Official documents suggest that the government's change to union workplace access provisions is largely symbolic.Prime Minister John Key announced on Sunday, as part of a wider bundle of labour law reforms, that unions will now be required to seek employe
Official documents suggest that the government’s change to union workplace access provisions is largely symbolic.
Prime Minister John Key announced on Sunday, as part of a wider bundle of labour law reforms, that unions will now be required to seek employer permission before entering a workplace.
“That consent cannot be unreasonably withheld,” Mr Key hastened to add.
Business NZ chief executive Phil O’Reilly welcomed the amendment, which was included in National’s 2008 policy statement, as fair to all parties, demonstrative of good faith and “still substantively more permissive than other countries”.
Support for status quo
But a Department of Labour policy options document released in May 2009 raises questions as to whether a change to union workplace access was needed.
According to the document, Business NZ indicated that while they would support the change that has since been announced, they also supported the status quo.
“As there is no clear problem, [Business NZ] are not particularly worried as to whether there is a compulsory requirement for unions to seek consent before entering the workplace or not,” the document states.
At present, unions are entitled to access workplaces on reasonable grounds, at reasonable times and with reasonable regard to normal business operations and health, safety and security procedures.
Effectively, the proposed change shifts the onus onto unions to prove an employer is being unreasonable, a shift which Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson has suggested is largely symbolic.
“The benefits, while symbolically significant, are likely to be marginal in practice”, Ms Wilkinson wrote in a March discussino document, referring to both the union access and collective bargaining issues.
“Moreover, in both cases, the desired change to a large degree, already occurs in practice and is not prevented by the legislation.”
Symbolic worth
Now that a union access change has been announced, the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) and the government are at loggerheads as to how much of an impact it will have.
CTU president Helen Kelly described the new provisions as a return to the “bad old days” under the Employment Contracts Act, which was replaced with Labour’s Employment Relations Act in 2000.
“We’ve been there before... it’ll be used as a tactic to avoid union organising,” she said.
She believed that making union access subject to employer agreement would create unnecessary conflict between unions and employers.
A spokesman for Ms Wilkinson’s office told NBR that the majority of workplaces, unions and employers already engage constructively on the issue of workplace access, so it’s “not going to make much of a difference”.
Prime Minister John Key described the the union access change yesterday as “just part of the overall package” though, if pressed, “probably a slight positive” for the economy.
The government’s labour law reforms are expected to pass through select committee stage and into law later this year.
