Public Submissions Open On The Employment Relations Amendment Bill
This bill proposes changes to the Employment Relations Act 2000, which is the principal piece of employment legislation that regulates employment relationships. It aims to make New Zealand's business settings more competitive, and to give businesses the confidence and support to grow, hire, and innovate. The bill seeks to reduce compliance requirements and associated costs, including for small-to-medium-sized businesses.
In particular, the bill seeks to:
provide greater certainty for contracting parties
amend the personal grievance process for employees
introduce a wages and salary threshold for unjustified dismissal personal grievances
remove the '30-day' rule to support an expansion of 90-day trials at the start of employment.
Make a submission on the bill by 2.00pm on Wednesday, 13 August 2025.
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Otago Daily Times
4 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Calendar Girls strip club forced to remove posts about women suing firm
The owners of the Calendar Girls strip clubs have been forced to take down posts identifying dancers suing the firm. Seven women are currently pursuing an application in the Employment Court for a declaration of their employment status. A non-publication order was issued in May suppressing their identities after they raised concerns about their safety and damage to their reputations due to the stigma attached to the work they had been doing. One of the women has now returned to court alleging breaches of the order by Calendar Girls NZ Ltd, the company named as the defendant in their case. Chief Employment Court Judge Christina Inglis hastily scheduled a hearing this week to hear the woman. "I accorded urgency to the application given the nature of the alleged breaches and the concerns that had underpinned the making of the orders of non-publication in the first place," the judge said in a recent judgment. Lawyers get together The urgent hearing was set down for Thursday but was cancelled after lawyers for both sides got together and agreed non-publication orders should be respected. "The defendants confirm that they have removed all offending posts," Judge Inglis said. However, her judgment did not detail what was in the posts. The seven women are seeking a declaration that they were employees of Calendar Girls NZ Ltd under the Employment Relations Act 2000. Being an employee, rather than a contractor, gives entitlement to a wider range of legal protections, including minimum conditions, protection from discrimination, health and safety, and the ability to bargain collectively. In 2023, dancers from the Wellington Calendar Girls club attempted to bargain collectively after being offered a contract that they said was "manipulative". Nineteen were told to clear out their lockers and not to come back to work through a Facebook post after asking for changes to the way they were being paid. In seeking non-publication orders in the current case, filed in the Wellington Employment Court, the seven women raised several concerns about having their identities made public. Women in the clubs use a professional name while working there, and are instructed not to give their real names to customers. However, their case in the Employment Court has been taken using their real names. The women involved in the case feared publication of their identities would "severely impact" their employment and housing prospects, and their ability to travel. They said the stigma attached to their work at Calendar Girls had already led to judgments about their morality and respectability. The women are all young and fear damage to their reputations and the impact on their families. They also said they had safety concerns about former clients and members of the public. Dismissed from a government job One of the women is a member of a church and is worried about others in the congregation finding out. Others have had tenancy applications declined, and another woman said she was dismissed from a government agency when it became known she had worked in the sex industry. Judge Inglis has now made orders instructing Calendar Girls not to disclose the names, identifying particulars, or photographs of the seven women who have taken the case. She said this applied to "all forms of communication, including oral, written, electronic and any other medium". The substantive case has been set down to be heard in a five-day fixture in February 2026. Calendar Girls NZ Ltd is a Christchurch-based company which operates clubs in Christchurch, Auckland, Wellington and Queenstown. - Ric Stevens, Open Justice reporter
Otago Daily Times
5 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Strip club forced to remove posts about women suing firm
The owners of the Calendar Girls strip clubs have been forced to take down posts identifying dancers suing the firm. Seven women are currently pursuing an application in the Employment Court for a declaration of their employment status. A non-publication order was issued in May suppressing their identities after they raised concerns about their safety and damage to their reputations due to the stigma attached to the work they had been doing. One of the women has now returned to court alleging breaches of the order by Calendar Girls NZ Ltd, the company named as the defendant in their case. Chief Employment Court Judge Christina Inglis hastily scheduled a hearing this week to hear the woman. "I accorded urgency to the application given the nature of the alleged breaches and the concerns that had underpinned the making of the orders of non-publication in the first place," the judge said in a recent judgment. Lawyers get together The urgent hearing was set down for Thursday but was cancelled after lawyers for both sides got together and agreed non-publication orders should be respected. "The defendants confirm that they have removed all offending posts," Judge Inglis said. However, her judgment did not detail what was in the posts. The seven women are seeking a declaration that they were employees of Calendar Girls NZ Ltd under the Employment Relations Act 2000. Being an employee, rather than a contractor, gives entitlement to a wider range of legal protections, including minimum conditions, protection from discrimination, health and safety, and the ability to bargain collectively. In 2023, dancers from the Wellington Calendar Girls club attempted to bargain collectively after being offered a contract that they said was "manipulative". Nineteen were told to clear out their lockers and not to come back to work through a Facebook post after asking for changes to the way they were being paid. In seeking non-publication orders in the current case, filed in the Wellington Employment Court, the seven women raised several concerns about having their identities made public. Women in the clubs use a professional name while working there, and are instructed not to give their real names to customers. However, their case in the Employment Court has been taken using their real names. The women involved in the case feared publication of their identities would "severely impact" their employment and housing prospects, and their ability to travel. They said the stigma attached to their work at Calendar Girls had already led to judgments about their morality and respectability. The women are all young and fear damage to their reputations and the impact on their families. They also said they had safety concerns about former clients and members of the public. Dismissed from a government job One of the women is a member of a church and is worried about others in the congregation finding out. Others have had tenancy applications declined, and another woman said she was dismissed from a government agency when it became known she had worked in the sex industry. Judge Inglis has now made orders instructing Calendar Girls not to disclose the names, identifying particulars, or photographs of the seven women who have taken the case. She said this applied to "all forms of communication, including oral, written, electronic and any other medium". The substantive case has been set down to be heard in a five-day fixture in February 2026. Calendar Girls NZ Ltd is a Christchurch-based company which operates clubs in Christchurch, Auckland, Wellington and Queenstown. - Ric Stevens, Open Justice reporter
