New Zealand’s vote against protections for gig workers at an international labour conference is “embarrassing”, a union boss says.<\/p>\n
The United States was the only other country to vote against a suite of safety assurances, minimum wage standards and protections against being unfairly kicked off online platforms.<\/p>\n
Council of Trades Unions secretary Melissa Ansell-Bridges, who had just arrived back from the UN conference in Geneva, told Checkpoint while some countries abstained from the vote, 98 percent had voted in favour.<\/p>\n
She said it it threw New Zealand out of step with the rest of the world, and was embarrassing considering New Zealand’s long history of fighting for workers’ rights.<\/p>\n
“Misclassification of employment status, being able to pay people less than the minimum wage, and basically externalising all of the economic risk is part of the business model,” she said.<\/p>\n
“And the rest of the international community is saying ‘This can’t stand, this is a risk to everybody’s wellbeing’, we have to bring in some kind of regulation to this new technology, to this way of working.”<\/p>\n
For New Zealand’s government not to stand in favour was “so disappointing”, she said.<\/p>\n
Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden said New Zealand was not given enough time to seek assurances that the final text would not undermine its laws.<\/p>\n
She said the government should not sign up to conventions where they would be shut out of decision making on the final text.<\/p>\n
Ansell-Bridges said it had been good enough for the other countries that voted in favour, and she didn’t think that argument held water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New Zealand’s vote against protections for gig workers at an international labour conference is “embarrassing”, a union boss…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":483761,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-483760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}