Rebecca Macfie is a leading investigative journalist, and the author of Tragedy at Pike River Mine (Awa Press, 2013; updated edition 2021), and Helen Kelly: Her Life (Awa Press, 2021), longlisted for the best book of non-fiction at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand national book awards.
Employment
Michael Wood’s ambition to bring about long-overdue reform to address a glaring power imbalance in the workplace has been put on ice. Rebecca Macfie reports.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has frozen a long-running law reform package intended to address the issue of workers being misclassified as contractors and thus denied basic rights and protections under employment law.
Hipkins announced the decision as part of his second policy purge, which also included binning the clean car upgrade programme, narrowing the scope of highway speed reductions, and canning a proposed bottle return programme.
He claimed the Government was “deferring” consultation on a new legal test to determine who is a contractor and who is an employee because of the “significant” implications of last year’s Employment Court ruling that four Uber drivers were employees He said the Government was putting the work on hold until “all appeals of the case are heard”.
Given that “all appeals” of the high-stakes Uber case may well take years and reach the Supreme Court – as did the landmark 2005 case of James Bryson, a Lord of the Rings model-maker – Hipkins’ explanation for sidelining the reform doesn’t pass the sniff...
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