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New Zealand Blood Service Workers and Junior Doctors Hit the Picket Line Once Again to Fight against Pay Disparities and Poor Working Conditions

As before, the ongoing strikes continue to cause delays in critical clinical laboratory blood testing and surgical procedures

After seven months of failed negotiations, New Zealand’s blood workers, clinical laboratory technicians, and medical scientists, are once again back on strike. According to Star News, hundreds of lab workers walked off the job on May 31, 2024, with another longer walkout planned for June to protest pay disparities.

New Zealand Blood Service (NZBS) workers, who are represented by the Public Service Association or PSA (Māori: Te Pūkenga Here Tikanga Mahi), collect and process blood and tissue samples from donors to ensure they are safe for transfer.

“Our colleagues at Te Whatu Ora [Health New Zealand] are being paid up to 35% more than us and we want to be paid too. We want fair pay,” Esperanza Stuart, a New Zealand Blood Service scientist, told Star News.

“The stall in negotiations is largely attributed to a lack of movement from NZBS on the principal issue of parity with Te Whatu Ora laboratory workers rates of pay. There is currently a 21-28% pay differential between NZBS and Te Whatu Ora laboratory workers, despite both groups of workers performing essentially the same work,” NZ Doctor noted.

Health New Zealand is the country’s government-run healthcare system.

The first strike took place on May 31 from 1-5 pm. A second 24-hour strike is planned for June 4. The strikers outlined the rest of their strike schedule as follows:

  • No work outside paid hours (5/29-6/6)
  • Refusal to conduct duties associated with processing AHF [antihemophilic factor] plasma (5/29-6/6)
  • No overtime or extra shifts (6/6-6/19)

The PSA union claims that the pay disparity workers are experiencing is pushing veteran workers out and complicating recruitment of new workers.

New Zealand Blood Service workers and junior doctors are once again back on the picket line to protest wage cuts and pay disparities. “I think it should be a signal that things are not right in our health system when there are multiple groups of workers going on strike simultaneously,” said PSA union organizer Alexandra Ward. Clinical laboratory workers in the US are closely monitoring the goings on in New Zealand as pressure over staff shortages and working conditions continue to mount in this country as well. (Photo copyright: RNZ.)

Clinical Laboratory Worker Strikes Ongoing in New Zealand

This is far from the first time New Zealand lab workers have hit the picket line.

In “Medical Laboratory Workers Again on Strike at Large Clinical Laboratory Company Locations around New Zealand,” Dark Daily reported on a medical laboratory workers strike that took place in 2023 in New Zealand’s South Island and Wellington regions. The workers walked off the job after a negotiated agreement was not reached between APEX, a “specialist union representing over 4,000 allied, scientific, and technical health professionals,” according to the union’s website, and Awanui Labs, one of the country’s largest hospital and clinical laboratory services providers.

And in “Four Thousand New Zealand Medical Laboratory Scientists and Technicians Threatened to Strike over Low Pay and Poor Working Conditions,” we covered a series of walkouts in 2022 sparked by an unprecedented surge in PCR COVID-19 testing that pushed the country’s 10,000 healthcare workers—including 4,000 medical laboratory scientists and technicians—to the breaking point.

This latest strike is likely to cause delays in vital surgeries and risk the nation’s critical blood supply. All of these strikes were spurred on by low pay, negative working conditions and worker burnout. Similar issues have caused labor actions in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service in recent years.  

Junior Doctors Join Blood Service Workers on Picket Line

Blood service workers aren’t the only healthcare employees in New Zealand’s medical community taking action. In May about half of the nation’s junior doctors walked off the job for 25 hours to protest proposed pay cuts, NZ Herald reported.

In a letter to the nation’s public hospitals, Sarah Morley, PhD, NZBS’s Chief Medical Officer, “warned [that] even high priority planned surgeries should be deferred because they did not meet the definition of a ‘life-preserving service,’” and that “only surgeries where there is less than a 5% risk that patients may need a transfusion should be carried out,” RNZ reported.

According to an internal memo at Mercy Ascot, NZBS “did not consider cancers and cardiac operations in private hospitals to be a life-preserving service,” RNZ noted.

The situation may be more dangerous than officials are letting on, NZ Herald noted. A senior doctor at Waikato Hospital told reporters, “There are plenty of elective services cancelled today—clinics, surgery, day stay procedures etc. … And although I can only speak for my department, we are really tight for cover from SMO [senior medical officers] staff for acute services and pretty much all elective work has been cancelled. So, it’s actually pretty dire, and if next week’s planned strike goes ahead it’s going to be worse. I’d go as far as to say that it’s bordering on unsafe.”

The strike did take place, and the junior doctors went back on strike at the end of May as well, according to RNZ.

Support from Patients

Eden Hawkins, a junior doctor on strike at Wellington Hospital told RNZ that patient wellbeing is a top concern of striking workers and that patients have shown support for the doctors.

“When patients have brought it up with me on the wards or in other contexts there seems to be a bolstering sense of support around us, which is really reassuring and heartening because there’s obviously a conflict within ourselves when we strike, we don’t want to be doing that,” she said. Hawkins also makes the argument that striking workers can improve patient wellbeing in the long run. Improvement of pay and conditions could lessen staff turnover and overall improve the standard of care.

New Zealand healthcare workers haven’t been shy when it comes to fighting for the improved working conditions and fair pay. And their problems are far from unique. American healthcare workers have been struggling with worker burnout, pay disparities, high turnover as well. Clinical laboratory and other healthcare professionals in the US would be wise to keep an eye on their Kiwi counterparts.

—Ashley Croce

Related Information:

Fed-Up Blood Service Workers Go on Strike

NZ Blood Workers Plan 24-Hour Strike for Pay Parity

New Zealand Blood Service Laboratory Workers to Strike after 7 Months of Stalled Pay Negotiations

Significant Risk to Blood Supply as Blood Service Lab Workers Strike

Junior Doctors to Strike for 25 Hours, May Postpone Treatments

‘Pretty Dire’ Situation for Patients as Junior Doctors Strike Over Pay Cuts

Junior Doctors Go on Strike Again, More Surgeries Deferred

Medical Laboratory Workers Again on Strike at Large Clinical Laboratory Company Locations around New Zealand

Four Thousand New Zealand Medical Laboratory Scientists and Technicians Threatened to Strike over Low Pay and Poor Working Conditions

In New Zealand, Contracts Often Define Specific Tests a Clinical Pathology Laboratory Can Provide to Physicians

District Health Boards in New Zealand use medical laboratory test contracts as one way to control cost of testing and better manage utilization

HAMILTON, NEW ZEALAND—Medical laboratory testing in this mid-sized city is carefully divided between a community laboratory company and the cluster of hospitals located in and around Hamilton. The test menu offered by each clinical laboratory is defined by contracts negotiated with the individual District Health Boards (DHB) that manage the healthcare system in this region of New Zealand.

This week, your Dark Daily editor, Robert L. Michel is in New Zealand. He is visiting clinical and pathology laboratories in two cities and speaking at the 2012 Pathology Laboratory Meeting that is conducted annually by Canterbury Health Laboratories (CHL), located in Christchurch. (more…)

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