The Government is to legislate to give women the right to breast-feed their babies at work - and it 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, which was over meal breaks.
The ministers also announced plans to allow public holidays to be transferred for shift workers.
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% 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, employers would be required to provide, where reasonable and practical, facilities and breaks for employees who wished to breast-feed.
Anyone 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, those would apply.
Mr Mallard said a change would also be made to the Holidays Act to allow the transfer of public holidays for those 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 of 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.
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.
