Tense new era ahead of next week’s mass walkout

Saturday, 18 October 2025

A tense new era has dawned as the Government stares down the barrel of Thursday’s mega strike. Both Government and unions walk a fragile line with the public - both hoping those beyond the picket support their side.

It is shaping up to be the biggest strike in decades - numbers estimated to surpass 110,000 of unionised health and education workers - and it comes at a pivotal time.

For unions, prolonged bargaining and a nearing holiday period could produce a fatigued union movement if negotiations aren’t wrapped up before Christmas. For the Government, it faces an awkward combination of tough economic times paired with a looming election year.

Health Minister Simeon Brown this week drew a line in the sand and made a final bid to stop the October 23 mega strike ahead of patients being informed of cancellations.

At last month’s nurses’ conference, despite more than three dozen nurses turning their backs to Brown, his less confrontational approach was met only with silence and occasional muttering.

But faced with a room of senior doctors this week, Brown chose to fight.

He took aim at senior doctors’ pay and described patients as collateral damage in the strike action. There were audible gasps in response to the Health Minister saying the impact on patients crossed an “ethical line”.

And while Brown is removed from negotiations and Health New Zealand is in the driving seat, he shortly after threw another spanner into the works while speaking on RNZ..

In response to a question on restricting the ability to strike for some services that may affect people’s lives, he said: 'I think if strike action continues, that may well have to be something that is considered.“ Public Service Association national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons described that as a “deeply troubling threat”.

The Minister’s office later clarified he was not proposing any law change but “simply reflected that, in principle, governments always need to ensure critical health services remain”.

On the education side there was a small sigh of relief this week. The Primary Principals’ Collective Bargaining Union with about 500 members, one of the multiple unions principals can belong to, settled with the Government on Friday.

However it represents a slither of the almost 60,000 education workers intending to join next week’s strike.

“This agreement shows what can be achieved through focused, good faith bargaining,” Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche said.

Large-scale strikes in New Zealand are not new. Teacher unions teamed up under the last government to walk off the job for better conditions and pay, and nurses voted to strike in 2018 and 2021.

The scale of the workforce striking on October 23 — comprising those typically required to be in bargaining with an expired agreement for at least 40 days, or acting on health and safety grounds — surpasses even the largest recent waves of industrial action.

Legal history expert Dr Grant Morris, from Victoria University, said there seemed to be two striking trends over the last 25 years.

“One is that you can get a quite a number of strikes under Labour as unions who know that Labour is more friendly to them, want to have the opportunity of getting the best possible deal …

“The other trend is what we're seeing now, when unions basically have lost patience with a National government, or National-led government, and decide to strike, even though they probably realise that there might not be a lot of sympathy from the Government for the industrial election.”

But - “underlying all of this is something beyond politics, and that's cost of living”.

“Because the economy is not strong employers, including the Government, are struggling to be able to pay what employees want. A big, big theme here is, this is what happens when inflation gets out of control or the economy's weak.“

Morris said the coordinated strike was “strategically, probably quite a powerful approach”.

Legislative changes and fluctuating union membership over the years have made it more difficult to compare current strikes with those in the past.

Morris said that New Zealand had been heavily unionised before 1991, but union membership had declined significantly since the introduction of the Employment Contracts Act. He added that nowadays, strikes were typically tied to specific bargaining processes, making it hard to coordinate broader sympathy strikes across different groups.

Infometrics chief executive Brad Olsen said disruptions were always challenging for the economy.

“There's a real variety of impacts that come through but, long story short, the economy will not be working nearly as efficiently on a mega strike day.

“And that's the point. The idea of a strike is to disrupt, and that brings the leverage, the bargaining power, the frustration and everything else to convince different sides to come to a resolution and an agreement. That doesn't always work.”

Olsen said the argument put forward at times that wage increases proposed in bargaining were less than the rate of inflation could over simplify the situation, or miss context.

'Sometimes you might have, in any one year, an increase that's below the rate of inflation, but you might have seen previous pay increases that were considerably above the rate of inflation.

“If you argue that a pay rise of below the rate of inflation is wrong in one year, I presume that you equally would argue that a pay rise above inflation is over the top in others.“

For Labour MP Jan Tinetti, she has been on the picket line as a teacher in Invercargill in the 90s, and on both sides of the negotiating table.

She went from being a unionist and on the negotiating team for primary school principals, to an Education Minister being booed by striking former colleagues under the last Government.

“It was a bit surreal,” Tinetti said of the shift from union to government.

“There were things that I suddenly realised I didn't know—how that side of the table worked,” Tinetti said. “And then I also realised, as a minister, that there were lots that the government and the department don't realise how things work.”

Tinetti said the breakdown was sometimes “the work that's done in between bargaining times.”

“Whereas in between times, if you had some working groups or something that had the voice of the worker at the centre, then maybe people going into bargaining have a better understanding — both sides —of each other's perspectives.”

She noted that while teachers did not strike under the Sir John Key National Government, “we got minimal increases”.

She said that one of the contributing factors was that, toward the end of that period, house prices began rising to levels that made it increasingly impossible for teachers to afford a home on the pay agreements they had at the time.

“So cost of living wasn't a big factor, but cost of living now is a big factor — in the fact that teachers are really struggling to buy houses, to get a mortgage, to even just [cover] basic living costs.”

So where is the public sitting?

“Let's be clear, the mega strike incoming is not a complete one-off that no one's been talking about,” Olsen said.

“This has been an ongoing discussion for months. I don't think anyone's got a good answer there, because if they did one or either of the negotiating sides would have capitulated by now.

“If everyone knew that one side was winning the public battle, then the other side wouldn't have to shift,” Olsen said.

“There's not a particularly happy medium in all of this.”