Health boards facing nursing disruptions

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Hospitals in five North Island health districts are facing industrial disruption after the breakdown of pay talks with nurses.

Thousands of nurses are involved in stopwork meetings aimed at putting pressure on the Government for national pay increases.

Meetings starting this week in Northland, the Waikato and the Bay of Plenty have more immediacy, with the Nurses Organisation recommending that the latest pay offers be rejected to advance negotiations for a collective agreement across five health boards.

Union organising services manager Laila Harre said yesterday that the pay offers included a range of rates but the largest group of nurses at Waikato Hospital, those at level three of the basic scale, had been offered a "pathetic" 3.5 per cent rise over three years.

She said that nurses rejecting the offer would have to be prepared to take industrial action to gain anything more.

Collective agreements covering about 4000 nurses in the five health districts, which also include Rotorua and Gisborne, expired last year and the union wants a back-dated document.

Ms Harre said the union would put modest demands in coming months on South Island and lower North Island health boards in return for their support for a joint approach to the Government for more money next year.

The union would also seek support from the three Auckland boards, which have another year left of a collective agreement with the union and its members.

Research commissioned by the union found that nurses earn substantially less than the amount needed to stop many of the 1000 or so who graduate each year from moving overseas.

It concluded that starting nurses now earning $30,000 to $33,000 a year should be on about $40,000, before overtime, and the basic pay scale should run to a top rate of around $60,000.

This compares with the around $44,000 now earned by fifth-year nurses in Auckland, who are at the top of the existing scale.

Ms Harre said the union acknowledged that this represented a big gap, which was why the Government would need to give the boards more money so that they would be able to bridge it.

Ms Harre, who is also the Alliance leader, was Minister of Women's Affairs before her party's election defeat last year.

She said the Government owed an increase to nurses who were "a big group on the wrong side of the gender pay gap," because it had campaigned on a policy of supporting equal pay for work of equal value.