MECA 2021 – Getting to the crunch

Lloyd Woods | Senior Industrial Officer and Lead MECA Negotiator

The MECA negotiating team met with DHB representatives in Wellington on 26 and 27 May for days nine and ten of face-to-face discussions.

The DHBs had been asked to bring their best offer to the table. We were disappointed to find that apparently your Chief Executives feel that your reward for coping with understaffing, overwork, and burnout, as well as your contribution throughout Covid-19, is a zero salary increase this year, unless in some way you pay for it yourselves. Prior to this meeting the government had made it clear there is no wage freeze, so DHBs can no longer use that as an excuse. We acknowledge that there is an offer of 1% on each step of the salary scales in year two of a two-year term, but this was taken by the team as adding insult to injury. The other components of the DHB offer presented no change to their previous response, being “no offer”. The ASMS team decided the best way forward was to grasp the nettle. We spent many hours talking about how we might persuade the Chief Executives that their continued refusal to respond to our claims was disrespectful and unacceptable. This includes the use of stop-work meetings and the possibility of industrial action. We decided we needed to refine our own claims to meet what the Government is saying about salary increases (CPI). We also decided to refine the tabled claims to those of most importance (as identified by the ASMS team of 22 through a ranking process). On Thursday 27 May we tabled this claim. Given the very fair and reasonable claim we tabled, we have some optimism that the Chief Executives will ‘come to the party’. While hoping for the right thing to happen, we will continue to prepare for a poor response. This includes careful planning of stop-work meetings across all DHBs, and negotiation of the Life Preserving Services agreements in the interim in case we are forced into industrial action.

We can finish with some good news: ten days of talks have not been completely without outcomes. Although compared to our substantive claims some are relatively minor, we do have 13 improvements to the conditions in the last MECA agreed, including strengthening of PPE, vaccination rights, flexible working hours, onerous duties leave, recognition of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and others. At this stage we do not have further talks timetabled. Given our offer we hope that we may not need them but there is room to meet if the Chief Executives show good faith in calling us back to the table.