Scoop
16-07-2025
- Scoop
Parliament Considering Big Changes To Employment Law
, Editor: The House Parliament has kicked off a three-week sitting block this week, and the first legislative business was initial debates and votes on three new bills. Two are contentious, including a bill to amend current Employment Relations law. Among its measures, it would restrict or even rule out grievance claims, make it harder for contractors to argue they are employees, and remove various rules relating to new employees. The minister in charge of both the bills is ACT MP Brooke van Velden. She described the intent of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill using a variety of common euphemisms (rebalancing, flexible labour markets, greater certainty, competitive business settings), but also described the proposed changes. Below are the major changes, as described by the minister herself, along with comments by opposition MPs. Hindering contractors from being declared employees by the courts "Currently a contractor can challenge their employment status in law despite being a contractor … To give greater weight to the intention of the contracting parties, the bill establishes a gateway test establishing an exclusion from the definition of 'employee' in the Employment Relations Act." - Brooke van Velden (ACT) "At the moment, there is a test of the real nature of the job … 'is this actually an employment relationship or is it a contracting relationship?' That's what our judges can do at the moment. This bill takes that away. It says if you have the word 'contractor' written in a document, then you're a contractor. Well, this is against all the international examples, this [is] totally different to the common law that applies in many other countries that we compare ourselves to, and is an absolutely disgusting, unprecedented attack on workers' rights." - Camilla Belich (Labour) Changes to personal grievance 'remedy' settings "I'm introducing a suite of changes to address this imbalance, which are: removing eligibility for any remedies for employees whose behaviour amounts to serious misconduct; removing eligibility for reinstatement into a role and compensation for employees who contribute to the situation that led to the personal grievance; clarifying that the Employment Relations Authority and Employment Court have the full spectrum of remedy reductions - up to 100 percent - available to them; requiring the Authority and Court to consider if the employee's behaviour obstructed the employer's ability to meet their obligations to act as fair and reasonable employers; and increasing the threshold for procedural error to shift the focus solely to whether any errors in the employer's process resulted in the employee being treated unfairly." - Brooke van Velden (ACT) "In an employment relationship, often there is a situation where an employee may do something that is not 100 percent perfect; an employer might do something which is not 100 percent perfect. The situation that they're bringing in says if the employee is anything less than perfect, they can't get their remedies." - Camilla Belich (Labour) "It's going to heighten the workers' vulnerability to be unjustifiably dismissed. And it's great if you have employers that are good, but, unfortunately, this opens the doors, as it does for many situations, for those worst-practising businesses and employers. That's why employees' rights were put in place in the first place. …This gives the employers more power. When you're in a climate where there isn't a heck of a lot of work, that then creates an opportunity for employers to exploit the most vulnerable." - Debbie Ngarewa-Packer (Te Pāti Māori) No personal grievance option for the well-paid "This bill introduces an income threshold of $180,000 per annum, above which a personal grievance for unjustified dismissal cannot be pursued. … By making it easier to remove poorly performing managers and executives while giving new talent a chance, I expect to help improve management capability and thereby lift economic performance across New Zealand." - Brooke van Velden (ACT) "The first thing that they're doing is actually making it so anyone earning over $180,000 in New Zealand can be fired at will." - Camilla Belich (Labour) Employer obligations to new staff "Currently, if an employer is party to a collective agreement that covers the work of the new employee, an employee's individual employment agreement terms must reflect the terms of the collective agreement for the first 30 days of their employment. This is known as the '30-day rule'. …The bill removes the requirement that the terms of a new employee's employment agreement should reflect the terms of the applicable collective agreement for the first 30 days of employment. …The employer would still need to inform an employee that a collective agreement exists." - Brooke van Velden (ACT) "The 30-day rule acts as a lifeline. It gives kaimahi time to consider union membership before being pressured into an individual agreement. Without this rule, employers could use the divide and rule tactics, which is real - the peer pressure to keep Māori kaimahi, to keep Pasifika kaimahi, to keep those who are not savvy on what their rights are, on weaker contracts from day one. And that's a really tough position to claw back from. It allows employers to opt out of collective conditions on day one, and it creates a race to the bottom." - Debbie Ngarewa-Packer (Te Pāti Māori) Union sign-up The minister in charge of the bill, Brooke van Velden did not mention this aspect of the 30-day rule: that the new law removes any obligation of employers to inform new staff of the option of joining a union, or facilitating that option. "It removes the obligation to provide an active choice in which the employer asks the employee whether they want to join their relevant union and receive that advocacy." - Ginny Andersen (Labour) A note on international obligations "We have a regulatory impact statement where all of the information in relation to international obligations is redacted. And why is this? Because we have free-trade agreements with lots of different countries that state that our employment situation should not decrease - and I bet you that that's exactly what it says in this regulatory impact statement. They won't share it with the House." - Camilla Belich (Labour) The Employment Relations Amendment Bill will be considered by the Education and Workforce Committee, which will be asking for public feedback on the bill. *RNZ's The House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding from Parliament's Office of the Clerk. Enjoy our articles or podcast at RNZ.
