The Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden has announced plans to reintroduce pay deductions for partial strikes.
A partial strike is where the employee is still doing some form of their work. Employers have been banned from reducing the worker’s pay since the previous Labour-led government removed that power in 2018.
ACT’s van Velden said she recognised the entitlement of employees to strike, but the disruption caused “should not continue without consequence”.
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That is insane. If striking workers are going to suffer pay cuts for striking you better believe those strikes are going to be a lot more aggresive since its become economic warfare.
So, the employer’s options:
Her proposed changes would mean an employee’s pay could be reduced by a proportionate amount “calculated in accordance with a specified method that is based on identifying the work that the employee will not be performing due to the strike”.
Alternatively, the employer could deduct 10 percent of the employee’s wages.
Either option would need to be communicated to striking workers ahead of the deduction being made, but they would not be required to communicate the amount.
One of the example situations:
train drivers in Wellington working to rule in September.
Isn’t working to rule meaning that they are doing their whole job and nothing that they aren’t paid to do? And if this happens in future their employer can deduct 10% of their wages?
Have I misunderstood something here?
I’m a bit confused myself actually. I can understand pushing back against practices like deliberately working slowly, or bus drivers not collecting fares, if you’re at work and being paid.
But following the rules to the letter?
Defence force staff are currently working to rule which is causing all sorts of problems. Eg taking their allotted breaks which leave critical parts of the org offline for 30 minutes or so (so they’re having to pull in officers to cover the gaps). It’s hugely disruptive and I assume very effective as a negotiation tool.
BUT. If the organisation can’t function with the staff taking their legally mandated breaks, the understaffing is just being exposed by the workers who have been plugging the gap, unpaid, until now.
That work to rule can see your pay docked is utterly insane.
Read stuff about van Velden’s work history and you’ll quickly gain the impression that she has never actually had to do a real job for any serious length of time outside of being an MP.
Born in '92 - so she’s 32 I think and graduated from UoA in 2016, so 8 years between then & now. First elected to Parliament in 2020, so reduce that to 4 years. Oh, and before uni she was at one of the countries most expensive college’s in Auckland.
In that time she worked for Hooton’s lobbying firm, and then became a staffer for Seymour where according to wiki her “sole task” was lobbying for the End of Life bill, which seems to have meant hanging around Parliament and talking to MPs about it.
Act’s bio for her does note that she has “been a factory worker and corporate affairs consultant”; which kinda reads summer student job and then the lobbying to me.
Anywho, all of that is to say that a person who has likely never experienced difficulty with employment, and never had the experience of work that the majority of NZers have had is striving to undermine and remove what few rights workers have managed to carve back over the last wee while.
That work-to-rule is even considered industrial action (partial strike) is disgusting.
Employee: in going to do exactly what you hired me for
Employee: then I’m going to dock your pay by 10%
