Contractors’ rights back on table
Contractors look set to be given more rights, including the ability to be covered by Fair Pay Agreements, perhaps from next year.
Workplace Relations Minister Michael Wood told a select committee yesterday that a working group had been convened in the past week between BusinessNZ, the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE).
The three parties will consider options put forward by MBIE in 2019 to better protect the rights of workers who are classed as contractors. ‘‘We have both employees and employers saying they think there is a lack of clarity and some abuses within the current system that need to be dealt with,’’ Wood said.
The types of workers engaged as contractors varies from the likes of cleaners, fruit pickers and couriers at one end of the pay spectrum, to highly-paid technology and communications specialists at the other. The Government’s concerns lie with those towards the former end of the spectrum. MBIE’s 2019 report warned that employees who were ‘‘misclassified’’ as contractors could miss out on minimum rights and entitlements afforded to other workers.
The ministry put forward a wide variety of options to address that.
They included broadening the definition of an employee under the law, extending employment law protections to contractors, putting a burden of proof on employers to show that workers were contractors, and giving some contractors the right to bargain collectively.
Wood said the goal of the work involving the CTU and BusinessNZ would be to ‘‘see if we can reach some consensus or at least clarify policy options’’.
Some of those options might require new legislation but some might not, he said.
‘‘We will just have to see where this lands. The expectation is we will have an outcome from that late this year or early next year.’’
Wood indicated he expected reforms would pave the way for contractors to be covered by Fair Pay Agreements, legislation for which is expected to be considered by Parliament before the end of this year.
Fair Pay Agreements will provide a mechanism for unions to negotiate industry-wide pay agreements if 10 per cent of a workforce or 1000 workers agree to that.
Wood said the Government’s intention was that it did get to the point where it brought contractors into the new wage-bargaining regime ‘‘so we don’t create arbitrage opportunities where employees can be reclassified to remove them from the fair-pay settlement system.’’