Employment Relations Act change permits employers to deduct pay during partial strikes

van Velden said partial strikes have seriously affected New Zealand’s families, students, patients, and workers. According to van Velden, these impacts included: 

• 50 percent fewer procedures relating to scans by MRI and nuclear medicine technologists, which delayed early cancer treatment, lengthened waitlists, upped outsourcing costs, and put pressure on front-line staff members 
• interruptions to student learning and working difficulties for some parents, as teachers refrained from teaching some year levels on certain days during their partial strike action in 2023 

“Rebalancing collective bargaining settings will support the Government’s priority to deliver better public services, by reducing disruption and maintaining a high quality of service,” van Velden said in the news release. 

van Velden said the change seeks to: 

• benefit all workers and communities 
• decrease the disruption of partial strikes to public and customer services 
• help return employers and unions to the bargaining table 
• ensure a fairer bargaining process overall 
• reinstate the option removed by the previous government in 2018 

Impacts of change

According to the government’s news release, with the recently passed change, employers can respond to partial strikes by deducting 10 percent of the partially striking employee’s wages or proportionately decreasing their pay with a method that singles out the work not performed because of the strike. 

The government’s news release stressed that, prior to the change, an employer could not deduct pay during a partial strike without first suspending the employee or issuing a lockout notice.

In its news release, the government said employers should notify employees in writing of their intention to reduce their pay before effecting the deduction. The government noted that the notice need not state the deduction amount. 

Per the government’s news release, if the union thinks the employer wrongly applied a pay deduction, it should inform the employer as soon as practicable and can consider asking the Employment Relations Authority to decide the deduction’s propriety. 

The government’s news release explained that a partial strike is a type of industrial action that arises when employees go to the workplace but decline to perform some job tasks.