About 10,000 public servants in New Zealand took part in
a half-day strike on September 9 against the National
Party-led government’s moves to drive down wages. The
government also intends to cut about 8,700 jobs across
government departments—14 percent of the core public
sector workforce.
Demonstrations were held in
Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and many other towns and
cities. It was the biggest strike since last October’s
“mega strike” by over 100,000 teachers and healthcare
workers.
The strike involved workers from the Ministry
of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), the
Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), the Ministry of Social
Development (MSD), the National Emergency Management Agency
(NEMA) and the Ministry for Ethnic Communities
(MEC).
The combined action was a significant
expression of rising anger over the government’s austerity
measures. The ruling elite is starving essential public
services in order to funnel more money to the rich and to
boost the military budget in preparation for war.
All
public servants have received pay offers well below the 4.1
percent rate of inflation. DIA staff have been offered just
0.8 percent, and the Public Service Association (PSA) says
offers to the other departments are little better. MBIE
workers received a zero percent pay increase in 2025.
Overall, public sector wages increased by only 1.7 percent
in the 12 months to June.
About 5,000 of those who
walked out on Wednesday were MSD staff, who administer what
remains of the country’s social welfare system. They were
striking for the first time in about 30 years. The PSA,
however, limited the strike to just two hours for MSD
employees, while other departments struck for about five
hours.
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The union leadership is preparing to sell these
workers out. Its position is two-faced. PSA national
secretary Fleur Fitzsimons told a strike rally in
Wellington: “We need bargaining-table offers that keep
pace with the cost of living increases facing public
servants.”
Later in the day she contradicted
herself, telling Radio NZ (RNZ) that if the government made
“the same offer that health and education workers got of
2.5 percent [in the first year] and 2 percent [in the second
year] and lump sum payments and clear commitments to work
constructively with the union, I think that would cut
it.”
In other words, the PSA will pressure public
servants to accept the real wage cuts that the unions
imposed following last October’s strike. The PSA pushed
through a below-inflation deal for 12,300 allied health
workers in February.
The PSA turned the Wellington
strike rally near parliament, attended by about 1,000
people, into an election rally for the opposition Labour
Party and the Greens.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins said
if he leads the government after the November 7 election,
“We will not be making the cuts to the public service that
this National government has committed New Zealand to”—a
carefully worded statement that leaves the door open for
different cuts. He told public servants, “You deserve
better,” but made no actual pledge to lift
wages.
Green Party MP Julie Anne Genter said “this
government has deliberately assaulted and attacked public
service workers.” She added that welfare recipients,
migrants and Māori were being scapegoated “for the higher
cost of living, when in fact it is the super-rich and highly
concentrated corporate power that is dismantling our
democracy.”
These statements are cynical and
duplicitous. The last Labour-Greens government, in office
from 2017 to 2023, effectively froze wages across the public
sector, with the assistance of the unions, which sold out
strikes by teachers and nurses. Child poverty and
homelessness increased while the rich got
richer.
During the 2023 election campaign, Hipkins
promised to cut more than 2 percent of spending across
government departments, which the PSA agreed to facilitate.
The Labour Party lost that election by a landslide.
A
worker at MBIE in Wellington told the World Socialist Web
Site that his department was already understaffed and any
more cuts would have “tangible effects on regulation. We
are set up in order to regulate and maintain standards in
things like housing. If our performance suffers, we’ll
just end up with housing problems.”
He continued:
“If one wants to be cynical, one could say that if the
government reduces performance in the department, they will
turn around and say: this department is somehow inefficient,
nothing to do with us, perhaps we should just drop the
regulation altogether.”
He rejected claims by the
government that AI technology could replace the functions of
many workers, calling this a “reckless” gamble. “The
intent is already there to make the cuts, this is just an
excuse.”
Asked whether he thought a Labour
government would be any different, the worker said
“there’s always hope, but they get into power and they
just don’t deliver.” He doubted that Labour would take
steps that would make life more affordable, such as
introducing rent controls.
The WSWS warns that Labour
and its allies, including the Greens, have no genuine
differences with the National Party-led government’s
program of austerity and militarism. A real struggle against
wage cuts and to defend jobs can only be undertaken in
opposition to all the capitalist parties.
Labour has
agreed to keep overall government spending roughly the same.
It agrees with National on pouring billions of dollars into
the military to strengthen New Zealand’s integration into
US imperialist wars and war plans against Russia and
China.
The PSA’s Fitzsimons last year demanded
increased military spending and singled out China as a
threat. The money for war will come at the expense of
hospitals, welfare programs, education, and workers’
wages.
The Greens are calling for a 2.5 percent wealth
tax on the very rich and a modest tax increase on very large
corporations. Labour has ruled out such policies, but even
if they were implemented they would not raise enough revenue
to address the crisis in schools, hospitals and other
services. The Green Party also has no objection to
increasing the military budget, which it supported during
the last government.
The struggle against austerity
cannot proceed within the straitjacket of the PSA. The
critical lesson from the repeated sellouts and betrayals by
the union apparatus, year after year, is that workers must
build new organisations: rank-and-file committees,
democratically controlled by workers themselves, and
independent of the union bureaucracy and the capitalist
parties.
Such committees must strive to link public
sector workers with workers in every industry, as well as
those in Australia, across the Pacific and internationally,
who confront the same attacks.
Workers must adopt a
socialist perspective that consciously connects the fight
against job and wage cuts with the fight against imperialist
war, and strives to abolish the capitalist system which is
the root cause of both. We urge workers to contact the
Socialist Equality Group to discuss these urgent
issues.
By Tom Peters, Socialist Equality Group
11
September, 2026
Original url: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/09/11/mjot-s11.html
