Chance to end labour-hire loophole strife
When does a worker not get workers’ rights? At the moment, when they’re from a labour-hire firm. Submissions are being heard on Labour’s Triangular Employment Amendment Bill, which seeks to address exploitative practices in labourhire arrangements.
It’s an opportunity to clear up some of the confusion for those workers and to afford them some of the basic rights that they currently lack.
If the host employer does not like, for any reason, the labour-hire worker, they can terminate their assignment without notice, reason or compensation. This means a simple personal clash could be all that’s between secure employment and the worker. The worker has no right of reply to address concerns or improve their performance.
Most New Zealanders who are employed have the right to a progressive warning system and a fair process if any allegation were to be made against them. These processes guard against unfair dismissal – in other words, the loss of one’s livelihood and potentially one’s reputation due to a false allegation.
For a labour-hire worker there is currently no such luxury; if they get on the wrong side of their supervisor that could be the end for that worker.
This disincentivises labour-hire workers from speaking up in a way most of us don’t have to consider.
Raising a health and safety issue or reporting sexual harassment at work can be onerous. From the perspective of a labour-hire worker, whose work can be cancelled at a day’s notice without the right of reply, it is simply a risk that is often not worth taking. Unfortunately there are employers who take advantage of this.
Labour-hire workers also earn less than those they work beside.
The bill will allow labour-hire workers access to the same terms and conditions of employment as those of the other permanent workers on site. This will ensure labour-hire workers are on site for genuine temporary upswings in business and not for the reasons we often see them being hired – that is, to be paid lower and given less-secure work hours (and work, for that matter) than those who are permanently employed.
Recently our union converted a long-term labour-hire employee to permanent status at his job where he had been working for five years for 40 hours per week.
By that stage he had given longer service than many of his permanent colleagues and he also knew a lot more. He had been trained in every department over the years, and, because of his skill and length of service, his colleagues had a lot of respect for him.
But his employer didn’t hold him to the same esteem, paying him less than everyone else and expecting more of him.
When this bill becomes law we will see an end to this kind of exploitation, and will finally close the labour-hire loopholes that are causing so much strife for so many hard-working New Zealanders.
I’m so proud that over the past couple of years our union has been responsible for converting hundreds of labour-hire workers from precarious day-to-day employment to permanent employment.
The impact of being offered permanent employment agreements on these people’s lives is significant; the reliable income and the sense of security these workers have gained has meant a shift from week-to-week survival mode to being able to plan for a future.
We have achieved these results through collective agreement negotiations, drawing on the strength of our membership and the sense of whanau our members have with the labour-hire employees that they work with every day.
Unfortunately, across New Zealand there are still thousands of labour-hire workers who lack the basic rights that most employees enjoy. It’s beyond time to change that.
A simple personal clash could be all that’s between secure employment and the worker.