Accusations from Nick Smith that the Labour government doesn’t have any policies kind of miss the point: governments by definition have policy. They may not have new policies to introduce over the next three years, but they at least have a fall back position on everything that’s currently happening.

But where are the government’s new ideas coming from to continue the dream of moderate social democracy it has been working on for nine years?

At least as far as its key area of employment relations is concerned, the answer is probably – the Greens. To a large extent the Labour government has outsourced its industrial relations policy-making to the Greens over the last three years.

That’s why in a week that’s already seen a huge quantity, if not quality, of policy and scandal dumped into the public arena, interested parties should care about the Greens’ workplace policy, launched yesterday.

It’s the same reason we implored readers should have taken notice of United Future’s tax policy.

Until its billion-dollar deal with Labour to provide for home insulation in exchange for supporting the emissions trading scheme, the Greens had actually made much more headway on employment relations policy than on saving the planet.

In the current term of government the Greens successfully piloted through Sue Bradford's Minimum Wage (Abolition of Age Discrimination) Act and Sue Kedgley's Employment Relations (Flexible Working Hours) Act were two of the most significant reforms of employment law since 2005.

(Bradford has also succeeded in passing laws banning smacking and allowing imprisoned mothers to live with their babies, a formidable record for a non-government MP.)

Youth wages, although they had risen steadily under Labour, were a permanent piece of the industrial relations furniture. The flexible work hours legislation put the onus on an employer to argue why its workers (with dependents) shouldn’t be allowed to set their own hours. These laws are, in other words, significant.

The Kedgley bill addressed work-life balance, a subject the government has spent many man hours on through the Department of Labour, but took the ideas further by legislating (the department’s efforts were directed mainly towards producing anodyne but interminable discussion papers on workplace practice).

That is to say, Labour is willing to support initiatives from the Greens that are more radical than it might propose itself.

And so astute watchers of the next government’s employment relations policies should not just look at Labour’s track record and puzzle out National’s minimalist pronouncements.

They should also look for those elements of the Greens’ agenda that could be adopted by the bigger party if it can return to the Treasury benches.

The wishlist includes:

- Pegging the minimum wage to 66% of the average wage;

- Full elimination of youth wages;

- Give age-caregivers “vulnerable employee protections”;

- Rights bringing contracted workers closer to genuine employees;

- Extend flexible working hours to give employees with dependents statutory rights to reduce their hours to part-time;

- Extend paid parental leave to 13 months;

- Five days bereavement leave for each bereavement (up from three); and

- A new statutory holiday between Queen’s Birthday and Labour Day.

Extending paid parental leave is the most likely concession here, as well as bringing contracted workers’ rights into line with employees. The pegged minimum wage is not totally unrealistic either – at $12, it’s not too far off two-thirds of the average wage on an hourly basis. The Greens will not get everything they ask for, obviously.

The most intriguing suggestion is the Greens’ plans for “pay and employment equity”, mainly because it’s an area Labour’s ministers have been looking at for some time themselves.

This is the idea of “paying the same wage for jobs requiring a similar level of skills, effort, working conditions, training and responsibility.” That is, not just ensuring men and women – and , the party is at pains to point out, Maori, Pakeha and anyone else – are paid the same for doing the same job, but ensuring men in male-dominated occupations are paid the same as women in comparable female-dominated occupations.

The usual comparison is police and nurses, with the suspicion being that the latter are paid less because the profession is traditionally “female”.

The fourth Labour government, on its way being hurried out the door in 1990, passed the Pay Equity Act, which was designed to ensure parity within and between male and female dominated jobs. It was one of the first pieces of law repealed by the incoming National government.

The Department of Labour has done a few reports and workshops on pay equity, and has found it hard to get a concrete handle on how to address –or even measure - the inequities. It notoriously commissioned Standards New Zealand to produce a standard for “gender neutral job evaluation” for use by human resources professionals.

But the Greens have successfully turned government “workstreams” that seemed headed nowhere into torrents of legislation before. Watch this space.