Brooke van Velden is a humdrum, run-of-the-mill union buster

Her talk of flexibility and choice hides a classic anti-worker agenda

Apr 10, 2025

Brooke van Velden: public servant, not power hungry | The Post — The other hand is stabbing workers in the back. Photo: The Post

I’ve already described the coalition Government’s policy agenda as “class war writ large.” I and others have discussed their privatization agenda and their cuts to public services and tax cuts for the wealthy.

It’s time to discuss another piece of the class war: Union busting. Any ruling class worth its salt will go after unions. Capitalists hate unions, and the reason is obvious. Unions, or collectives of workers, can force bosses to come to the table to negotiate better working conditions and wages. If the bosses don’t play ball, the unions can strike, halting production and crippling business. For these reasons, unions are a crucial part of any working-class program, and also are targeted with particular viciousness by capitalists and the politicians who serve them.

Thankfully, we’ve come a long way from the days where the bosses would send strikebreakers out to crack skulls and force strikers to capitulate to industrial demands. Because of these brutal confrontations, organized labor won some significant legislative victories for workers. Everything from shorter working days to protections against child labor to holiday pay to paid time off has come because of the struggle of organized labor. The first half of the 20th century in particular was a time of militant labor unions and a powerful labor movement which had significant political power.

But of course, as I explained here, these gains are always subject to being clawed back by the ruling class. Anything enacted through legislation can be reversed by legislation. And because business profits are the result of bosses paying workers less than the value of their labor, profits and wages are in direct competition with one another. Anything that allows workers to band together to exert their collective political and social power to force higher wages or better working conditions is therefore viewed as a threat to business and is lobbied against strongly by business interests. The political program of weakening the ability of workers to take collective action for the benefit of them and their fellow workers is called union busting.

Why does she hate workers so much?

Enter Brooke van Velden, the current Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety and union buster extraordinaire. During her first term as a minister, she has carried out the most anti-worker political program in at least 40 years. Indeed, van Velden seems intent on clawing back much of the progress that workers have won in the last generation.

This should come as no surprise to anyone, because the right-wing coalition indicated their anti-worker agenda from the very beginning, eliminating the Labour government’s mandate for the Reserve Bank to focus on both inflation and employment.

Part of the reason for the coalition Government’s vicious job cuts to the public sector also has to do with employment. Aside from providing funds for tax cuts for the wealthy, slashing jobs also increases the rate of unemployment, driving down wages and the purchasing power of the working class. This in turn leads to decreased demand and lower inflation.

It should be clear here that one of the principal mechanisms economists use to tackle inflation knowingly and purposely increases the rate of unemployment. Some argue that this is just a side effect, but it has been convincingly argued that austerity is used purposely by the capitalist class. By “promoting unemployment and market discipline, it neutralizes collective working-class power and fortifies economic control in the hands of central bankers and treasury technocrats insulated from political contestation.”1

Van Velden signaled her intention to undermine the labor movement in Aotearoa early on by refusing to meet with representatives from the Council of Trade Unions, New Zealand’s biggest trade union, following an initial meeting at the beginning of her tenure as minister. She has still not met with them again. She has, however, met with representatives from the Free Speech Union and NZ Unions, both right-wing organizations with ties to international corporate interests and anti-vax and other reactionary movements.

During her time as minister, van Velden has introduced, passed, or signaled the government’s intention to enact a raft of anti-worker policy. Let’s look at some of these.

Fair pay agreements

As part of the first 100 day agenda, van Velden introduced legislation to repeal Labour’s Fair Pay Agreements. Fair pay agreements are industry-wide standards for wages and working conditions that aim to provide standardized worker protections within a given industry. The bill repealing these was passed under urgency. Van Velden said of the repeal “Fair pay agreements were never about fairness, they forced a minority of union worker's views on all affected workers and businesses…” This repeal makes it easier for businesses to force workers to accept unfair or inadequate working conditions or compensation and these harms are disproportionately born by the most at-risk workers. Following the repeal, a leaked cabinet paper revealed that van Velden had gone against official advice against repealing the agreements which showed that “the move would disproportionately impact women, Māori and Pasifika and young people.”

90-day trials for all businesses

Under urgency, the coalition Government passed a bill establishing 90-day trial periods for all businesses. This bill means that all businesses can fire any employee within 90 days with no legal repercussions. Employers do not even need to give a reason for firing workers. Van Velden said that this would give businesses confidence to hire people whom they would not normally hire, which would lead to increased productivity. Critics of the bill said that it gives businesses carte blanche to hire and fire at will, and increased the precarity of workers. In fact, a 2016 Treasury-commissioned report found that when 90-days trials were implemented previously they did not lead to more hiring, invalidating the reason given for their implementation. The policy is therefore not evidence-based, and, where impacts are felt, it is by those workers whose employment is already most precarious.

