Written By: - Date published: 12:52 pm, July 24th, 2008 - 80 comments
Categories: national, workers' rights -
Tags: 90 day policy, ACC
You know you’re in for a treat when a political party’s ‘policy’ (I still refuse to consider half a dozen bullet points a policy) concerning the rights of New Zealanders at work the place most of us spend a good part of our days nearly avoids any mention of the word ‘rights’. On its surface, National’s ‘workplace’ policy seems fairly mild (bullet points help in that regard) but, when you look at what it actually means in practise it’s classic National: anti-worker, anti-rights, anti-wage rises. The difference between this policy and Brash’s extreme 2005 policy is one of tone, not substance.
Introduce a 90-day trial period for new employees by agreement between the employer and the employee, for businesses with fewer than 20 staff.
We’ve discussed the 90 Day No Rights policy already (1,2). It’s a mandate for bad bosses to stand over vulnerable workers. Workers will be able to be fired for refusing to work in unsafe conditions, refusing to do unpaid overtime, joining a union, or any of a limitless list of ‘reasons’. Bad bosses will be able to keep the threat of instant dismissal over new workers at all times.
Continue to allow union access to workplaces with the employer’s consent. • Restore workers’ rights to bargain collectively without having to belong to a union.
Unions currently have the right to reasonably access workplaces to talk to members and to recruit. This policy means National would allow employers to bar the union from the workplace. Non-union collective bargaining is when a ‘bargaining agent’ (often the boss or paid by the boss) draws up a collective contract between workers and the boss. The boss refuses to deal with the workers’ union because there’s already a collective contract; workers can accept the collective offered or get nothing. These moves are designed to undermine collective bargaining and, thereby, weaken workers’ power to win better pay and conditions.
Retain the Mediation Service but ensure it is properly resourced with properly qualified mediators. • Require the Employment Relations Authority to act judicially in accordance with the principles of natural justice, including the right to be heard, and the right to cross-examine before an impartial referee. • Allow injunctions and important questions of law to be heard in the first instance in the Employment Court. • Allow a right of appeal to the Court of Appeal.
The mediators in the Mediation service are already properly qualified, unless by ‘properly qualified’ National means ‘pro-employer’. The other changes seem designed to make the system more litigious and expensive, putting roadblocks in the way of workers being able to enforce their remaining work rights.
Keep four weeks annual leave, but allow employees to request trade of the fourth week for cash.
If you believe that the choice will genuinely be in workers’ hands, I have some magic beans you might be interested in buying.
Appoint a working party to review the Holidays Act, especially the issue of relevant daily pay.
Labour introduced relevant daily pay to make sure a worker’s leave pay equalled her average daily pay because many waged workers earn a large part of their pay through regular overtime but were previously only paid their ordinary time wages when they were sick or on holiday. National wants to reverse this.
Sometimes what is missing is just as revealing as what’s there: There’s no mention of ACC, paid parental leave, minimum wage increases, Kiwisaver, meal breaks, time and a half on public holidays, and so on. And despite all the rhetoric we’ve heard over the last year, absolutely no mention of how National would lift wages.
UPDATE: Jafapete has some good analysis here and Rogernome likewise here.
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At bargaining I want a 6% pay increase. The boss argues that ‘buying back’ one week of annual leave = a 2% increase and digs his heels in at 4%.
Of course, the 2% that the boss points to is money he would have paid out in wages anyway to someone else while I was on leave.
The ‘buy back’ is about reducing wage demands/ wages, NOT annual leave. The boss is going to be paying for 4 weeks leave regardless.
Lew:
I don’t believe either objectivity or unbiased are possible. All you can really do is know what the preemptive biases are.
That is why I like The Economist. Clearly has a distinct of set of biases as an institution and proudly proclaims them. But their articles clearly state alternative ideas and why they disagree with them. They also discourse on previous opinions and explain why they turned out to be incorrect. There are a number of other news media around like that.
