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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Scoopit!
Leftie, lots of self-employed people, many of them on modest incomes, effectively do “sell” all of their holidays. Do you propose to make this illegal as well?
“Hello workers. You know how we banned your union from the workplace and instituted a non-union collective agreement? Well guess what, this year we’re cutting your pay by 2%. You can make that up by selling your fourth week’s leave. But of course, it’s entirely your choice. Except for you lot in your first 90 days – you’re signing over your leave now or else you’re out the door. Any questions? Thought not.”
Billy. Work rights are the rights an employee has in dealing with his or her employer. To speak of the work rights of someone who is self-employed is an absurd excercise in semantics – they decide their own working conditions as they see fit.
I see the partisans at Scoop have had some fun with Photoshop and put Donald Trump’s hair on John Key’s head. http://www.scoop.co.nz
Is anyone under an illusion that those guys are impartial? It’s getting quite embarrassing for them. They wouldn’t do something similar for the Prime Minister.
Billy…what Tane said. Lets stay on the same page aye.
“We know that in reality many workers would actually not have a choice if this policy went in – they would be forced by their employers to give up their fourth week.”
What do you base this statement on Steve?
How would the employer force someone to give up the forth week.
Your scaremongering is getting ridiculous
Awsome work Steve. I’ve also had a crack at reading between the lines on this one (which is difficult given the lack of detail).
http://rogernome.blogspot.com/2008/07/nationals-2008-industrial-relations.html
HS. If someone is incompetent, there is a simple process to deal with them – discuss the issue, warn them, offer assistance to help them get up to speed, warn again, sack. If your reasons are fair, then it’s hardly a burdensome process – make the worker aware fo your concerns, warning the worker to do better, helping them do better, warning them of the sack if they don’t, sacking them when they won’t/can’t.
And, of course, if there’s gross misconduct (stealing, fighting, abandonment of the job) dismissal can be immediate without these stages.
Sounds like a topic for a spinbusting post, actually.
Mike, I explained how just such a situation happened to me once further up the thread.
If you believe that the choice will genuinely be in workers’ hands, I have some magic beans you might be interested in buying.
If you really consider that to be “between the lines” analysis then you probably believe those beans are magic…
Scribe:
There is all of that photo shopped junk from Whale etc. I guess that someone thought that field of exercise had already been fully explored. They tried new fields.
However I suspect this more a case of attacking the messenger. Wasn’t that in the C/T rulebook somewhere. So for that matter was diverting away from context to something trivial.
Scribe – you seem to follow the C/T tactical book quite well? For that matter some of the other comments up here seem to be organised that way as well.
Blar: Explain why the circumstances outlined could not happen under this ‘policy’ given that there is bugger all detail. It is hard to complain about the analysis if you can’t say why it won’t happen.
Frankly the policy at this level looks like total bullshit for the media to get headlines from. So people on this site like picking holes in bullshit policies
lprent,
I went to Scoop to look at policies etc, and stumbled across it.
Whale doesn’t try to operate in an objective way and people know what they get. Scoop claims to be “independent news”; it’s just another left-wing mouthpiece.
Reflecting on the Australian experience:
The introduction of Workchoices (which had similar provisions, except they lasted forever and applied to anyone working in a business with less than 100 employees) allowed exactly this to happen. The number of bosses who misused the provisions was infinitessimal compared to the number firms in the economy but the actions of this handful adversely affected the lives of thousands of workers and their families. The ACTU leapt on every instance and made sure it was known. Fall-out was so bad that it’s seen as one of the primary reasons the Coalition lost. So: severe adverse affect for a minority of workers; creates fear and uncertainty in the rest; bad for the Party that introduces it. Ergo, negative and stupid.
In Australia the law allows for 50 percent of your annual leave to be traded for cash. Most workers seem pleased to have the option (I exercised it once myself and had an incredible two weeks rather than a mediocre four) and, unlike the dismissal provisions no one seems to be complaining about bosses acting unreasonably. Certainly it’s not a major focus of the ACTU’s “Your Rights at Work” campaign, unlike the dismissal issue.
Extrapolating wildly here, but if you’re in a position of negotiating to trade off your annual leave for cash, that means you’ve been there at least a year and thus are probably working for a reasonable boss who hasn’t had a dummy spit and sacked you because you’re not prepared to put up with his or her capriciousness.
You’re right about the brevity and the language. This is either fiendishly clever stuff carefully crafted by evil geniuses so it can mean just about anything, or it’s vague thinking cobbled together in a hurry with no thought for precision just because they can’t go into an election with no policy, but they’re so sure of winning they can’t be bothered making the effort. Not good either way.
I don’t believe that there is a such a thing as being “objective” in the media. Look at the Granny for instance. Being independent doesn’t mean that they don’t have a viewpoint – so what.
I corrected the spelling during edit – dictionary caught me.
