John Armstrong: Employers win some, lose some as bill gets a workover

COMMENT

Swainy will fix it.

That was the reassuring spin from the Beehive to aggrieved employers after Paul Swain took over the labour portfolio from Margaret Wilson in February amid a business backlash against the Government's rewrite of its four-year-old employment relations law.

Yesterday a duly amended Employment Relations Law Reform Bill finally emerged from select committee scrutiny - but without quite as many alterations as employers would realistically have hoped for.

The key word is "realistically", given the unbridgeable gulf between the business lobby's anti-union rhetoric and the Labour-led Government's union-friendly promotion of collective bargaining in the workplace.

Mr Swain has fixed some things.

But the employer-friendly changes largely affect clauses in the bill which were either poorly drafted or interpreted by employers as capable of giving unions a bigger foot in the door than the Government says was ever intended.


The unions have made progress in preventing non-union staff "free-loading" on workplace benefits extracted by union members in collective bargaining.

The bill has also been tightened to stop employers inducing employees not to take part in collective bargaining. There is also a stricter definition of the "reasonable grounds" on which employers can refuse to conclude a collective agreement.

The "wins" for employers include removal of a clause that could have realised their worst fear of being dragged into multi-employer collective agreements.

A clause widely interpreted as stopping employers offering similar terms and conditions to staff on individual contracts as those negotiated with the collective has been clarified to avoid any suggestion of a breach of the law.

A further gripe that employers would have to divulge commercially sensitive information about their business operations to unions at the bargaining table has also been remedied.

The tweaking will not stifle complaints about the bill from the business lobby. But it has enabled Mr Swain to convey an impression to a wider audience that the Government is listening.

And it presents the Opposition with a quandary.

The National Party could have screamed "backdown" at the Government yesterday. But that would have suggested the Government had fixed the bill, thus killing it as a political issue.

National's promise to scrap Labour's industrial law keeps the issue alive. But only just.

The new law will not come into force until December. Given many collective contracts now run for longer than a year, it is less likely the dire consequences being predicted by National for workplace relations will eventuate this side of next September, the latest date the election can be held.

Moreover, during a period of high economic growth, low unemployment and very little industrial unrest, National's warning that the measure will prove detrimental to growth, productivity and employers' willingness to take on workers is a difficult argument to sustain without the evidence.

Having earlier predicted doom and gloom after Labour repealed the Employment Contracts Act in 2000, the centre-right Opposition parties are now in serious danger of crying wolf. Perhaps Mr Swain has fixed it after all.