On Thursday 23 October over 100,000 nurses, doctors, midwives and teachers are going to strike. Whilst not a general strike in the sense that workers across the employment spectrum go on strike, this is expected to be the biggest in New Zealand in decades.
It is too small to be called a general strike. It is not to say New Zealand has not had a general strike before, but the protest action being planned for 23 October 2025 is significantly smaller than a strike in 1979 where in a country which then had barely 3 million people, 300,000 workers walked off the job for 24 hours. An earlier action in 1913 was a major and at times violent industrial dispute that was not limited to one day and was of significant intensity.
At the same time it is significantly bigger than other notable strikes in New Zealand history, including the 1951 Waterfront Strike. In that one harbour side workers went on strike for better pay, conditions and an improvement in work methods. This one is perhaps the most notable because it lasted 151 days, became a major political issue and involved what many considered – and might still consider – to be draconian use of the army and navy to work the docks.
Legislation passed since 1951, in particular the Employment Relations Act 2000, have redefined the grounds on which a strike can legally proceed.
I support the striking workers.
I support them because the entire neoliberal economic model that increasingly favours the “rich and the sorted” – to misquote Prime Minister Christopher Luxon – is borked. People are waking up to the fact that our reputation for good employers and work conditions is being undermined by people being made to work harder for less returns – nurses, doctors, and other qualified professionals are leaving the country in droves for better employment prospects in Australia. A couple of months ago, the number of people leaving New Zealand each year was 73,400 people.
I know a soon to graduate student nurse working with me, who has already seen prospective job offers in Australia and she still has her final exam to go in November. Earlier this year my neighbours daughter who is an engineer booked a one-way ticket to London with her partner.
The strike is not just about better pay, contrary to what politicians in National, New Zealand First and A.C.T. will tell you. The ones I have spoken to, who are striking on Thursday said it was as much about work conditions, managing workload and being able to have adequate support at work.
I would not be dreadfully surprised if more workers go on strike in the coming weeks and months. They have several good reasons to do so, not least:
- The cutting of sick leave time for part time staff
- The Orwellian approach taken by Ministers responsible, particularly Minister of Health, Simeon Brown, who is mulling a law change to crack down on strikers in the health sector instead of trying to address the problems
- Teachers work 12 hour days – the teaching is barely half of their workload; many coach extra-curricular sports or assist with activities – the fact that they are pooling resources to write whole page open letters in major newspapers
There are things that can be done without the Government increasing expenditure unduly to alleviate the situation. The challenge is purely ideological – how seriously does the Government want the situation to improve? Suggestions that this is deliberate softening up of the health system for privatization have been floated, which I am trying to place to one side at the moment.
Right now I do not believe a general strike is inevitable, but in the last 12 months I have revised my estimates upwards – it is not impossible, but the comparative probability is still low. If privatization does become inevitable, the Minister of Health – whether it is Simeon Brown or somebody else – will face a significantly increased probability of a general strike. That would be a very rare event to happen and would no doubt require significant introspection by those involved. For the general strike to be on par with 1979, it would need to involve over 400,000 workers across the board.
With the above borne in mind, I tend to view strikes of this size involving multiple sectors of the workforce as being mini-general strikes. They do not have the numbers or broad spectrum of a general strike, but are more than just one or two disgruntled sectors taking industrial action.
Leftist Kiwi Writes 