An overview of strikes in New Zealand
Strikes have been in the news lately, with secondary school teachers on strike in mid-August and nurses recently going on strike. With industrial action top of mind, this article provides a short background around striking, when strikes are lawful under the Employment Relations Act 2000 (Act) and how this has changed over time.
While the particulars around the legal right to strike have waxed and waned over time, this form of industrial action has a long history in New Zealand’s labour law context, with the earliest recorded strike dating back to 1821.
Despite this, the ability to strike was superseded by compulsory negotiation and binding arbitration to settle working condition disputes in the late 19th century. Late 20th century legislation later recorded a legal right to strike and, more recently, the Act provided specific parameters around what constitutes a strike and when this may lawfully be done.
For employers, the counterpart to a strike is the right to ‘lock out’ an employee in negotiations - where an employer refuses an employee the right to carry out their normal work. While this makes the news less often than strikes in our current labour landscape, both the right to strike and to lockout have been described as “part of ensuring a balance to the relative negotiating positions of the parties in industrial bargaining”: see Secretary for Justice v. New Zealand Public Service Association Inc [2018] NZEmpC 129.
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