State Companies and Employment Law - by Michael S.

How many of us realised that these yellow vans are not part of Courier Post?

They are in fact vans that Courier Post make their contractors buy and look after at their own expense. The supposedly self-employed contractors also have to

NZ Post made $27 million profit after tax in six months last year. It said it delivered 85,000,000 parcels a year.

The couriers' union, E tū, tried to bring a class action to have the couriers declared to be employees. That would give them lots of employment rights, such as sick pay and holidays, but those rights are what NZ Post doesn't want them to have.

You might expect a state company to be a good employer and to want to make sure it is complying with the sort of employment law Parliament said New Zealand should have. But according to E tū, the couriers' union, NZ Post lawyers played the system by making unnecessary paperwork and trying to get the case adjourned. The E tū national organiser, Joe Gallagher, said "I'm a bit disappointed for a state-owned enterprise to be pushing back so hard like this.”

Judge Holden previously said that Uber drivers are self-employed, not employees, following the Australian model, but in contradiction to most of the world.

But, Chief Judge Inglis said that courier drivers for Parcels Express were really employees.

Are NZ Post couriers more like Uber drivers or more like Parcel Express drivers?

Chief Judge Inglis and Judge Holden do not have the same approach to many things so it may be more important which judge was dealing with it.

In any event, E tū has decided not to pursue the class action and instead to support an individual driver, Asneil Kumar, in bringing a case.

Leighton Associates readers may notice something about the names of the drivers in those two cases. They are not typical Maori or Pakeha names. As the Newsroom report says, many of the drivers who are treated like this are migrant workers. They are easy to exploit because they depend on having a job to keep their visa. But do we really want a New Zealand state organisation even more involved in migrant worker exploitation?