Contractors vs employees

Van Velden has announced changes to the legal test of whether workers are contractors or employees. This is a significant distinction, because employees are required to be provided with certain statutory privileges, such as a minimum wage, paid holidays, limits on the hours they are asked to work, and the right to not be fired from their jobs. Contractors do not have the right to any of these protections. More and more companies are designating their workers as contractors in an effort to undermine worker protections and increase the ability to exploit workers in the so-called “gig economy”.

ACT’s push to redefine the legal test comes after the ride-sharing company Uber lost a landmark case in the New Zealand Employment Court in 2022 which ruled that Uber workers are employees and not contractors. Van Velden said of the changes "The current process for workers challenging their employment status through the courts can be costly for businesses, and can increase business uncertainty in general.”

She has, however, come under fire for meeting with Uber during the drafting of the legislation, with some accusing her of copy-pasting Uber’s definition of a contractor for her own bill. In other words, it very much looks like van Velden is purposely changing the employment legislation to enable Uber and other businesses to exploit workers legally. Uber is already well known for their exploitative practices and corruption.

Employee Relations Amendment Bill

All of the above-mentioned changes will be incorporated into an amendment of the Employee Relations Act which is expected to come before parliament later this year. In addition to the above-discussed changes, the amended act will include a number of changes to New Zealand employment law that will heavily shift the balance of power in favor of employers. These include:

The reintroduction of the ability for employers to deduct worker pay for partial strikes
Eliminating the rule which automatically signed workers up for any collective bargaining agreements for the first 30 days of employment. This undermines unions by allowing employers to pressure or provide misinformation about collective bargaining arrangements, leading to fewer people benefiting from union protections
Setting an income threshold of $180,000 on whether workers can file an unjustified dismissal claim
Changing rules around whether employees may receive remedies for personal grievance claims. If the person’s behavior is found to contribute to the breakdown in the employment relationship, they will not be eligible for remedies
Workers will no longer be prohibited from discussing their pay with other workers
Allowing employers to make a settlement offer for the purpose of terminating a worker’s employment arrangement
A 1.5% minimum wage increase from $23.15 to $23.50 per hour. This wage increase does not keep up with inflation and has been called “an effective pay decrease” by the opposition
Changes to the Holidays Act which will change the way that workers accrue annual leave
Changes to health and safety laws exempting small businesses and others from health and safety requirements, a move that ignores expert advice

This is not about “flexibility” and “choice”. It’s classic union busting.

In discussing all of the changes to employment law, van Velden has said that the goal is to increase labor flexibility and choice. For example, in her speech announcing the repeal of the Fair Pay Agreements, she said

Fair pay agreements undermine the flexible labour market which has been a pillar for New Zealand’s economic success for the past three decades.
They do not help employees. Instead, they make life harder for business so they’re more hesitant to employ people.
National and ACT opposed this law when it was introduced and feel strongly that fair pay agreements would reduce flexibility, choice and agility in workplaces.

Contrast this with the speech made by Michael Wood, Labour’s Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety at the third reading and passage of the Fair Pay Agreement legislation

Fair Pay Agreements have long been one part of our wider work programme focused on lifting the wages of those on low to medium incomes – ensuring better wages for employees is even more essential now as we tackle global headwinds.
We are ending New Zealand’s 30-year failed experiment with a low-cost labour model. Over this period, many workers, have suffered through a ‘race to the bottom’, but, equally, our rates of labour productivity have been amongst the worst in the world.

So which is it? Is our productivity suffering because of a lack of a flexible labor market and inadequate employee choice? Or is it that the employer/employee relationship has been heavily in favor of employers and business for the last 40 years of neoliberal capitalism? The data points us to one conclusion, and it isn’t the one that van Velden would have us believe. She and the rest of the coalition Government are selling us a lie, same as all the other right-wing business shills before them.

At the end of the day, van Velden is an unoriginal, uninspired plain old union buster. Her positions and policies are not evidence-based as indicated by her continual failure to consult with, or to flat out reject, experts on the issues she makes policy on. Rather they are wholly ideological, fed to her by business interests and libertarian think tanks who disguise their pro-corporate anti-worker agendas in language of “flexibility,” “freedom”, and “choice”.

A recent puff piece in The Post labeled her as a “public servant, not power hungry.” Sure. I can believe that someone who dismissed the last government’s COVID response as extreme, stating “when it came to COVID, we completely blew out what the value of a life was, completely, I've never seen such a high value on life” really values and seeks to serve the public. Someone who, when confronted with evidence and advice indicating severe health harms associated with the manufacture of engineered stone, health harms which led Australia to ban the product, appears hesitant to implement a similar ban and is being actively lobbied by business interests to oppose it. Is this the kind of public servant Aotearoa deserves?

Every effort should be made to expose van Velden and the coalition Government’s anti-worker agenda and to fight it in any way possible, including with massive strike action. We should flood the submission process for the Employee Relations Amendment Bill when it is announced. We should protest any changes. We should work to enact a comprehensive pro-worker policy agenda. We may not be able to stop her and her union-busting buddies, but history will bear witness that they did what they did against the wishes of the public and workers and solely in the interest of capital and business profits.