Challenges and opportunities for women employers

Print

Challenges and opportunities for women employers

in the 21^st century

address to Business & Professional Women’s Association Ashburton 8 September 2001

by

Anne Knowles Executive Director Business New Zealand

 Thank for asking me here today, and for the opportunity to address some of the issues that will impact on women employers - and indirectly on all women in business - in the 21^st century.

 We are certainly living in interesting times.  There has been a significant sea-change in employment law, major changes to employment-related laws like ACC, and further changes are proposed that will make the lives of business people rather more complicated than in the past. 

 I would like to run briefly through those areas, but before that I would like to look at some characteristics that women bring to business.

 In my job I get to see quite a lot of professional women and women in business.  My observation is that women have real strengths in motivating staff, in creating meaningful incentives for high performance, in the human touch that makes for an outstanding business environment. 

 Another observation is that women in business tend to be extremely flexible – they have to be, to juggle family as well as work demands.  We all know that our most precious resource is time.

 I suspect these qualities and issues will be put to the test over the short to medium term. 

 First, the employment relations area.  It’s been nearly a year since the Employment Relations Act was passed.  As you know, this Act replaced the Employment Contracts Act, which came about as a result of the high levels of strike action in the 1970s and ‘80s. 

 The lawmakers who wrote the Employment Contracts Act wanted to get the focus on workplace bargaining, with employment contracts that would suit the particular needs of individual workplaces.  This was in contrast to the previous one-size-fits-all ‘national award’ approach where all workers in a particular industry could be covered by the same award.  

 The Employment Contracts Act was not perfect – there were a number of significant difficulties with it – but it certainly did allow for flexible arrangements that suited large numbers of employers and employees, and it did markedly reduce strikes.   During the 1970s and ‘80s there were hundreds of strikes every year – up to nearly 500 a year at their height.  But during the ‘90s, when the Employment Contracts Act was in force, the average number of stoppages was down to 58 a year.

 The present Government, supported by the union movement, campaigned on a plank of repealing the Employment Contracts Act.  The union movement was concerned that a focus on workplace bargaining made the role of unions less relevant.  And the Labour and Alliance partners of the coalition Government were both supportive of a more ‘collectivist’ approach to employment relations. 

 As a result we now have the Employment Relations Act which is based on the premise that there is an imbalance of power in a bargaining situation – in other words, the employer always has more power than the employee – so the ERA focuses a great deal on unions, collective agreements and collective action as means to equalise that bargaining imbalance.

 I should say that I don’t agree that there is always a power imbalance in favour of the employer.  In areas where there are skill shortages – in computer-related fields for example – the employee clearly has more bargaining power than the employer.  The employee can go down the road and find another IT job very easily – while the employer can find it difficult to find another skilled IT worker. 

 As a rule, the better qualified and higher skilled a person is, the more bargaining power they have.  To me, that suggests that individual education and upskilling is how you best prepare yourself for a bargaining situation, rather than collective action. 

 We are at present seeing the consequences of this collectivist approach with the recent upsurge in industrial action –

 ·        prison officers

·        journalists at the Herald

·        journalists at Radio New Zealand

·        workers at Sanfords and Sealords

·        mental health nurses

·        Sky City Casino workers

·        Carter Holt Harvey staff

·        Bluebird staff members

·        Greenlane doctors

·        polytech teachers

·        wharfies

·        hospital cleaners

·        cement workers

·        electricity line workers

·        vets in meat works

·        sawmill workers

  – and that’s just since the beginning of this year.  

 There have been a number of soothing noises saying that the strike statistics are not particularly high, but the fact is that the official strike figures are so far only available for the March quarter.  I suspect that when the statistics for the June quarter come out next month we will see a different story.

 But what the March statistics do tell us is that the person-days of work lost have increased dramatically, from around 400 person-days lost, to more than 6,000.  Many more people are now involved in strike action because the collective agreements are more far-reaching. 

