Health NZ’s lowest-paid hospital workers have a deal, but they don’t have the money. Support staff represented by E tū reached agreement on 3 September for a 2.5% pay rise and a $1000 lump sum, and they now face a five-month wait before it shows up in their pay, straight through Christmas.
Any private employer that handled a pay deal this way would have a retention problem on its hands. At Health NZ it is filed as scheduling.
The deal was the easy part
Health NZ was happy to promote the outcome at the time. Its own release on the Food and Services Collective Agreement said about 2,900 members would receive the increase, the lump sum and better on-call allowances over a 17-month term. It also pointed out that roughly 70,000 staff had benefited from new collective agreements across nurses, resident doctors, senior medical officers and others.
That scale is the explanation Health NZ is relying on. Acting executive national director Deborah Kent says payroll is scheduling implementation of about 34 collective agreements between now and March 2027, and that the timeline is “consistent with commitments made during bargaining with the union”.
The people at the table don’t remember it that way. Christchurch Hospital orderly Tony Knights, who has worked there for 43 years and was part of the bargaining, said no delay was flagged during negotiations. “It upsets me a lot. I was at bargaining, so I’m quite upset about not being able to deliver for my fellow workers,” he said.
This is the third act of the same play
The delay might be easier to forgive if it were new. It isn’t.
In February 2024, senior doctors and dentists asked the Health Minister to step in after some regions were told a September 2023 settlement wouldn’t be paid in full until June, more than six months later. Andrew Slater, then chief people officer, said the agency had inherited 28 separate payroll systems for 90,000 staff, “most of which aren’t fit-for-purpose”. He said the payroll team had been expanded by more than 20% and was dealing with record numbers of agreements that needed back pay, along with the Holidays Act remediation.
That was more than two and a half years ago. The pipeline is still full, the explanation is the same, and the people waiting are now orderlies and food service workers rather than specialists. E tū’s own bargaining material describes a previous round in which it took a year after the Health NZ settlement to get pass-on confirmed for contractor workers. Measured against that, five months counts as progress, which says a lot about the standard.
Health NZ also runs a standing lump-sum mechanism to compensate workers for delays in reaching pay equity settlements. An organisation that builds a payment specifically to make up for its own slowness has stopped treating that slowness as an exception.
Money isn’t the bottleneck
E tū director Finn O’Dwyer-Cunliffe puts the blame on Wellington. “This isn’t a payroll glitch,” he said, arguing Health NZ is not getting the support it needs from ministers and the coalition.
He is partly right, because it isn’t a glitch. But the resourcing argument doesn’t hold up well. The payroll failures were already public under the previous government, when the agency still traded as Te Whatu Ora. And in December 2025 the Nurses Organisation, through then-chief executive Paul Goulter, pointed out that Health NZ had underspent budgeted personnel costs by $538 million while overspending $162 million on outsourced staff to fill gaps.
An organisation that leaves half a billion dollars in its staffing budget unspent while paying premium rates for temporary labour does not have a funding problem. It has a problem getting things done.
What a private board would do
In the private sector, an agreed rise sitting unpaid for five months for the lowest-paid part of the workforce would go straight to the board. Pay is the most basic promise an employer makes. When it slips, staff leave, the ones who stay lose trust, and the next bargaining round starts with the union already suspicious. Goulter warned in 2025 that settlement delays were costing Health NZ a settled workforce. That cost appears later in agency spend, recruitment and lost productivity, not on a payroll report.
This also matters beyond the health sector. Health NZ is the largest employer in the country and sets the reference point for wage expectations across care, cleaning and food service, and many private contractors’ pay is linked to its settlements. When Health NZ is slow, the contractors’ workforces are slow to be paid too.
After two years of the same explanation, the agency doesn’t need more bargaining, it needs a single payroll system that works and someone accountable for delivering it. Until ministers ask for that as clearly as they ask for wage restraint, every settlement Health NZ announces will come with a delay attached.
Sources
- RNZ: Hospital staff wait five months for agreed pay rise to kick in (2026-11-03)
- The Daily Blog: Hospital workers left waiting five months for pay rise from government – E tū (2026-11-03)
- The Gist: Hospital workers face five-month wait for pay rise ahead of Christmas (2026-11-02)
- RNZ: Doctors, dentists call on Health Minister to step in over delayed pay rises (2024-02-29)
- E tū: Health NZ SECA Collective Agreement Details
- RNZ: Nurse union says Health NZ settlement delays is costing them a settled workforce (2025-12-20)
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