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The Centre for Labour, Employment, and Work (CLEW) produces a bi-monthly newsletter called CLEW’d IN. The newsletter includes articles from our team on new research or current topics of interest in the fields of human resource management and employment relations, comment on interesting and important employment law cases and updates on scheduled seminars and workshops.
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COVID-19 lockdowns have forced millions of office workers to transition to working from home. Kitchen tables and spare bedrooms have been commandeered as make-shift home offices and reliable home internet has become a necessity as usage of Zoom and similar products has soared.
At the time of writing this comment the Screen Industry Workers Bill (SIWB) had been reported back to Parliament by the Education and Workforce Select Committee and was awaiting a second reading. Given that Parliament is dissolved on the 6th September ahead of the October 17 election, it seems unlikely that the Bill will become law before next year. It would, however, be preferable that the Bill was left to vanish by any new government. If the Bill was to be enacted it would set both an unwelcome and an undesirable precedent for New Zealand labour law.
Anyone familiar with George Orwell’s novel 1984 will relate to the menace of Big Brother watching their every keystroke and mouse click. . It seems for a growing share of the workforce, however, that dystopian reality has arrived. Nonetheless, what might have been said to be little more than a management fad looks to have blossomed into a full-fledged trend, doing so while most of us hunkering down in our ‘bubbles’.
Gordon Anderson, Professor of Law, Victoria University of Wellington reviews a recent decision of the Employment Court which addressed the issue of when workers are contractors and when are they employees, with all the protections of employment law.
The most recent survey from the Centre for Labour, Employment and Work was completed late in 2019 for the year to December 2018 and the results show that the declining union membership of the last ten years has been reversed for the second year on end. This summary of the key findings are released ahead of the full report which is expected by mid-June.
