Employment Relations Case Study

1058 Words3 Pages

It is important that legislation concerning employment relations is always evolving in order to strive for the most productive relationships with the most benefits for stakeholders. Amendments to part 6D of the Employment Relations Act is an interesting example of such evolution. The amendments came into effect in early 2015, effectively removing prescriptive measures relating to rest breaks and allowing workers to take compensatory measures in replacement for their rest breaks. These changes faced significant debate, particularly within the quick service restaurant industry, with support from employers and opposition from the workers. This essay assessed the benefits and risks of these amendments, in order to examine the validity of such debate. Ultimately, this essay argues that, as evidenced by the impact of McDonalds and its workers, the amendments heavily favour the employer, placing the employee at a detriment. With a diverse workforce of over 9,000 employees and investing $100 million NZD into expanding an additional 6,000 more, McDonald’s New Zealand (McDonald’s) enjoys unprecedented growth within the quick service restaurant (QSR) industry (c). This diverse …show more content…

‘Compensatory measures’ are undefined and very broad, and as such, there are questions as to exactly what workers can expect from their employees. As the government ignored warnings of the removal of timing and necessity of rest and meal breaks expose lower income and vulnerable employees to have no breaks at all (f). This poses significant risk to the employee’s engagement and wellbeing levels as figure 1 shows, a correlation between low well-being and a low engaged employee resulting in the least contribution from

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