http://stuff.co.nz/4449330a10.html
Quote:
The Government is to legislate to give women the right to breastfeed their babies at work – and will also provide for minimum meal and rest breaks for all workers.
Labour Minister Trevor Mallard and his Cabinet colleague Maryan Street announced the moves at the centenary commemorations of the 1908 Blackball miners' strike over meal breaks.
The ministers also announced plans to allow shift workers to transfer their public holidays.
Mr Mallard said the proposed changes to legislation would be introduced this year.
Announcing the changes, they said it might surprise people to learn there were no statutory requirements for meal and rest breaks.
Ms Street said 93 per cent of active collective agreements provided for rest and meal breaks but anecdotal evidence suggested some workplaces – particularly in the service and manufacturing sectors – were providing less than optimal breaks.
Under the changes to be made to the Employment Relations Act:
* Someone working a standard eight-hour day would be entitled to a minimum of two 10-minute paid rest breaks and a half hour unpaid meal break throughout the day. The breaks would have to be fairly timed so a meal break was taken as near as practicable to the middle of the work period. If an employment agreement had more generous entitlements, then these would apply.
* Employers would be required to provide, where reasonable and practical, facilities and breaks for employees who wished to breastfeed. A code of employment practice would guide employers on how to uphold the obligations.
Ms Street said there was currently no explicit legal protection ensuring women had the right to breastfeed their babies at work.
Evidence suggested access to breastfeeding breaks and facilities in the workplace was mixed, and the extent to which discrimination on the grounds of breastfeeding was understood to be prohibited was mixed, she said.
The law would be changed to explicitly prevent discrimination on the basis of breastfeeding, she said.
"The definition of `sex' as a prohibited ground for discrimination in the Human Rights and Employment Relations Acts is already interpreted as extending to breastfeeding but stronger and more explicit protections are needed in the workplace context."
Mr Mallard said a change would also be made to the Holidays Act to allow the transfer of public holidays for someone who worked a shift that crossed the hour of midnight on a public holiday.
The original intention of the Act was to provide flexibility in allowing the transfer of a public holiday from a day listed in the Act to another day for reasons for cultural or personal significance, or convenience.
However, a recent Supreme Court decision – New Zealand Airline Pilots' Association Industrial Union of Workers Incorporated v Air New Zealand Ltd – had ruled that an employer and employee could not transfer a public holiday from a day listed in the Act to another day.
"This has had a significant effect on many businesses that operate shifts that span two calendar days," Mr Mallard said.
Where a shift had ended on a public holiday, many businesses had had agreements with their workers to transfer the public holiday to the following shift the employee would have worked.
However, as a result of the Supreme Court decision, some businesses now stopped work at midnight and resumed the shift 24 hours later, which meant employees were working a split shift and not able to have a whole working day off as a public holiday.
Ms Street said the proposed change was supported by the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and Business New Zealand as it would benefit both employers and employees.
The Government was planning a wider review of the effectiveness of the Holidays Act, and the issue of employees or employers transferring public holidays for reasons of cultural or personal significance or convenience would be considered.
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So would breastfeeding at work mean you have a legal right to bring your kids to work? I fail to see how this could work?
And also I see that shift workers get some love, but weekend workers with Monday off still get shafted.