Two thousand firefighters across New Zealand held a
one-hour strike on February 13 as their long-running dispute
continues with the government agency Fire and Emergency NZ
(FENZ), which is trying to cut their pay.
A strike
scheduled for February 16 was cancelled due to severe
weather and flooding in parts of the country. Notices have
been given for strikes on February 20, 23 and 27, and March
2.
The NZ Professional Firefighters Union (NZPFU) has
now held about a dozen one-hour strikes since October. FENZ
is offering an increase of just 6.2 percent over three
years—a major pay cut with annual inflation at 3.1
percent. According to economics firm Infometrics, the cost
of essential items has risen 3.8 percent in the past
year.
Because firefighters last had a pay increase in
2023, FENZ’s offer actually equates to around 1 percent a
year over five years.
Successive National- and Labour
Party-led governments have starved the fire service of
funding for decades, leading to rundown and faulty
equipment, chronic staffing shortages and low pay. The
latest cuts are part of the National Party-led coalition’s
drastic austerity measures to pay for tax cuts and to double
the size of the military in preparation for war.
There
is widespread opposition to this agenda. On October 23,
2025, more than 100,000 workers—teachers, doctors, nurses
and other healthcare workers—took part in New Zealand’s
biggest strike since 1979. The union bureaucracy is
desperately seeking to prevent a repeat of the “mega
strike,” keeping workers divided and isolated from each
other in order to demoralise them.
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The PPTA, the high
school teachers’ union, pushed through a sellout last
December, including below-inflation pay rises of 2.5 and 2.1
percent over the next two years. Primary schoolteachers
rejected a similar pay-cutting agreement, and the healthcare
workers’ struggles remain unresolved.
During the
January 9 strike, Workplace Relations and Safety Minister
Brooke van Velden and Health Minister Simeon Brown seized on
a fire at a shop in Auckland to slander firefighters as
“reckless” and “gambling with people’s lives.” On
February 12, FENZ’s deputy national commander Megan
Stiffler repeated that striking “needlessly puts the
community at risk.”
This vicious propaganda has two
aims: first, to deflect blame from the government for
endangering public safety by severely underfunding the fire
service; second, to create conditions for banning
strikes.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke with
firefighters picketing in Porirua on February 13.
Ben,
who has worked 12 years as a professional firefighter, said
that “to make ends meet” some firefighters were working
as many as 86 hours over a nine-day period.
He said
the strikes were primarily “about our working conditions
and trying to really ensure this service is world-class for
every New Zealander.” In Porirua, he said, fire appliances
“have been plagued with faults.” Due to issues with
intercoolers, fire trucks were prone to overheating, which
can cause delays.
Commenting on the staffing shortage,
Ben said his station was “struggling to fill holes today,
tonight and into the weekend. We just can’t continually
keep flogging the existing workforce.” He noted that the
“first recruit course for this year’s cycle has been
cancelled because Fire and Emergency New Zealand has deemed
that there are enough career
firefighters.”
Meanwhile major regional centres such
as Blenheim, Ashburton and Queenstown do not have crews of
professional firefighters and rely on volunteers.
Ben
said it was a “kick in the guts” to see government
ministers “hopping on social media and slating career
firefighters. It’s our legal right to protest, we don’t
have many levers available to us to ensure we’re getting
fair and equitable treatment from our
employer.”
Conditions had not improved following
strikes under the previous Labour government. Ben described
promises made in 2023 as “just shallow words.”
One
major, long-standing demand is for more support for
firefighters who develop occupational cancer. Ben said
“the hoops you have to jump through to get ACC [the
state-owned Accident Compensation Corporation] to accept
that claim is just not fair.”
JC, who has worked for
FENZ for 10 years, said during that time “it’s got
worse, the whole place seems like it’s a debacle.” The
strike, he said, was because FENZ had failed to invest in
new firefighting equipment.
He also mentioned
firefighters “having to rely on overtime just to get
ahead. People who have got new children, they’re starting
to struggle now because they can’t do that overtime.
It’s not very fair. We should be able to go to a job and
have a good base pay.”
JC said it was
“appalling” for politicians to attack firefighters for
striking, adding that comments by Michael Laws, a host of
the far-right Platform podcast, were “absolutely
disgusting.” Laws declared on January 22 that professional
firefighters had “decided to abandon the human race” and
were “bastards.”
“He’s got no idea,” JC
said. “I risked my life once to try and save a person I
could not save. I got burns from it and they are going to
remain for the rest of my life. I tried my absolute best to
try and get to that person. To make comments like he was
making really just throws a big knife in your
back.”
He pointed out that firefighters are “one
of the most trusted professions in New Zealand” and “the
public absolutely love us. Every time I go somewhere they
say: ‘I support what you guys do.’” The media,
however, largely blacked out the latest strike.
There
is widespread support in the working class for the stand
taken by firefighters, but the union bureaucracy is
preventing this support from being mobilised.
The
NZPFU has no strategy other than more hour-long strikes,
aimed at placating the firefighters’ anger and wearing
down their resistance to an eventual deal that fails to keep
up with inflation or fix the broader crisis in the fire
service. Significantly, NZPFU issued a statement in December
congratulating the PPTA on its below-inflation pay deal,
indicating that it would accept a similar
offer.
Firefighters should reject any attempt to
impose a sellout and instead fight to broaden the struggle
against austerity by appealing to other sections of the
working class. To do this, workers need new organisations
that they control. Rank-and-file committees, independent of
the union bureaucracy, must be built to link up the
struggles of firefighters, teachers, healthcare workers and
other public and private sector workers, all of whom face
ruthless attacks on their living standards and working
conditions.
Workers should base themselves on a
socialist political program. The money wasted on war and
hoarded by the super-rich should be used for essential
services that workers rely on, including a fully resourced
and expanded fire service with modern, reliable equipment
and well-paid staff.
By Tom Peters, Socialist Equality
Group
16 February 2026
Original url: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/16/txnt-f16.html
