7 December 2006

Executive summary

Quality flexible work should be a key component of the Government's labour market policy.   This would benefit employers, employees, the economy, families and communities.

• A statutory right to receive fair consideration of a request for flexible work arrangements and practices is (in our view) the only way in which such practices will become the norm in the New Zealand finance sector.
• Many large companies in the finance sector have sound policy regarding flexible work in place and publicly at least, appear to support flexible work.    However, despite these policies the culture in the vast majority of workplaces neither encourages such requests being made nor which places sufficient value on meeting the needs of employees in this regard.
• Employers and management need a better understanding of the benefits to employees and of the business of creating and implementing flexible work practices.   The single biggest barrier to achieving this in our sector is management's inability to see these issues in the context of an investment in employee skills, retention and satisfaction rather than as a short term imposition and a short term cost.
• In the relatively rare cases where a worker has made a request for flexible work that has been agreed to, the employee is often made to feel as if some huge favour has been done for them for which they should show continual loyalty and gratitude.   This is a culture which must be changed.
• Over the least thirty years or so, New Zealand governments have managed the country and economy to the point where the economic survival of the family is generally dependent on two incomes.     At the same time, we have developed very little policy which seeks to mitigate the impact of these economic changes on families and communities.   A legislative right to request fair consideration of flexible working practices is a very small step to take which would benefit many people (assuming agreement to their request), in their ongoing efforts to achieve work / life balance.

What is Finsec?

Finsec is a registered trade union with membership of approximately 6,500 of which 82% are female.   The significant majority of Finsec members work in banks, who are comparatively wealthy employers who employ thousands of staff and who have well developed human resource policies.   The balance of Finsec members work for large employers often employing between 100 and 1,000 staff in insurance and finance companies with a small number of members working for smaller employers who employ less than 25 staff.

Benefits and difficulties of flexible work

Today's New Zealand labour market has a record number of workers, increasing female participation, the economic necessity for both partners in a family unit to be in paid employment, some of the highest average working hours in the OECD and low levels of unemployment.

Research produced by the Family Whanau and Wellbeing Project reported in the New Zealand Herald on 26 November 2006 states that despite the massive shift of women into the workforce over the past twenty years the average family is no better off and family income levels have remained static.

Despite today's work environment changing dramatically in the last forty years there have been remarkably few initiatives either by successive governments or employers to mitigate the inevitable economic and social impacts on workers, their families and communities of this work intensification.

Everyone in society will benefit if we, as a country, are prepared to adopt practices that make working easier. We need to find a fair and appropriate balance between the wants of business and the needs of workers, their families and communities.  

Most employers agree that the ability to retain staff decrease staff turnover contributes enormously to their management of costs.   The provision of flexible work practices will benefit businesses economically and help retain sought after skills and experience.

The other benefits to employers and employees are equally clear.   The ability to request temporary or permanent alterations to hours of work and / or work practices in a supportive environment will have the following benefits:-

1. better employee relations
2. a stronger sense of employee ownership of and commitment to their work and their employer
3. employees who can better meet the needs of their families
4. employees who can make stronger contributions to the communities in which they live through such things as volunteering, participation in school activities, and actively participating in the social development of their children through out of school activities
5. employees who are better able to pursue out of work interests that contribute to their   personal development and wellbeing (and employers will often receive the benefits of this)
6. employees who are less stressed by the need to meet inflexible work demands and time constraints and the associated health and safety benefits to employers of this
7. employees who feel that they have better work / life balance and the associated benefits to employers of this
8. employees who become more proactive advocates of their employers as an 'employer of choice'
9. a greater sense of 'give and take' amongst employees which will assist in engendering a more positive attitude to meeting one off or temporary work needs of employers
10. having an environment where employees can (during the course of a working life) access various flexible working practices would allow employees more ability to align their work practices with the phases and differing requirements of each 'time' of life
11. a strong likelihood of reduced family / domestic leave use
12. employees who currently experience 'flexible' (or perhaps better defined as 'precarious') work because it is forced on them through economic necessity and employment practices such as casualisation, compulsory rostering of hours, averaging of work hours etc. may in-fact be able to significantly reduce some of this uncertainty though such a new provision

This list of benefits means that flexible working environments are a real win / win situation for employees and employers as well as families, communities and the business.

However, we do see that there may be difficulties in providing flexible working hours and practices for some employers. Many of these difficulties will be transitory in nature and arise from a lack of knowledge of the possible ways in which work could be structured to meet an employee's request. There may also be a fear of change when long established work practices are changed.

Statutory right to request flexible work versus education and encouragement

Finsec supports a legislative solution that enables employees to make a request that must be given fair consideration.    We believe that legislative reform is necessary if the country is serious about achieving working environments where meeting such requests is a priority. Despite work / life balance issues being to the fore in labour market reviews for a number of years now, little has changed for most workers.

In our own industry, we have a number of examples of both collective agreement provisions and policy statements that seek to assist in work / life balance.   For example:-

1. The Bank of New Zealand collective employment agreement recognises that employee workloads should be achievable in 37.5 hours and requires the employer to monitor examples of excess workload. But, in practice, this does not happen and members tell us that unpaid overtime remains widespread in the bank
2. Westpac Banking Corporation has won EEO Trust Awards for its policy and approach to flexible work practices. Yet, for most employees, the implementation of these policies and their benefits remains a distant dream

Anecdotally, where flexible work practices are attempted, they often come at a price to the employee.   For example job sharing arrangements remain extremely rare in our sector, but we know of a number of cases where the two employees involved have been asked to sign away their employment rights to be treated as individual employees, instead agreeing to be treated as one employee.   Thus, they each need to cover leave of the other employee, accept that if the employer cannot replace one employee who leaves, the other has to resign (without redundancy compensation) and so on.  

Another example is when employees return to work from parental leave, due to change in their family circumstances they proactively seek to change their hours of work from full time to part time.   The employer responds by saying we cannot accommodate your request because of the business needs, or you will have to wait until a part time vacancy arises and apply.   In some situations employees have decided not to return from parental leave because of the employer's inflexible approach.  

Another example is in a recent restructure in Westpac Banking Corporation where the bank told employees who currently worked fixed hours of work over five days of the week that they had to accept new jobs with hours of work that could be rostered over any seven days of the week and that these roles were comparable.   Fortunately, with Finsec involvement this situation was resolved but this demonstrates that employers often give no real consideration to the impact of changing hours on employees in the first instance.

So, in practice, one of the largest, most profitable and (in theory at least) forward thinking sectors has been working on issues such as those canvassed in this review for well over a decade and has failed to make substantive change for the majority of their staff.

Indeed despite these changes Finsec staff regularly deal with cases where unreasonable demands are placed on workers.   At a recent union meeting one bank worker said that her bank told her that her family needed to take a back seat to her working hours.   Without a statutory right to request flexible working hours one can assume that this worker would not have been able negotiate any changes to her hours.

Legislation is needed before the current situation will materially change. This would send an important signal from parliament to employers and the courts that it sees this issue as essential.   The intent of such a legislative provision would simply be to require fair consideration of an employee's request for change to work hours. It does not include a mandated requirement to agree to such changes.  

Recommendation

That the Department of Labour recommend to government that providing legislation with more specific provisions about employees' rights is the most effective way to enable flexible work.   (That is we support option C from the proposed alternative models in the discussion document.)

Providing of information, educating and promoting of positive examples of models of flexible working hour arrangements is also necessary. We believe the Department of Labour should coordinate this task with input from all parties including employers, employees and their unions.

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