Welcome to 2025 – we’re very happy to be here.
It was a tumultuous end to 2024, with a lot of large public sector agreements up for negotiation. The Government agencies are facing some challenges. If history repeats, even in a different economic climate, industrial action this year will really become a case of ‘watch this space’. There are still some big agreements to come this year too!
Here are the noteworthy events from December, summarised with links included for your light reading.
1. Public Sector
- 36,000 nurses, midwives and healthcare assistants withdrew their labour for eight hours and followed this with further rolling strikes across the country. Members were also disappointed with Te Whatu Ora restricting bargaining parameters for the settlement to 1% of total employee costs.
- Minister Collins has invoked a rarely used power to allow uniformed service persons to fill in for striking PSA-member civilian staff over the holiday period.
- PSA members at MBIE are taking partial strike action in response to a 0% offer on their agreement which expired in March, this includes border operations staff.
2. Private Sector
- FIRST Union members at Woolworths have ratified their new two-year Collective Agreement, with increases of approximately 6.8% over the term.
- Christchurch Airport firefighters who are PSA members took a variety of partial strike action in the lead up to Christmas. The parties had used facilitation in an attempt to reach a settlement.
3. Lockouts
Lockouts are an industrial action lever that an employer-party has available to them during the collective bargaining process. It is not regularly used and has varying degrees of success. Please seek advice if this is a path that you’re considering. In November & December there were two instances reported –
- Cardinal Logistics have a collective agreement that expired in March 2023.
- Te Roopu Taurima o Manukau Trust who provides disability support services locked out their PSA-member employees.
4. Partial Strike – Partial Pay
Under the proposed change to the Employment Relations Act, employers will be able to make partial deductions from pay for taking partial strike action. This is a return to pre-2018 Employment Relations Act and had many challenges with the approach at the time and some of the examples given by the Minister here would prove extremely difficult to calculate.
5. Minimum Wage
Minimum Wage will update on 1 April 2025 to $23.50. This is a 1.5% increase, and at 35c, it represents the lowest increase since the 25c increase 1 April 2013 (which was equivalent to 1.9% then).