In what has been dubbed a mega strike, an estimated 100,000 nurses, senior doctors and dentists and other health workers, teachers and school support staff and prison staff will walk off the job,.
It’s unusual to have so many workers striking simultaneously, since striking under today’s employment law, other than on safety grounds, is limited to union members whose collective bargaining talks have broken down.
The industrial relations unrest symbolises the disgruntled electorate this government inherited. It’s a post-Covid hangover for which it has found no cure.
Protesters have taken to the streets with monotonous regularity over many issues in the last two years, including a massive turnout in Dunedin about the hospital rebuild.
National has scored some own goals, the biggest being the foolish, short-sighted, and unnecessary agreement to allow the contentious Treaty Principles Bill to proceed to second reading.
While some issues have been long-standing ones not of this government’s making, that matters little to people struggling to pay the bills, find work, timely healthcare, or an affordable and decent house to live in.
When health professionals repeatedly complain about short staffing and the pressure they are under, government politicians from the prime minister down trot out tired old lines about the record spending on health as if to say the concerns are unwarranted.
In education, where change is being pushed through at a break-neck pace at both primary and secondary levels, it is a similar story. Complaints from teachers about the pace, the level of support and their minimal input, prompted Education Minister Erica Stanford to insist she has listened and to itemise all the resources and support she is providing.
This week’s strikes, as inconvenient as they will be for school pupils and prospective patients, are likely to have considerable support by others sympathetic to the cause.
Among them will be many women still seething at the stealthy but brazen way the government quashed the pay equity settlement process they were engaged in.
The government industrial relations approach has been to employ divide and rule rhetoric and plead poverty. The latter does not wash when people see money being found quickly to be spent on causes deemed desirable such as defence.
There has been exaggeration of "average" salaries of those in health and education disputes, supposedly to make the public think they are all overpaid whingers. This has been backed up with multiple accusations from politicians that unions are playing politics, including Public Service Minister Judith Collins in an open letter about the strikes yesterday. Politicians are never guilty of such play.
Last week Health Minister Simeon Brown took the antagonism up a notch, suggesting doctors were crossing an ethical line by striking and, when pressed, making vague noises about changing strike law.
In all of these strikes, proper notice has to be given and, in the case of health workers, life-preserving cover arrangements agreed.
It is desperate stuff from the government and only likely to make workers’ positions more entrenched. It will make the job of the negotiating teams (which do not comprise government ministers) more difficult than it was already.
Anyone who has been involved in collective bargaining will know it is a complex dance of two steps forward, one step back, and vice-versa, with much more than pay involved.
It is not something which either side helps by publicly slagging off the other.
Last week, as tributes flowed for former prime minister Jim Bolger, current politicians of all stripes were keen to revere him.
In a recent interview with veteran journalist Richard Harman, Mr Bolger made the observation the current government was driving people apart.
"When you are in government, you have to bring people together," he said.
In the wake of his death, this week would be a good time for the government to think coolly and sensibly about how to do that. We doubt bringing people together in a mega strike was what Mr Bolger had in mind.
