour like that, you end up—because it’s a short-term employment, you pay them more. That is so often the case; I’ve seen it happen many, many times.

You’ve got to remember, also: who is actually going to be the group that’s going to struggle the most with dealing with these issues, working out what they can and can’t do? I’ll tell you who it’ll be: it’ll be small business, because it’s small business that struggle, that have to deal with more paperwork, more red tape. Of course, that is what the Opposition specialise in: bringing in things to make it harder for business and to introduce more red tape. That will not advance the cause of workers, and it will certainly not advance the cause of businesses.

And guess what? Employees need successful businesses, and for a business to employ a contract worker, it means that they have to be doing well. You want your businesses to do well; you don’t want to make it harder for them and make restrictions on them growing. So that is something we have to keep in mind—really, really important.

But I just would like to remind everyone that we are in the Government that is focused on the things that really matter, which is growing the real wages of people and, as we’ve said, getting inflation under control and getting interest rates down. That is what is actually making a difference in this country, not bringing in this extra red tape so that we can then, by stealth, bring back compulsory unionism by stealth. That is not what we need in this country.

Hon James Meager: No.

GRANT McCALLUM: I certainly hear that support from this side of the House, and I thank the support of the other parties to do what we have to do with this bill, and that is to kick it back—back into the dim, dark past where it belongs. On that note, I do not commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a privilege to take a call on this bill tonight, and I want to acknowledge my colleague Helen White for bringing it to the House. I want to take a moment to just counter some of the comments that have been made from the other side, that, quite frankly, are just really, really wrong.

So I might start, first of all—and I do acknowledge the member from New Zealand First the Hon Mark Patterson, and I acknowledge that New Zealand First have supported a bill that was brought by the Labour Party recently. I do acknowledge that. There’s one particular area in his speech that I wanted to follow up on, and that was around the cost to employers, in that employers pay a premium for labour hire workers. They do. They pay a premium to the labour hire company. My experience having—and I’ll get to some of the types of employers that use labour hire companies, because, again, there’s been some interesting facts presented from the other side that I’d say actually aren’t factual. Yes, employers do pay a premium for labour hire workers. But that doesn’t get passed to the worker. There’s a ticket-clipping exercise for the labour hire company. And the experience I’ve had is talking to workers who are standing alongside permanent employees who are being paid less, but the employer is actually paying more for that worker because there is a percentage being passed on to the labour hire company. So that’s the first thing.

Related to that, I wanted to talk about the time frames that these people are working for these companies. I have spoken to workers, actual workers in my electorate, who have worked for the same labour hire company at the same large sawmill in Nelson for years—years. This is not about seasonal work. The seasonal workers in Nelson at Sealord are actually part of a collective agreement, for the record. So Katie Nimon could come and learn a little bit about that. But we’re talking about large sawmills, working there for years, the sawmill paying more money than they would to a permanent employee through a labour hire company. The most recent examples of this in Nelson have actually been exploited migrant workers. So it was in the employer’s interest to leave those people working for a labour hire company. Unfortunately, those workers are then unable to access the visas they need. So there’s a whole system tied up here that actually leads to exploitation. So I just want to counter some of the arguments presented on the other side with actually what happens in the real world.

Other members talked about choice. I’ve never, ever, ever talked to a labour hire worker—and I’ve talked to many of them—who doesn’t want a permanent job, who hasn’t asked the employer to be employed permanently.

Hon Karen Chhour: I was a labour worker. Didn’t want a permanent job.

RACHEL BOYACK: Well, you often haven’t talked to them! I’ve talked to lots of them in my electorate. They work in processing companies, they work in fish processing, they work for sawmills, they work in the horticulture sector. They want permanent employment. This is not about a choice. They go to a labour hire company as the choice of last resort.

The last thing is that there’s been a lot of comment about this hurting small businesses, and that it’s going to add all this red tape. The member’s been very clear: this only applies when a collective agreement is in place, and the majority of collective agreements are at large employers. It doesn’t add any other, extra party to this. All it’s doing is implying the same wages and conditions, so that John who’s standing here working in the sawmill, and Jane standing next to him, doing the same job, get the same pay. Katie Nimon started to talk about, “How dare we talk about lifting wages?”. Well, for goodness’ sake! We’re the Labour Party. We believe in people being paid a decent wage for a fair day’s work. That’s what we stand for. That’s why I’m a member of the Labour Party. That’s why I am a Labour MP. Because I fundamentally believe that if an employer can afford to pay somebody the same for doing the same day’s work, they should do that. And an employer who’s paying a premium to a labour hire company, literally for years, can actually afford to take that person on permanently and pay them the proper wages and conditions.

Laura McClure: They usually do, when they’re good.

RACHEL BOYACK: The funny thing is, I’ve talked to so many of them and actually done this as a job for years. They don’t. They actually don’t. This law needs to change. Congratulations to Helen White, and I’d encourage Mark Patterson to maybe rethink New Zealand First’s position, because I think you’ve made the wrong call on this one, mate, and I know we can get you there tonight.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to speak on this bill this evening. Whenever we talk about employment law in this House—anything to do with workers, with businesses, with employment relationships—the Opposition couches it as “We’re for the worker, and everyone else isn’t.” They couch it as “A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.”, which we agree with. The difference is we don’t think we know exactly what that amount of money is for every employee in the country. We don’t believe we should be getting in the middle of the employment relationship and telling the employee, “Hey, this is what you should negotiate with your boss.” Nor do we think we should be getting in there and telling the employer, “This is the way you’ve got to run your business.”

