This week I attended a session hosted by BusinessNZ with the Honourable Brooke van Velden, Minister of Internal Affairs and for Workplace Relations and Safety.
Her current focus is in two areas. Firstly there is fixing issues with the Holidays Act, and in particular the issues which made the task of establishing the correct holiday pay for numerous employees a challenge larger than many Olympic Games competitors faced.
I’m not sure how many members have been faced with the issue of paying their employees the incorrect amount but it affects a lot of firms, so it will be good to get that fixed.
The Minister’s second challenge is sorting out the Health and Safety at Work legislation. This is not working as shown by our relatively poor performance with work-related death rates. Agriculture, forestry and construction are specific industry areas of concern.
That job includes her keeping an eye on WorkSafe. Recent revelations about its poor financial performance are not the only area for concern. She cited the case where the regulator had visited two plants of the same company, one in the North Island and one in the South, both factories using the same plant and processes. One WorkSafe inspector deemed one plant to be acceptable but the other inspector found the opposite with the other plant. Not only was the inconsistency a problem, but what was of greater concern to her was that the regulator could not advise or give guidance on what needed to be done to remedy the plant that they found issues with. Her clear expectation is that regulators need to be able to provide that advice, and I agree. We have seen similar predicaments in transport so this will be something we will follow with interest.
An area of concern raised by several attendees at the meeting was the Modern Slavery legislation. Not surprisingly, there was great concern about the harm exploited workers were facing. However, a related issue that I was unaware of was the challenge employers face in providing evidence to international trading partners and demonstrating that they are not exploiting their workers.
Over the last decade or so there have been increasing demands on service providers to report on various aspects of their business. That has gone from managing safety, to impacts on environment, workers and resilience planning. Without question all these aspects are important to manage, however, the reporting requirements are an additional demand and compliance cost that operators need to carefully consider.
I am very mindful of not trivialising worker exploitation. But I must admit that given some information I’ve seen and heard over the last few weeks, the thought has crossed my mind that we might need some legislation to stop transport operators being exploited!
I’ve seen a range of transport contracts over the last 20 years or so, but in recent weeks I’ve been shocked to see some with new conditions regarding commercial terms and penalties that in my view are completely financially unfair. Not to mention the additional strain and pressures these conditions will place on the transport operators and the perverse outcomes that will result from this. This is the antithesis of the principles of the chain of responsibility, and it makes a mockery of the legislation supposed to manage this risk regardless of that being under transport, or health and safety acts.
While transport businesses are facing increasing pressures such as these, I have felt frustrated at seeing the regulators getting stuck into things like the positioning of number plates and speed camera vans being located on our best and safest road like Transmission Gully, the latter even more galling given that the speed limit on that road is likely to be increased soon.
Now more than ever our industry needs to be clear on what the regulators should be focusing on. And rather than focusing on introducing greater expectations on transport operators, regulators need to turn their attention to the parties in the supply chain that are imposing unfair and unreasonable pressures on operators. In the absence of a change I fear we have a perfect storm brewing.
Survey
As an organisation representing our industry it is important to us that we listen to members’ views and that our policy positions are supported by robust evidence and analysis. Therefore this week we released a survey on issues including:
- speed management;
- workforce and driver shortages;
- compulsory third-party insurance;
- standards for heavy vehicle lighting;
- industry accreditation and who should run it.
We have had a great response so far and if you haven’t already, then I urge you to complete the survey. The link is here.
