About 9,500 New Zealand university and polytechnic staff,
including lecturers, tutors, professors and librarians voted
in ballots last month to strike during
October.
Tertiary Education Union (TEU) national
secretary Amy Ross said university staff were being offered
pay rises well below inflation, which is currently 4.1
percent. Radio NZ reported in August that the TEU was
“seeking a six percent pay rise for its members at six
universities,” but an October 2 press release announcing
the strike vote did not mention this figure. Workers also
want more secure employment, with fully half of all tertiary
staff not permanent.
It is the first time both
university and polytechnic staff have voted together to
strike, but the TEU has not announced any strike dates. Its
statement said actions “may include half day or full day
strikes, withholding of students grades or new
enrolments.”
Polytechnic employers are resisting
attempts to retain a single collective employment agreement
covering the country’s trades training sector. The TEU has
asked the state’s Employment Relations Authority (ERA) to
provide facilitated bargaining for a multi-employer
collective agreement (MECA) for 11 institutions.
The
union has been trying to engage in collective bargaining
with polytechnics since February, with most employers
dragging out the process, refusing to be a part of a MECA
and refusing to discuss pay.
Staff from the
universities of Otago, Canterbury, Victoria University of
Wellington (VUW), Massey, Waikato and Auckland are all
involved in the proposed strike action. So too are
polytechnic staff from the NZ Institute of Skills and
Technology (NZIST), MIT/Unitech, Wintec, Toi Ohomai, Eastern
Institute of Technology, UCOL, Open Polytechnic, Nelson
Marlborough Institute of Technology, Ara, Otago Polytechnic
and Southern Institute of Technology.
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The vote is an
expression of rising anger over worsening austerity hitting
all layers of the working class. It follows a half-day
strike by 10,000 public servants on September 9 against the
National Party-led government’s moves to drive down wages
and cut jobs. About 8,700 jobs across government
departments, 14 percent of the core public sector workforce,
are to be axed.
The public service strike was the
biggest since last October’s “mega strike” by some
100,000 teachers and healthcare workers.
The ruling
elite is starving essential public services, including
health and education, to funnel more money to the rich and
to boost the military budget in preparation for war. With an
election due on November 7, opinion polls have the National
Party and main opposition Labour Party both registering
below 30 percent support, the first time since the 1930s
that the two main bourgeois parties have been so
unpopular.
The broad assault on living standards has
been facilitated directly by the trade unions. Following the
mega-strike the unions isolated each section of workers
involved, shut down intermittent strike activity, and
imposed below-inflation pay deals of around 2.5 percent for
teachers, allied health workers, doctors and
nurses.
The TEU did not mobilise members to join with
other educators in last October’s historic strike. Its
current negotiations over wages and conditions are already
preparing a sell-out, as evidenced by its move to divert the
polytechnic dispute into the hands of the ERA.
The
union bureaucracy is appealing to the political
establishment to increase funding. Ross stated that while
“it’s up to the tertiary employers to better their
offers and to move along in bargaining,” the union was
calling for “a comprehensive long term investment plan for
the Tertiary sector.” The union notes that NZ ranks below
the average of similar countries on investment in tertiary
education and wants all the parties “to show meaningful
leadership and commit to improved funding for the whole
sector.”
This begging exercise, aimed at the very
forces responsible for decades of underfunding in health and
education, is a sham. It is designed to divert anger and
militancy into the dead-end of parliament. The trade unions
are campaigning for Labour and its allies in the election,
with former TEU leader Sandra Grey playing the major role as
president of the NZ Council of Trade Unions.
The TEU
has a long history suppressing strike action and enforcing
pay cuts and widespread sackings, including under the
2017–2023 Labour Party-led government.
In October
2022, 7,000 university staff held a half day strike, the
first nationwide stoppage in 20 years. Grey, then the
TEU’s national secretary, told Newshub that over the
previous two years the union had accepted “the lowest pay
increases of any workers in New Zealand, because we actually
said to our employers: we understand COVID’s hard on the
universities and on the polytechnics, and we did our
bit.”
A study commissioned by the TEU found that
from 2007 to 2021 salaries fell by 10 percent at the
University of Otago, 12.2 percent at Canterbury and 17
percent at Auckland University. During this time, there were
no nationwide strikes and the union’s typical response was
to accept job and wage cuts as necessary. During the 2022
pay struggle the union initially called for an 8 percent pay
increase, then reduced it in November to 7.2 percent to
match inflation and eventually imposed below-inflation deals
for most staff.
By 2023 hundreds of tertiary positions
were axed in addition to 1,000 jobs shed during the height
of the COVID pandemic. The cuts included 229 jobs at VUW,
over 200 at Otago, and 170 at Auckland University of
Technology (AUT). The national trades training institution
Te Pūkenga announced 400 sackings.
The TEU organised
no unified nationwide campaign on the campuses and among the
wider working class to defend jobs and public education.
Instead, the union confined members to making futile appeals
to the then Labour government, calling for “four-way
discussions among student associations, the Tertiary
Education Union, Vice Chancellors and the government to
establish a sustainable funding model for universities.”
The position of the union was simply that it be
“consulted” over how cuts were to be made.
The
pseudo-left International Socialist Organisation (ISO)
played a significant role in propping up the union
bureaucracy and promoting illusions in Labour. Speaking on
the New Zealand Herald’s Front Page podcast on June 28,
2023, ISO member Dougal McNeill, the TEU branch president at
VUW, hailed a paltry temporary funding boost by the Labour
government as “a first step” which provided the
opportunity for “a wider conversation about
funding.”
The Socialist Equality Group (SEG) in New
Zealand warns that the current struggles will, if left in
the hands of the TEU, result in a sellout. The union
apparatus long ago ceased representing the interests of
workers, even in the struggle to defend basic conditions. It
is a privileged bureaucracy whose priority is the defence of
capitalism. Its role, with the assistance of middle class,
pseudo-left groups, is to enforce redundancies, wage cuts
and pro-corporate restructuring.
The unions,
instruments of big business and the state, are not
reformable. The SEG calls on education sector workers to
build rank-and-file committees that they control
democratically, independent of the unions. These committees
must break the isolation imposed by Labour and the
bureaucracy and fight to unite all public and private sector
workers against historic attacks on their jobs, wages and
living standards.
By John Braddock,
Socialist Equality Group
15 October 2026
Original url:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/10/15/aguo-o15.html
