Labour sells maturing coalition short
Henry Cooke henry.cooke@stuff.co.nz
On Tuesday a very rare thing found its way to journalists’ inboxes: a press release signed off by Labour, NZ First and the Greens.
The release confirmed the set of compromises made by Labour and the Greens to ensure NZ First would support the second reading of a long-fought bill to reform workplace laws. Union officials would still need permission to visit any non-unionised workplace, and multi-employer deals had been softened even further into irrelevance.
It all looked fairly reasonable, like a group of parties with different beliefs working out a compromise. The unions and business groups put out nicesounding press releases not long after. Winston Peters himself told media it was a triumph for the democratic process.
But the path to get there on this flagship employment law was a mess, and exhibited all the worst fears the Left wing of this country has about a coalition with NZ First.
NZ First had already won a major concession before the bill was even introduced. Despite the fact Labour as a party only exists to protect the rights of workers, the first Labour-led Government in a decade decided to let NZ First keep 90-day trials for any businesses with fewer than 20 employees.
This was a big win for NZ First and the smaller regional businesses which back them. Almost a third of the country’s workforce (29 per cent) work in places with fewer than 20 employees, including basically every agriculture and forestry company. It should have been enough – but it wasn’t.
As the bill was introduced and passed its first reading the business lobby reared into gear with fullpage attack ads and websites, threatening industrial chaos if the law passed unadulterated.
Labour’s Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Iain LeesGalloway utterly failed to respond to these attacks properly and really sell the bill, which shouldn’t have been that hard, as it included popular measures like restoring the right to tea breaks. Instead, he and Labour mostly talked just about how all the bill did was restore workplace law to its 2008 position, which is mostly true but not very inspiring.
So NZ First swooped in to fill the vacuum. Shane Jones went on in early August and said very clearly that the bill was still negotiable and he was listening to the business industry’s concerns.
Behind the scenes, this made Labour angry. NZ First had already taken a chunk out of this key law and was now hunting for another bite. It all got public in September when the bill came back from select committee with little change. The party went all in: briefing journalists that the bill would be changed and publicly describing it as a ‘‘work in progress’’. It got so bad