Above: Palmerston North stopwork meeting on 23 July 2020

PHC MECA Update 4 August 2020

Your strike ballot commences today!

As indicated in last week's Update,  based on your feedback from the union/stopwork meetings we will be proceeding to a strike ballot of our members.

Out of the strike options, a very clear majority supported an eight hour strike ballot. Further, 90 percent of the feedback indicated respondents were prepared to participate in the strike action supported by the majority of their colleagues. This is very conclusive and shows that these members see this as the necessary next step.

It is so disappointing we have to take this step. Funders and the Government should recognise they need to appropriately value their primary health care workforce, when we are seeing every day new funding being provided for other matters.

However, now more than ever is the right time to show how collective and committed members are to achieving pay parity.

As indicated previously, given there are around 500 employers and 530 workplaces covered, we need to have the same time and date on the ballot. It is not logistically possible to fit this in with all start and finish times in all workplaces because there are so many employers, but this should not detract from the action itself.

Proposed strike action

The electronic ballot will commence today (Tuesday 4 August) and will run through to 5pm Wednesday 12 August. You will receive a link to participate in the ballot shortly.

The proposed action is a total withdrawal of labour starting at 0800 hours on Thursday 3 September 2020 and ending at 1600 hours on Thursday 3 September 2020.

You would not be paid for the duration of the strike hours.

Where to next

Once the ballot is completed and we have a vote to proceed, we will then formally give the employers 16 day's notice of the strike date and time.

At anytime during the balloting process or the strike notice period, we are able to resume negotiations if a new offer is possible  – and we would hope common sense prevails from the powers that be to enable this to occur.

Media

We will be issuing a media release today.

Let's show how committed we are to achieving what should be a given in terms of an appropriately valued primary health care workforce.

Ngā mihi,

Chris Wilson