National's 90 day Probationary Employment Bill. The Best Employment Rights Money Can Buy?

In the middle of 2006, the National Party succeeded in getting a private member's bill drawn, called the "Employment Relations (Probationary Employment) Amendment Bill". It provoked huge protests all around the country, and was eventually thrown out due to lack of support within parliament.

Now the National Party has made this Bill part of its 2008 election platform. This is a major issue because it has the potential to affect around 20% of workers (people who are employed in workplaces with less than 20 employees).

The aim of the legislation is to give small business owners the right to hire people for a three month period during which, the employer:

... may at any time ... terminate the employee's employment forthwith.

Under the current law, in most instances the employer must issue several formal warnings before proceeding with dismissal, and the warnings must have valid grounds - i.e. persistent lateness. Under National's proposed law an employee may be sacked for any reason whatsoever, as the employer would not be required to explain the reason for the sacking. This of course leaves employees open to all sorts of abuses. For instance, an employee could be sacked for the following reasons:

1) Refusing a demand to grant sexual favours for an employer (breaches the Human Rights Act 1993).

2) The employer doesn't like the religion or sexuality of the employee (Once again, Human Rights Act).

3) The employer owes the employee wages in arrears, but doesn't wish to pay those wages (breaches the Wages Protection Act 1983).

4) The employee refuses a demand from the employer that they work unpaid overtime (Wages Protection Act 1983).

5) The employee decides to join a union (breaches the Employment Relations Act 2000).

6) The employee refuses to undertake a work-related task that is hazardous (Employment Relations Act).

Now currently if an employer does any of these things, the employee is entitled, under the Employment Relations Act, to seek a free mediation session (the average waiting time for this service is three weeks), through which they will most likely be compensated for being unlawfully treated.

Under National's proposed law, an employee would not be entitled to seek a free mediation session in order to see their rights protected (section 69AD.3). Instead the employee would have to pursue a civil court case, which would mean many thousands of dollars in lawyer's fees, a wait of months (instead of weeks), and an intimidating formalised court setting (in fact for numbers five and six there would be no resolution process available because the ERA would be invalidated).

All these added barriers to justice would mean that employees, not being able to afford the process in terms of money and/or time, would simply give up. We know this because, during the decade of the National Party's Employment Contracts Act (1991-1999), employees had to rely on the employment tribunal (which involved legal costs of around $5,000 per day) for employment dispute resolution. Consequently, only 5,000 employment-related cases were resolved per year, whereas now twice as many such cases are received and disposed of every year.

Through re-introducing an expensive, legalistic approach to employment dispute resolution, National would in effect be removing all employment rights for many thousands of workers.

Edit: jafapete and the standard have also done some interesting work on this subject.