This coming week, under urgency and leading into Xmas, the Coalition government will expand 90-day trials to all workers, in yet another payback to National/ACT/NZ First’s (NAF) business backers. Being able to sack people without rights will encourage employers to “take more risk on someone who doesn’t tick all the boxes” (according to Brooke Van Velden, (ACT) Minister for Workplace Relations).
Heard that a thousand times. Research has shown that 90-day grievance free periods do NOT add to employment, nor bring in workers who employers might give a “chance” to, out of the generosity of their hearts.
This mythology has been around for more than a decade. Wayne Mapp, National MP way back when, introduced a Members’ Bill when Labour was in government under Helen Clark, Kate Wilkinson, then National’s Minister of Labour drove them through when National came into power and Paula Bennett pushed it on jobseeker beneficiaries. Labour softened it to employers with fewer than 19 workers. (They should have repealed it completely, but Winston stood in the way with his curmudgeonly handbrake).
NAF and employers talk about “costly grievance procedures”. Well, they created this.
The deregulation of the Labour Market in the early 1990’s, thanks to Bill Birch and co squashed unions and opened up personal grievances to all comers. It invited a proliferation of “bargaining agents” or “employment advocates”.
But they forgot any regulation or standards for bargaining agents such as those who advertise “no win” “no fee” services. Many are predators – ambulance chasers – making money from both employers and workers. They tie up our Employment Relations judicial system. Just read some of the judgements. They are cowboys in a Wild West of profit-making at the expense of everyone else.
In our deregulated system, I accept we need advocates. But I don’t accept they should continue to operate without regulation in a free for all.
Reducing workers’ rights because employers may face “costly grievance procedures” is a rubbish argument. The irony doesn’t escape me that while NAF just repealed Fair Pay Agreements, which were about negotiated standards across industry, they are happy to impose a standard on the whole of the country’s workers without negotiation or select committee processes.
According to the bosses, workers should just be grateful someone else “gives” them a job. If you happen to be pushed to get off Jobseekers Benefit, hard luck. You will be doubly punished if you get fired and the sanctions that will follow.
So employers can say “don’t come Monday” – no excuses, no exceptions.
PS : join your union.
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