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Enhancing the effectiveness of minimum employment standards in New Zealand

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

Gordon Anderson  and
Lucy Kenner
Gordon Anderson*
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Lucy Kenner
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
*
Gordon Anderson, Faculty of Law, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington 6140, New Zealand. Email: gordon.anderson@vuw.ac.nz
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Abstract

Employer breaches of New Zealand’s minimum employer standards and other forms of worker exploitation have been increasingly recognised as a significant problem. This affects migrant workers in particular, and among them those working without documentation or on various types of non-resident visas. Exploitation has become particularly embedded in a number of industries: fishing, hospitality and tourism, and in some sectors of agriculture, particularly those dependent on seasonal labour. Initially, government action to mitigate these problems was slow and reluctant but over the last decade, culminating in the reforms of 2016, there has been a more focussed effort to provide a strong legislative framework to support minimum employment standards. This article describes the background to those reforms, analyses the reforms themselves and goes on to consider whether they are adequate to ensure access to justice by disadvantaged workers.

Keywords

J81J83J88Legal protection and enforcementmigrant workersminimum employment standardsNew Zealandworker exploitation
Type
Articles
Information
The Economic and Labour Relations Review , Volume 30 , Issue 3: Labour Standards: New International Cases of Erosion and Defence , September 2019 , pp. 345 - 365
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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