KEY POINTS:
Noreen Makatoa has been working as a kitchenhand at Middlemore Hospital for 20 to 30 hours a week for four years. But to her employer, Spotless Services, she is still a "casual" worker.
"I'm working 40 hours at the moment, but it's off and on," she says.
"One week I'll work 20 hours, the next week 40, it all depends on how the work is."
Mrs Makatoa, 47, needs secure work to support herself, her sick husband and four children aged 15, 14, 9 and 8.
"I want permanent part-time work. I preferably would like a 30-hour week," she says.
"With the price of things these days it's very hard and it means we sometimes have to leave the kids to get to school themselves if we have to get up and go to work at 6.30am."
Despite nine years of Labour-led governments, her experience is commonplace. At the end of 2006, 63 per cent of New Zealand businesses employed at least one person on a casual or fixed-term basis, and 33 per cent of firms - mostly small ones - said at least three-quarters of their employees worked on that basis.
Jill Ovens of Mrs Makatoa's union, the Service and Food Workers, says the trend toward using casual workers has become a serious problem.
"We've been trying for years at Middlemore. When I started at this union in 1995, I asked them to audit all their casuals because they had so many people coming in regularly rostered," she says.
She believes she has finally won Spotless' agreement to transfer "casuals" on regular rosters on to "permanent part-time" status - just as the company's contracts at the hospital are about to move to a new contractor, Compass, and to in-house cleaners.
If Labour wins re-election, casual workers will be top of its fourth-term industrial relations agenda.
Labour Minister Trevor Mallard has drawn up a bill giving Labour Department inspectors the power to determine whether "casuals" are really permanent employees.
The bill would also provide a code of employment practice for casual workers, and would require that unionised workers in labour hire companies be paid at least as well as unionised workers employed directly by an employer that hires the labour hire company.
"There has been, in the past 10 to 15 years, quite large growth in labour hire firms and third-party contracting arrangements," Mr Mallard says.
"There seem to be some good reasons for doing that. But it can't be used as a device to avoid proper employment relations arrangements."
It's an issue that divides left and right-wing parties along classic ideological lines.
Labour is backed by the Greens, Progressives, the Maori Party and NZ First, whose industrial relations spokesman, Peter Brown, pushed Labour to make the change after seeing many wharfies in his Tauranga hometown still on "casual" terms after working for years.
But National, Act and United Future oppose the move.
National spokeswoman Kate Wilkinson says determining whether a worker is casual or permanent is a complex issue that should sometimes go to the Court of Appeal.
National has its own employment proposals this year. It would allow businesses with fewer than 20 staff to hire new workers for a 90-day trial period during which the worker could be dismissed without the right to challenge an unfair dismissal through a personal grievance.
It would let workers trade in their fourth week of annual leave for cash when it suited both parties.
The worker would get an extra week's wages on top of the statutory holiday pay, but National says the employer might be willing to pay the extra cost for the convenience of having the worker at work.
And it would let workers bargain collectively without having to join a union.
Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly says this last measure is more dangerous than it sounds because it would allow employers to turn their standard individual contracts into "collective agreements", employ everyone under the house collective, and lock out genuine unions.
Business NZ chief executive Phil O'Reilly says business supports National's proposed amendments, but doesn't want wholesale law change.
"If I asked companies 10 years ago what were the top five issues facing them, industrial relations - union stuff - would have been number one or two. Now that stuff generally doesn't get in the top five," he says.
"The Employment Contracts Act was fine for the time, we were breaking an egg to make an omelette.
"We don't need to do that now ...
"So what the Nats are saying is: let's keep the framework of the ERA [Employment Relations Act], modify it by taking away some of the things that have been causing us trouble, and leave the rest alone."
* Realities of the Kiwi workplace
The minimum wage declined under National from 47 per cent of the average wage in 1990 to 41 per cent in 1999, and has been lifted under Labour to 50 per cent.
Wage-earners' share of the national income slipped slightly under National from 45.8 per cent in 1989-90 to 43.9 per cent in 1998-99 and recovered marginally under Labour to 44.7 per cent in 2006-07. An OECD report last week said wage-earners' share across the developed world fell from 67 per cent to 57 per cent in the 20 years to 2006 because of more capital-intensive technology and weaker unions.
Union membership halved from 34 per cent of the workforce when National passed the Employment Contracts Act in 1991 to 17 per cent in 1999. It recovered to 18 per cent last year.
Working hours lost through industrial disputes plunged from 1842 hours for every 100,000 hours worked in 1990 to just 81 hours for every 100,000 in 1999 and 44 last year.
