About 40 Idea Services staff picketed outside their King Edward St office yesterday, between 7am and 11am.
E tu union Dunedin delegate Leah Sumner said support staff were fed up with chronic understaffing which left them working long hours, including weekends, and they wanted better pay to compensate for time away from their families.
"They feel overworked and undervalued.
"They want to move us from house to house to create more flexibility, but that's not good for our clients.''
She said clients were not coping with the constant changes in their carers, which was resulting in staff being verbally and physically abused by their clients.
"We need to make sure our work areas are safe.
"We need more staff and regular staffing - less changes for the clients that we're looking after.''
She said it was just one of many issues facing staff at present.
In Invercargill, about a dozen E tu union members picketed outside Idea Services in Dee St.
Union delegate Gordon Cambridge agreed the strike was more about working conditions than money.
"Fifty percent of the workforce have been assaulted in the past year and they [Idea] want to remove the risk from clients from the health and safety agreement.''
The New Zealand Disability Support Network (NZDSN) chief executive Garth Bennie said Idea Services was a provider of services to about 4000 people with intellectual disabilities.
He said trusted providers like Idea were constantly trying to improve the quality of the services they provided and recognised the value of the work their staff did, but in real terms their funding was tightening.
"It's not just the providers who are feeling it.
"People with disabilities and their families are constantly telling us they are qualifying for fewer services and fewer options at a time when Government changes in the sector are trying to give people more choice and more flexibility about the services they use.
"If we don't see a change soon, strikes and more cuts are an inevitable consequence as we see an underfunded sector move beyond breaking point.
"The sector simply doesn't have enough money to meet demand from staff and the people they work so hard to support.
"This is the cumulative effect of over a decade of underfunding.''
A recent independent report completed by Deloitte, showed there was at least a $150million annual funding shortfall in the disability sector.
