During the Governor-General’s speech from the Throne on the re-opening of Parliament, the new Government committed to “building a strong economy” and to “work with business to deliver shared prosperity for all”.
Unfortunately, in a couple of key policy areas we are seeing a fundamental disconnect from those objectives.
First of all, the Government has signalled some of the biggest changes in employment law for over 20 years, against the very wishes of New Zealand businesses.
Unfortunately, many of the reforms they are proposing will also take us back 20 years when it comes to the fundamentals of the employer/employee relationship and will have a major impact on recruitment and retention of staff.
Already before Parliament is the Employment Relations Amendment Bill.
This Bill is the first major piece of “structural change” employment legislation implemented by the new Government and contains a number of provisions within it that should make business owners really sit up and take notice.
The Bill restricts the 90-day trial periods brought in by the previous Government to businesses with fewer than 20 employees and removes the requirement for a union representative to gain consent from an employer before gaining entry to a workplace (a major issue when considered against health and safety requirements).
The Bill also gives primacy to collective employment agreements and removes the power of the Employment Relations Authority to resolve disputes arising from collective bargaining.
It does not take much imagination to see that this could result in drawn out bargaining situations and more strike action across industries.
The Bill also repeals sections of the current law that allows employers to opt out of multi-employer collective bargaining.
For sectors that are typically made up of a plethora of small businesses that unions have traditionally struggled to penetrate this change paves the way for industry-wide or occupation-wide bargaining to be instituted through the Government’s other flagship employment policy, Fair Pay Agreements.
These “Fair Pay Agreements” are being designed to set minimum terms and conditions for all workers in an entire industry or occupation and establish a system of sector-wide bargaining.
This is designed by the unions to be a direct challenge to individual bargaining and will, if enacted, establish large collective agreements which would apply to all workers across an industry or occupation no matter where in the country they reside or any other supply and demand factors.
The other major area of concern for many industries is the Government’s stance on immigration, particularly in relation to a further tightening of working visa rules which make it harder to bring in immigrant workers who fill gaps in the New Zealand labour market.
While the Government has softened its position somewhat since it was elected, there is no doubt that it sees immigration as a causal factor to many of the population pressure issues prevalent in Auckland.
Since truck drivers were removed from the Immediate Skills Shortage List in 2014, the road transport industry has found it a lot harder to recruit overseas.
While RTF continues to advocate for truck drivers to be reinstated, the likelihood of that happening is extremely low.
RTF has therefore joined in a broader campaign involving other prominent industry associations facing similar workforce shortages to our own.
This has recently been formalised by the signing of the Employment and Immigration Charter.
The objective of the charter is to “bring together leading industry organisations and peak bodies with a common interest in ensuring that New Zealand has a vibrant labour market with sufficient capacity to meet the needs of our growing industries”.
Signatories to the charter represent a wide range of sectors that traditionally struggle to attract local workers including forestry, horticulture, farming, aged care, civil contractors, hospitality, tourism and road transport.
The charter sets out some basic principles that associations representing these sectors believe need to be addressed in order for New Zealand to have an immigration policy consistent with the needs of our economy.
The signatories advocate for a long-term strategy to ensure there are sufficient and motivated New Zealanders to resource our future workforce needs and where there are gaps in the labour force that these can be bridged by the implementation of a stable and consistent immigration programme.
We also want to see our immigration policies be competitive with other key countries reliant on immigration to bridge labour shortages, including Australia and Canada, as well as more public recognition of the valuable role migrant workers play in the New Zealand.
While this charter doesn’t call for specific numbers or address labour shortages in specific regions, it is designed to reframe the debate around immigration and move us away from the kind of lowest common denominator xenophobic-laden politics that has dominated the debate over the past few years.
All we ask is that the Government honours its stated commitments in the speech from the Throne last November and when it comes to immigration “makes sure we get our immigration settings right … and ensure work visas issued reflect genuine skill shortages”.