The media here often do have the thoughtful articles – but well into the paper. Their headline articles tend to be insipid, thoughtless, and what looks like headline driven rather than news driven.
That of course shows up in the type of pap that is fed to the media as ‘policy’. For instance an industrial relations policy as 12 or so bullet points with ambiguous meanings. However if that is what the media are willing to accept, then that is what they will get.
Who cares what is on page 15? Well I do – probably why I don’t watch TV news or ‘current affairs’ any more. At least the net means I can find out this stuff without having it filtered. I can find the clearly biased opinion and make my own assessment of their biases.
You haven’t justified why time and a half should be paid on public holidays in addition to the extra pay that a worker already gets.
They should either get paid OR a paid day off. At the moment they effectively get both.
Labour promotes policies which are designed to penalise the employer because the unions hate employers. Another example is Kiwisaver. We hear a lot about the tax credit that doesn’t actually cover the full cost of forced employer contributions that has become another employment cost.
What is sad about National’s policy is that it only applies to work places with 20 or less staff. It’s too little and too modest and won’t do very much at all to move NZ forward.
You do realise HS that franchises like subway would be covered under this. So if a subway restaurant has 20 or less staff then it’s covered by this. There are thousands of vulnerable low paid employees who will have their rights removed by this. Remember workers rights are human rights.
Lynn: “I don’t believe either objectivity or unbiased are possible. All you can really do is know what the preemptive biases are.”
I agree entirely. In many ways, getting to the heart of a matter is a process of triangulation – read widely around a story, look for the common threads which appear in each rendition, and most importantly, which are left out, by whom, and for what apparent reasons.
L
Lew: Yep and beware of people that “have the truth” because they are sure to be lying to themselves. In the end you have to make up your own mind on each issue and labels are irrelevant.
In the end, as your world picture evolves, all you can be sure of is that you have to make a decisions because to not make them is to make them by default. I changed over decades from a arrogant simplistic lad with attitudes like Rob, to a reluctant socialist (still arrogant however). The more I looked at people and history, the more you realize that talent arises in unexpected places, and society survives as a whole by allowing talent to flourish.
For all of the waffling of the neo-cons/neo-libs, they cling to the unproven theory that opportunity happens without infrastructure. It does for those who are willing to sacrifice most of their life to chase it. However that it is only the most obsessive and maladjusted who are willing to do that.
To allow whole groups of people to seize opportunities you have to provide the social infrastructure for it to happen. To the uninformed this looks like social engineering whereas it is social and economic survival generations out.
I’ve said this many times before – most of the ‘right’ are defined by their habit of thinking short-term.
Well said, Lynn.
L
This blog is a joke. How at all does it attempt to come to a balanced judgement on any of the issues? Instead we’re left stranded with the same anti-employer and anti-business sentiment over and over again.
Maybe it’s time for a change in tact.
“Non-union collective bargaining is when a ‘bargaining agent’ (often the boss or paid by the boss) draws up a collective contract between workers and the boss. The boss refuses to deal with the workers’ union because there’s already a collective contract; workers can accept the collective offered or get nothing. These moves are designed to undermine collective bargaining and, thereby, weaken workers’ power to win better pay and conditions.”
Actually, this is already the case (except for non-union collectives) – employers are not compelled to bargain collectively. In theory there could also be another collective agreement signed by another union in the same workplace, since there are in some cases several unions representing the same occupational group.
Labour and all supporters should recognise by now that the MECA in particular is an attempt to reintroduce industry awards by another means. Collectives should be limited to one employer rather than being allowed to spread across multiple employers as the MECA is designed to do.
Swampy,
Why should they be limited to a single employer?
We’ve all seen MECAs within the public sector benefit both employers and workers as there is a clear economy of scale when it comes to bargaining. I’ve never been sure if the advantage is unique to the public sector (where the employers aren’t in competition), are there places in the private sector where MECAs are working?