I think if we cut through what’s being said, National’s policy leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
Steve (and others) are filling in the blanks with scaremongering tactics about what might happen. Others are looking at it and giving National the benefit of the doubt, expecting the “law of common sense” to prevail.
We can look forward to more concrete policy rollout when the PM announces an election date. Until then, debating with Steve will continue to be a very tiresome process.
SP
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.”
The Nats are on the record as saying.
“That would be only at the employee’s request and could not be raised in employment negotiations. National understands that many people are doing it hard, and they would opt for cash in hand rather than a week off work.
But that won’t be the case for everyone, that’s why it will be entirely in the hands of the worker.”
I suggest you email the Nats and see if they’re interested in your magic beans.
edit – Scribe agreed when’s the last possible date for the election. I suspect they’ll try to put it off as long as possible
roger nome. cheers. the lack of due process element of the 90 Day policy is a real problem – it opens the door for dismissal even on supposedly prohibited grounds.
I’ve also noticed something strange. You and jafapete have quoted from the media release and I’ve gone from the PDF of the policy – they say different things regarding union access. In the PDF, union access is permitted only with the employer’s consent. In the media release, that permission cannot be reasonably withheld…
… god, what a party, you can’t trust their spokespeople to know policy in their own areas and concurrently released statements of the same policy state the policy in substantially different ways.
“That would be only at the employee’s request and could not be raised in employment negotiations.”
They said something similar about individual contracts last time around.
lprent,
I don’t believe that there is a such a thing as being “objective’ in the media.
There is objectivity in the media (though rare); however, no journalist is objective. His or her writing can be, though.
As far as the Herald goes, some people have short memories. The Herald’s coverage of two huge stories the week of the 2005 election probably determined the outcome. Brethren, page 1. Taito, page 5 or so. And which story is still actual news today?
Regarding the Scoop photoshopping, why is that OK but the photoshopping on Whale Oil is evil?
Scribe
Re scoop – I have a relation who works there they tend to go after whoever at times as per these links.
http://img.scoop.co.nz/media/video/0709/clark_lizard_clark.mpg
http://img.scoop.co.nz/stories/images/0804/c6ce78f6875317b9244c.jpeg
http://img.scoop.co.nz/stories/images/0804/e9a1c1658d0d6b4b2c3c.jpeg
hs,
They do run satire from time to time, and I don’t have a problem with photoshopped images being created to supplement such articles.
I find it off-putting when they do it to accompany press releases etc. It’s editorialising something on a site that’s supposed to be the words straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
Anyway, we’re getting off topic. Apologies SP et al.
Scribe: “Regarding the Scoop photoshopping, why is that OK but the photoshopping on Whale Oil is evil?”
Well, for one thing, they photoshopped a toupee on his head, rather than his head onto porn.
It’s the cheerful waggery of chalk-drawings on the footpath as compared to the tagging of spraypaint genitals on billboard models.
L
Scribe: Ummm I think that the bretheren thing comes up every time that the ERA is mentioned? Bet that has more column inches since 2005 than Taito does.
I think that the photo shopping will happen regardless. I suspect that scoop will do whatever happens to be topical. It is the current equivalent of satirical cartoons.
I’m afraid that this type of crappy press release from the Nat’s (can’t really call it a policy) will allow a lot of speculation. Expect more of it
Scribe: Ummm I think that the bretheren thing comes up every time that the ERA is mentioned? Bet that has more column inches since 2005 than Taito does.
Well, whatever one says about the Brethren’s pamphlets, you can’t say they were illegal. The jury’s still out on Taito, literally, despite the fact the only thing he was apparently guilty of, to paraphrase the PM, was helping his constituents.
Nope – I can’t say they were illegal.
However I can say that I think the the 1993 electoral act was very poorly written. It seems to have been designed to cause problems in a MMP environment. The specific actions like putting what were essentially bogus addresses on attack pamphlets should have been covered by the act but weren’t.
Taito has mainly been done under other acts for much the same reason.
[lprent: get back on topic - oops that is me....]
“Blar: Explain why the circumstances outlined could not happen under this ‘policy’ given that there is bugger all detail. It is hard to complain about the analysis if you can’t say why it won’t happen.”
There were no circumstances outlined there – just a snide remark.
That’s an assertion, not analysis and an assertion can be disproved as easily as one can be made.
Leaving aside the detail, if I can sensibly use that term in relation to Nat party policy…
If Nat’s employment policy was not really going to change anything, (as the right seem to be arguing) it wouldn’t have been put out there in the first place.
So what are the potential changes?
Logically they can only be somewhere on the scale of negative scenarios that have been postulated on comments here.
Positive changes would have been trumpeted by the Nats but I’ve heard nothing anywhere besides unconvincing protestations that things will remain much as they are at present…which makes no sense whatsoever for the reason given at the beginning of this comment.
