Brooke van Velden meets with Council of Trade Unions after pay equity changes
Photo:
RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
The Council of Trade Unions is meeting with Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden on Thursday morning, hot on the heels of pay equity changes passing under urgency last week.
The half-hour meeting from 10.15am is the minister's first with the union in about a year, despite her predecessors typically
booking monthly catch-ups
.
It also coincides with an event hosted by Labour and the Greens to bring union members to Parliament to hear from them about the effects of the pay equity changes.
CTU national secretary Melissa Ansell-Bridges told RNZ the minister's approach to the relationship was unprecedented, but they hoped to get straight into the substantive issues.
"This is really an opportunity to, I suppose, begin some of those conversations that we haven't been able to have with her to date. Obviously top of the agenda is going to be pay equity and we're going to be conveying to Brooke how we think the changes that they have made are absolutely heading in the wrong direction.
"We'll be wanting to get into the substantive issues, we have a lot of questions for Brooke about the changes she has made firstly to pay equity but also there's a range of other issues we haven't been able to engage with her about as well."
Those other matters included calls for a ban on engineered stone, the government's policy of banning partial strikes, and other health and safety policies.
She said they would be asking for the 33 in-progress claims that were scrapped last week to be restored, and the changes to the Act to be reversed. Whether that would be possible was up to the government, she said.
"What they have done is absolutely atrocious and really needs to be reversed as soon as possible ... the changes that they have made to the Act undoubtedly make it harder to settle claims, and to settle claims that actually reflect the work that women do in those female-dominated industries.
"We are going to be making sure that workers' voices are heard in that meeting, and that Brooke van Velden understands the depth of feeling about the changes."
Asked about the lack of meetings, she said van Velden had shown she was not interested in what working people had to say about the changes she wanted to make.
Whether the minister would be receptive was unclear.
"I guess we'll see."
Ansell-Bridges helped facilitate the earlier event for opposition MPs and media to hear from union members about the equity changes, which were passed within a couple of days of being announced.
Labour and Green MPs had planned the event - held in Labour's larger caucus room - last week, inviting a handful of women and their families.
Decrying a newspaper opinion article in Parliament which criticised female MPs for backing the legislation, van Velden quoted from it - using the c-word in Parliament for the first time.
Labour's spokesperson for Women Jan Tinetti addressed that at the start of the meeting on Thursday, saying there had been some "deliberate distractions" from the government over the reaction to its move.
She said she was frustrated and angry about the legislative changes and would continue to fight them.
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