 Most of us involved in business know that to get the best out of anyone in an enterprise, they have to be treated with respect and treated as an individual.  I think this is something that women employers intuitively understand.  But the current focus on getting as many employees as possible into collectives certainly makes it harder to deal with employees as individuals.

 Another employment area where we’re moving towards a less individual approach is that of accident compensation.  The first phase of the ACC legislation passed earlier this year basically got rid of experience rating, where an individual firm’s safety record determined the amount that was charged for ACC – and brought in a system that put everybody in categories so you are now charged according to the industrial category you belong to, rather than according to your individual performance.  As  result we now have a less clear-cut incentive for workplace safety.

 I mentioned that an issue that’s very relevant to women is time.  Time is of course important to any businessperson, which is the reason why there has been a lot of discussion about compliance requirements that can eat up the productive time of enterprises.  

The Ministerial Panel on Business Compliance Costs recently reported their findings to the Commerce Minister Paul Swain – 175 pages and 160 recommendations to try and reduce the large amount of compliance costs borne by businesses in New Zealand.

This is what the businesses of New Zealand say about the various pieces of legislation that take up their time –

Resource Management Act – too much variation in the interpretation between councils; plans are too difficult to understand; consent process too expensive and time consuming; competitors are able to use the consent process to stop developments...

Health and Safety in Employment Act – companies can’t get certainty on what’s required of them; OSH keeps raising the benchmarks; too many petty requirements; a punitive approach - and that’s before the legislation coming through this month which will require workplace safety committees, involving union representation, to make decisions on all matters affecting health or safety and which will enable unions to place ‘notifications’ to shut down an enterprise…

ACC – enormous amounts of information required by ACC, but employers can’t get their questions answered by ACC; blanket rates for whole industries, no incentives or rewards for actual safety performance

Hazardous Substances & New Organisms Act - significant application costs; large amounts of time involved in preparing for applications; no provision to stop anti-competitive behaviour; high penalties for non-compliance; disincentives against innovation…

Employment Relations Act - procedures so complex that employers don’t know how to comply; "good faith bargaining" hard to do because it’s not defined; too complicated to take on extra staff; union involvement time consuming for employers; lots of new penalties that an employer could incur without knowing …

Statistics - statistical surveys are too frequent and time consuming; forms are complicated and hard to follow; the reasons for the surveys are not well enough explained…

Tax – complicated tax forms; harsh penalties; inflexible treatment by IRD staff; tax guides too technical; IRD difficult to contact and slow to respond; too much of the IRD’s work is done by employers (collection of employee tax, student loan deductions, court fines deductions, family support deductions and so on)…

And the list goes on.  Legislation in all these areas was no doubt passed with the best of intentions.  But in each case the result has been to create a mountain of paperwork for businesses.  That means they have to devote time to comply with the government’s requirements – time that could be better used looking after customers and growing the business.

I am hopeful that the Government’s response to the Compliance Costs report will include some concrete proposals to reduce the time drag on businesses and I hope those proposals are acted on – but at the moment, looking at the legislative programme that’s coming up, with paid parental leave, new holidays legislation, new EEO requirements and contracting out proposals that will all add to the time drag on businesses – it doesn’t look good.

I’ve mentioned a number of challenges for people involved in enterprises.  But I’d also like to take a moment to consider the opportunities and freedoms that are available to us as business and professional women.

It’s easy to take for granted the rights and advantages that we enjoy as citizens of a democratic country.  But they are significant, compared with many other countries.  Our Prime Minister, our Leader of the Opposition, Governor General, Chief Justice, the CEO of the stockmarket’s largest company – all women.  That would be impossible in many countries today.

There are no barriers to education for women and girls.  No barriers to entry to any occupation.  And in some previously male dominated professions – my own, for example – there are more female than male graduates.

It’s very affirming to look at the lists of people who are standing for elected positions as councillors or mayors all around the country and to see so many strong women candidates.

It’s up to us to choose how we use our freedoms.  Certainly I look forward to the future with a great deal of optimism, and I also sense a positive approach among the many professional and businesswomen that I have dealings with.

I am glad to be able to share my thoughts with you today, and I thank you for your invitation.