Surprisingly enough, you can choose not to take a side in the debate. You can choose to be for New Zealand. You can choose to take views on what’s right in terms of employment law. You can choose to determine what’s right in an employment relationship in the context of what is right for a place we call home, for a place we call New Zealand.

We believe that people have the right to make choices themselves, that businesses have the right to negotiate, and, ultimately, we want them doing this to the benefit of this country. We want productivity and we want growth in New Zealand, and this bill counters that. This bill goes against that. This bill adds red tape. You hear the Labour Party want to say, “Hey, we don’t know what that red tape is.” Well, all of a sudden, every small business in New Zealand that is providing some form of labour to other employers for a temporary basis has to go, “Hold on a minute. What’s your relationship with your employer? What’s your relationship with your employee? Do we now have to pay our staff more because you’ve got some different relationship with your employees?”

I’d be interested to know: if the Labour Party thought that those employees were earning more than the employees at the controlling employer’s workplace, would it go the other way? Or does Labour have a one-way view on the cost of employment and a one-way view on productivity—downwards, of course—in this country?

Earlier in this discussion, Labour couched this as being about putting food on the table. Do you know what? I’m getting a bit sick of the Opposition talking about their interest in the average New Zealander, when they voted against things that literally put money on the table of those employees in this House last year. Tax cuts, tax cuts and tax relief, for the average New Zealander who would have then been helped by, supposedly, in their opinion, this bill. They could have just avoided the complication that this bill would bring to this House and simply voted for tax relief and put more money in the pockets of the average worker. But no, they chose not to do that because they think that they know best. They think they know best for the employee. They think they can get their head into the game of every employment relationship in this country and make it not only more complicated but make the decision for business, make the decision for employees.

On this side of the House, we have a different view. We have a view that we need to create employment relationships in this country that can be negotiated between employers and employees and can help us grow the average wage, the average salary, the productivity of this nation.

There is a role that flexibility plays for employees and for employers. There is a need for employment relationships that aren’t fixed, that allow what they are calling controlling employers to have employees come for a season, for a short period of time; maybe sometimes that’s for a long period of time—I don’t know what the business decision or the employment relationship decision is behind that particular example, because I’m not trying to get in the heads of every employer in the country and tell them how they need to run their business. And I’m not trying to get in the heads of every employee in this country who chooses to work for one of these businesses—and it is a choice. It is a choice that they make, and therefore we do not commend this bill to the House.

Thank you for the contributions that everybody has made tonight. I remember an employer coming to talk to me in my capacity as an employment lawyer, and they wanted to know what they needed to pay workers in New Zealand who they were employing for a short time. They, first of all, asked what they had to pay for their casual workforce. I told them “Well, actually, there’s the minimum wage, but you don’t have to pay them anything extra.” They were shocked because, in Australia, they pay them 20 percent more and they have an award so people get paid on top of the award and then they get a weighting for being a casual. Then, they asked me what they would have to pay them for things like holidays. There was so little in the pot for workers in this country, I was ashamed and they were shocked—they were completely shocked at how little they had to pay our workers.

I tried to tell a story from the 1980s through to now in New Zealand about what has happened to wage growth in this country. The only part of that that the current Government were interested in was a bit that didn’t actually land on their watch. That was the only part they wanted to know about. That seems to me a little bit like arrogance, doesn’t it? We are supposed to learn from history. We are supposed to learn what works and what doesn’t. What did this country in, in a big way, was the Employment Contracts Act because it failed to recognise the reality of life, and, actually, it damaged New Zealand and New Zealand workers to such an extent that we are still mopping up—we are still mopping up.

This was supposed to be a little bit of that mop up, because what it said was that workers doing the same work who were being hired by labour hire companies could actually opt to go on the same terms and conditions. We were told that it was complicated and it was red tape. Well, I’m sorry, how silly are people? That’s not red tape. We have employment in this country, and it’s pretty simple: you calculate the amount that you pay the hire company based on the terms and conditions you pay your own workforce. That isn’t that hard. Our employers are pretty much smart enough to do that. That way, people who are doing that work can pay their bills. They can pay and, actually, the taxpayer doesn’t have to top them up. That is actually what’s really happening.

There is this myth that somehow the National Party are the people who understand economics. This shows the problem with the myth—it shows the problem—because it’s false economy if you underpay workers, if they never get a share of the wealth of the country, and it all goes offshore and it all goes to the 1 percent, then we end up with a mess of a country. We end up with crime. We end up with mental health issues. We end up with violence. We end up with all of those things because it is a very stressful place to live. It might not happen on somebody’s farm that they inherited from their parents in the North—it might not happen there—and it might not even happen for their kids, but it’s happening to our kids in this country. It’s happening because they cannot pay their bills. So this was actually an attempt to do that tonight, just a little nudge that people are paid the same amount. It’s not that hard.

When I was once involved as a lawyer out at the steel mill, they had something called an equalisation clause. It worked in a very similar way. It said, “If you come on site and you’re a contractor, you should be paid the same amount as the people who are there.” Guess what! Actually, the world didn’t cave in. We still made steel. People just got paid a decent amount. People retired better.

We need to start being smart in this House and stop this absolute garbage, that fills the head, of an ideology that just cannot see past the word “union”, because that’s what’s going on. Thank you for listening to me.