About 2500 mental health and public health nurses have joined fellow Public Service Association members in voting to take industrial action starting August 25.
The PSA today released the results of the ballot of its nearly 12,000 district health board members, which also include administrative staff, technicians, and allied health staff.
National secretary Richard Wagstaff said members had “overwhelmingly voted” (87.1 per cent) to take industrial action after being offered only a 0.7 per cent pay increase per year and no movement on other issues, including training and professional development.
Ashok Shankar, the PSA’s national organiser for DHBs, said nurse members had voted in even higher numbers to take industrial action than the other professions.
He said the last time PSA nurses took industrial action was in 2005 – which was the first time ever that public health nurses had taken action.
Shankar said there were very strong feelings amongst nurses this time round – not only because of the low pay offer but also the decreasing amount of training and professional development being offered.
He said because professional development was not an entitlement in the PSA MECA, the DHBs, under financial constraints, had been decreasing spending on PSA members and not on other staff.
“Which we think is unfair and unjust. They should do that because they are required to provide the same training to everybody.”
The staged industrial action is to start on August 25, with working to rule followed by an overtime ban on September 1. The third step is to strike for three hours on September 2 and for three hours on September 10.
Shankar said PSA had been negotiating the clerical/adminstration contract for 11 months with DHBs and the nursing agreement since about March. It is understood to be the first time that all DHB PSA members have come together to vote and agree on joint industrial action.
The last multi-employer collective agreement (MECA) for PSA nurse members took more than a year to negotiate and was finally ratified in December 2011.
The deal was backdated to 28 October 2011 and provided a two per cent lump sum payment in 2012 and a 2.5 per cent pay rise on May 1 2013.
That 2013 pay rise brought the starting salary for a PSA mental health or public health nurse to $46,948, and the top of the eight-step, community nursing basic pay scale to $70,992.
The MECA for Auckland region PSA nurses expired on June 30 this year and the MECA for nurses across the rest of the DHBs expired on April 30.
The New Zealand Nursing Organisation’s MECA for DHB nurses does not expire until early next year.
