Workers in New Zealand are facing yet another attack on their wages and conditions of work. The government is proposing to weaken the Employment Relations Act.
This follows changes the government has already made cutting youth pay rates, reducing union access, limiting the scope of appeals against unfair dismissal, and removing rights for workers in their first 90 days of employment.
The latest changes are in a bill that will be debated in parliament in coming months and will be the subject of an active campaign by unions.
The main effect of the changes will be to reduce wages and conditions by weakening the rules on collective bargaining.
Low wages are already pushing thousands and thousands of Kiwis to leave for Australia with a record loss in the last year. These changes will make it even worse.
We know that collective bargaining is under attack in many countries. It is typical of New Zealand’s centre-right National government to do this as they did in 1991 with the vicious Employment Contracts Act. This latest bill is moving us back very close to that regime.
The Employment Relations Act includes ‘promoting collective bargaining’ as one of its objects.
Yet this bill is designed to undermine collective bargaining. New Zealand has also ratified the main International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention that promotes collective bargaining. Unions will therefore develop a complaint to the ILO.
What does the legislation do?
Allow employers to end negotiation when they like
Currently, the law requires that employers conclude a process of collective bargaining unless there is “a genuine reason, based on reasonable grounds, not to.” This change will let employers say they have had enough of bargaining at any point and there will be nothing workers can do. Employers can ‘surface’ bargain. Also employers will be able threaten to give workers’ jobs to someone else while they are bargaining to force them to agree. And right from the outset when the union has initiated bargaining for a collective employment agreement, the employer can openly state a preference for individual agreements and effectively refuse to bargain.
Remove protection for new workers
Currently a new worker in a workplace with a collective employment agreement is automatically employed on the basis of that collective agreement for their first 30 days of employment. This also applies to non-union workers. It protects them from being offered inferior terms and conditions to everyone else.
This change will force a new worker to choose straight away, making them vulnerable to pressure from the employer to accept a worse offer. Over time this will undermine everybody’s terms and conditions. In fact, the Cabinet paper recommending these changes, signed by the Minister of Labour, actually says they, “will enable employers to offer individual terms and conditions that are less than those in the collective agreement”.
Undermine industry deals
Employers will be able to opt out of multi-employer bargaining which will jeopardise the few industry-wide agreements that have been negotiated.
Make it more difficult to strike
Employers will be able to use what is in effect a ‘strike tax’. If workers take industrial action in the form of refusing to do some duties, the employer can either calculate a deduction or simply apply a 10 per cent pay cut. Employers however can partially lock out workers with no such penalty.
Reduce meal and refreshment breaks
Meal and refreshment breaks can be of a time and duration as specified by the employer provided there is a ‘reasonable’ compensatory measure. This undermines entitlement to proper breaks and threatens health and safety.
And more
There are many other changes that attack work rights. For instance, small businesses that win contracts will not have to comply with transfer protections for vulnerable workers, the small time-period advantage unions have over employers to initiate collective bargaining is removed, written notice is now required for any strike, and access to information in redundancy situations is reduced.
New Zealand unions are campaigning against this bill. We know that the government is trying to portray these changes as ‘technical’.
Our campaign will highlight the effect of this bill on pay, conditions, health and safety and work rights. But our campaign is not just to retain the current law.
We know that the Employment Relations Act as it stands is too weak. We need a law that can underpin extension of collective bargaining into more widespread industry documents.
The campaign will include stop work meetings, regional rallies, lobbying, building momentum around submissions, profiling workers’ stories, and getting our message out to everyone about the impact of these changes and the need for a better law that can lift pay.
This campaign will ‘connect the dots’ between employment law changes and the widespread concern in New Zealand about low pay alongside rising inequality.
For more details visit: http://union.org.nz/whycutourpay
