Principle of fair pay escapes employers
THE OtagoSouthland Employers’ Association is worried. Its chief executive says that implementing fair pay agreements nationally and compulsorily, an option suggested in the report of the working group led by former prime minister
Jim Bolger, would have a destabilising effect on the economy, as industrial unrest spread across multiple enterprises (hang on, though — hasn’t the Government ruled out industrial action during bargaining for FPAs?)
They would restrict, she says, the ability of individual employers and their workers to negotiate to suit their own circumstances, reducing flexibility for both parties, including flexible hours for family and other commitments.
It sounds as if she’s keen to safeguard the interests of employees as well as employers.
Or is she? Back in 2017, before the election, when FPAs were only a Labour Party policy, she didn’t sound so caring about employees.
‘‘What we have now is working for modern employers. Why change it?’’ she said. No crocodile tears about employees’ wellbeing there. Sadly, that probably reflects OESA’s thinking more accurately.
Wages in New Zealand have been rising, but much more slowly for those on low wages than for those on high incomes. This increasing income inequality has, as the OECD points out, a significant negative effect on economic growth. And as the working group’s report makes clear (p2), productivity in New Zealand has, since 1972, increasingly lagged behind that of the G7, United States, Australia, and even the United Kingdom.
The far from leftwing OECD recommends a model of combined sector and enterprise level collective bargaining, because it is associated with higher employment, lower unemployment, a better integration of vulnerable groups and less wage inequality than fully decentralised systems like New Zealand’s.
One of the aims of FPAs is to facilitate the Government’s vision of an industrial framework where businesses are not disadvantaged by paying reasonable wages. It’s particularly aimed at sectors or industries where, as the working group says, ‘‘competition is based on everdecreasing labour costs rather than on increasing quality or productivity’’.
The working group agreed that collective bargaining systems would be most useful in such sectors or occupations, but that FPAs may help other sectors or occupations, where opportunities are identified to improve outcomes for employers and workers. It’s designed a system to be triggered by a worker ‘‘representativeness threshold’’ or a public interest test.
Most members agreed that to achieve the Government’s objectives, all businesses in a sector or occupation for which an FPA is established should be covered by it. Employer representatives disagreed with such compulsion, but they need to get real: a voluntary FPA would be toothless, and therefore meaningless.
Why would any employer interested in their workers’ welfare (any sensible employer should be, not just for decency’s sake, but for the sake of maintaining a healthy business) object to a fair set of minimum pay and conditions? Anything less than fair pay is exploitation. A business that depends on screwing its workers deserves to fail.
Can’t he read? On RNZ’s Morning Report this week, Don Brash reiterated his tedious refrain: that Article 3 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi means that all New Zealanders have the same rights.
Article 3 certainly gives Maori ‘‘the same rights and duties of citizenship as the people of England’’ (Maori language version, Prof Hugh Kawharu’s translation). But those rights and duties are additional to the rights guaranteed Maori in Article 2: ‘‘the unqualified exercise of their chieftainship over their lands, villages and all their treasures’’ (Maori version, same translation: the English version has ‘‘the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession’’).
Articles 2 and 3 together mean Maori do indeed have more rights than other New Zealanders. That may stick in Dr Brash’s craw, but it’s what Te Tiriti says. Swallow it, Dr Brash (and ‘‘Hobson’s Pledge’’).