Jenee Tibshraeny: NZ Herald Wellington business editor on the Government reducing the compensation aggrieved employees can get from employers

The Government has unveiled plans to reduce the amount aggrieved employees can be compensated by their employers – to zero in some cases.

Minister Brooke van Velden has detailed proposed changes to the Employment Relations Act, which are aimed at giving egregious employers more power in disputes with employees, who have behaved badly themselves.

 NZ Herald Wellington business editor Jenee Tibshraeny explains how these changes could impact businesses and workers alike.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So Janative Shreni is The Herald's Wellington Business editor and
he's been looking at the story.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, hi Andrew, how are you doing very good?

Speaker 1 (00:07):
So to zero? So the minister is wanting to reduce
your money that an employee can get. But what if
the complaint has been upheld? You know, and Bori decided
it's zero. Do they not get money even though their
complaint has been upheld? This seems weird?

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Yeah, that's right. So basically, if you're an employee, you
can take your employer to the employment relations authority or
the employment court and you can bring forward a personal grievance.
So that's if you think you've been unfairly dismissed or
you know, harassed or humiliated or something like that in
the workplace, you can take take your complaint forward. Now,

(00:42):
the authority or the court could uphold your complaint. They
could say, yes, Janay, that's fine, you know you have
been treated badly by your employer. But what Brooke van
Valden is saying is that she reckons the authority in
the court should be able to discount the amount that
you get paid out if you've actually done something bad
as well in the process so currently that's the case.

(01:04):
Let's say I'm dismissed because I perform really poorly. Currently
they can say, well, you're not going to get the
full pay up because you actually haven't been a very
good employee. What she's saying is that if you've done
something really bad like stolen or hurt somebody, your employer
doesn't need to pay you out at all. So the

(01:24):
authority in the court can say, yes, actually you're you know,
you've been unfairly dismissed, but you've acted so badly your
employer doesn't need to pay you anything.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
So as the idea will she have to will have
to therefore schedule all the various complaints that employee employees
can have off employers and vice versa, so that we
know exactly whether you're a zero, you're whether you're a
ten buck, or whether you're a one thousand.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, good question. So currently the court and the authority
has some discretion to discount the amount that you get
paid out. But she wants to tweak the law to
say that actually, if the employee employee has engaged in
serious misconduct, now that has some sort of legal definition
serious misconduct, then you get nothing there's another thing that

(02:16):
she wants to change here, whereby if reducing the sort
of compensation you might get for hurt and humiliation again
if your behavior contributed towards the dispute. So there's already
a bit of a scale here where, you know, because
these things are never clear cut right. Often it's you know,
a bit of give and take, and it's a bit

(02:36):
of this and that, and the court and the authority
can already use that scale. But she wants to tip
things very much in favor of employers because she thinks
people are sort of taking the mickey a little bit,
and you know, and this is creating uncertainty and hurting businesses.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
And whenever people, whenever people make these sorts of accusations
and they say we're doing this, you say, well, have
you got evidence? Has Brook van Alden van Velden got
evidence of employees exploiting personal grievances because there's money tree
at the end of it.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, well that's that is a good question. And you know,
she's just referred to some anecdotal evidence. For example, she
said there was a case where you know, no names
or anything, just where someone worked in health care they
abused a patient and then they got their job back
at the end of it. She said, well, that's that's
not on. But the thing here is that, you know,
if you do have a personal grievance, it still costs

(03:31):
you money to take it forward in most cases, depending
on you know, sorts of legal services you have access to.
So I guess the unions would argue that actually, as
an employee, you might already be on the back foot.
You don't want to cause a saga and go through
all that stress and everything unnecessarily. So the unions say, well,

(03:51):
there's already power and balance. But then the employers groups
they say, well, you know, Andy, and employers shouldn't be
penalized if they just did their paperwork incorrectly or did
something minor, but the employee actually did the bad thing,
like the employee actually didn't turn up to work or
punch somebody at work or stole. So it's a pretty

(04:15):
heated debate. I think it's actually it's quite complicated.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, it's very abstract and very hard to actually quantify.
And you know, the employers feel like sitting ducks and
they feel that they're being exploited, and the employees feel
like they're just pawns at the end of the day
again getting exploited and so there we go. An interesting story.
Thank you Jane Janet de Breshani, who is our Wellington
Business editor. For more from Heather Duplassy Allen Drive, listen

(04:38):
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