The Australian experience:
Union says boss told apprentice “get haircut, no tomatoes, you’re a fag’
Article from: The Daily Telegraph
By Joe Hildebrand, Political Reporter
July 24, 2008 12:00am
AN ABUSED teenage apprentice was told by his boss that he wasn’t allowed to put fresh tomato on his sandwiches in his lunch break.
He was also told he wasn’t allowed to make phone calls on his breaks, his mum wasn’t to drive him to work and he had to have a haircut once a week.
In an extraordinary catalogue of alleged abuse, recorded by the young man in his diary, employer John Ryan also called trainee cabinetmaker Byron Nolan a “fag”, forced him to wash all the workers’ dishes and accused him of taking drugs.
Byron was also forced to do unpaid work on the weekends and was not paid for the first two weeks of his employment.
Mr Ryan then sacked him two days before his three-month probation ended.
Scribe: “There is objectivity in the media (though rare); however, no journalist is objective. His or her writing can be, though.”
I meant to respond to this earlier, but was too busy.
Objectivity in the media (any media, not just the news) is a Heisenbug – a phenomenon which changes because you observe it. The process of making an event or policy or an idea into a format which is consumable means that some things get left in, some get left out, and some get misrepresented.
Allow me to quote Nick Davies:
“The great blockbuster myth of modern journalism is objectivity, the idea that a good newspaper or broadcaster simply collects and reproduces the objective truth. It is a classic Flat Earth tale, widely believed and devoid of reality. It has never happened and never will happen because it cannot happen. Reality exists objectively, but any attempt to record the truth about it always and everywhere necessarily involves selection, by using the kind of judgements [described above]. In this sense, all news is artifice.” (From Flat Earth News, which should be required reading for anyone who cares about how the media works.)
If you want to test this, take a day off and immerse yourself in it. For a day in my life, do at least half of the following: listen to Morning Report and Paul Homes and Marcus Lush; read the DomPost and the Herald and the ODT. then listen to Midday Report and The World At Noon, then Larry Williams Drive and Bill Ralston Drive and Checkpoint, then watch One News, 3 News and Prime News. There will, on a given day, be a large degree of commonality between these sources, in terms of the stories they cover. However the angle on each outlet’s rendition of each story will be (sometimes subtly, sometimes not) different. Which one is objective? It’s quite possible for two renditions of the same story to both be perfectly true – based on the same facts, and the same assumptions, and even the same soundbites – and yet not be identical. You could say they are equally objective, but objectivity isn’t a sort-of quality: something either is or it isn’t. You’d be more correct to say they’re equally unobjective.
Of course, it’s easy to answer this question ideologically – the one which favours the government/the opposition (or whatever) is the one you consider to be objectively correct. But I don’t need to tell you that’s intellectually dishonest
Edit: Perhaps the source of the confusion is that people tend to say `objective’ when they mean `unbiased’.
L
Lew, you should try a paper in journalism. You might be surprised to discover that there are ways to report facts in a balanced way. Increasingly, that’s not how things are done. That’s something to be sad about, not to celebrate.
But on point, remember, please, that this applies to very small businesses – the ones in which the owner is likely down in the trenches slaving away with the staff. These are not faceless corporate minions accountable only to shareholders. They’re real people, most of whom work on a profit shoestring. Forcing businesses like that to carry dead wood because they can’t afford to dismiss someone is an insult to the other members of the team.
But, then, first, you have to admit that small business owners are workers, too. And fully human.
Johndoe: “there are ways to report facts in a balanced way.”
`Balanced’ is not the same as `objective’; in fact, balance can be the enemy of objectivity because reality is not balanced. Reporting the facts in a balanced way tends to lead to false equivocation – the fallacy which leads lazy journalists to give a tiny minority of climate change skeptics’ opinions the same weight as the vast majority of climate scientists who consider anthropogenic climate change as good as proven; or citing the Residents’ Action Movement as some sort of authority on GST, or any number of other similar cases. Not to say that dissenting or heterodox voices should be excluded – just that they often receive more weight than their due in the name of balance, and therefore, balance can itself be a distortion.
L
I’d agree with that and you have to question if the balance is because the media wants to be balanced or because of it’s bias in favour of certain viewpoints.
“I’d agree with that and you have to question if the balance is because the media wants to be balanced or because of it’s bias in favour of certain viewpoints.”
There’s a little of both there but the main point in “balance” is the fulcrum which is conflict. The orthodoxy is that it is not news without a point of conflict and that means that no matter how much consensus their is on an issue the dissenting voice needs to be there to provide that conflict. Of course that means being oppositional (even to the point of absurdity) is the best way to get coverage. That’s why National do hit and run PR and that’s why fringe groups like the sensible sentencing trust get so much coverage. The sad part is that this means the moderate voice is often sidelined.
I think it’s pretty obvious that by “selling” your fourth week of annual leave, employers will simply adjust wages in such a way so that if workers want what would otherwise have been their normal salary, they are compelled to sell their fourth week of annual leave.
It’s a sneaky way of reducing annual leave back to three weeks.