The pandemic is over but the paperwork isn’t
Four years after New Zealand’s vaccine mandate deadlines passed, employers are still losing cases in the Employment Relations Authority. The most recent determination, Joynt v Accessible Properties New Zealand Limited, was decided on 21 April 2026. The employee lost on a technicality, her repeated references to grievance rights during consultation didn’t actually constitute a formal grievance, and the 90-day window had closed. But the fact that a mandate-era dismissal was being litigated at all in 2026 should concern any employer who assumed this chapter was closed.
The legislative framework that enabled mandate-based terminations, Schedule 3A of the Employment Relations Act 2000, was only repealed on 26 November 2024. That means the legal architecture sat on the books for roughly three years after implementation, and the claims flowing from it show no sign of drying up.
Courts never accepted “the government made us do it”
The consistent thread across every decided case is that government mandate pressure does not excuse poor process. In February 2023, the ERA found that healthcare worker Andrea Hoyle had been unjustifiably dismissed by HealthcareNZ Limited despite a valid government mandate applying to her role. The authority acknowledged the difficulty, calling it “a close call” given “the immensely difficult pressure placed upon HCNZ by the Government’s vaccine mandate.” But it still ordered the employer to pay $18,000 in compensation and $25,920 in lost remuneration, totalling $43,000 reduced by 10% for the employee’s own contribution.
The failure was specific and avoidable. Hoyle had offered to work from home. HealthcareNZ never meaningfully engaged with that option. The authority found that “an adaption to her working approach could have been accommodated, at least on a temporary basis.”
A BusinessDesk analysis in August 2023 catalogued further cases still grinding through the system. A university was hit with a combined $53,023.50 in lost earnings and compensation for failing to exhaust alternatives. In the Damar case, an employee received $29,000 in hurt and humiliation plus $11,400 in lost wages, reduced by 35% to $18,850 after accounting for the employee’s own contribution. The conclusion from that analysis was blunt: “process remains key and missed steps are at an employer’s peril and cost.”
The scale of exposure is bigger than most realise
According to the Royal Commission’s findings, mandates covered roughly 15% of the total workforce. More than 350,000 workers in health and education were subject to them. Compliance was high, 95.8% of education workers and 97.2% of health workers had received a first dose by the deadline, but the non-compliant remainder still represents thousands of individuals. Even a small fraction pursuing legal claims generates significant aggregate liability.
The EMA’s submission to the Royal Commission captured the structural problem honestly: “businesses struggled to implement mandates while being bound by employment law processes.” The EMA called for a legal carve-out for future public health emergencies. No such carve-out exists.
What the Joynt case actually teaches
The April 2026 Joynt determination cuts both ways. The employee lost because her language during consultation, phrases like “I may exercise my right to file a personal grievance” and references to “discriminatory” treatment, did not meet the legal threshold for raising a formal grievance. Crucially, the employer had put it in writing that no grievance had been raised and that any future grievance would be dealt with on its merits. That documentation was decisive.
The lesson is practical. Employers who clearly documented the distinction between consultation feedback and formal grievances are protected. Those who didn’t are still exposed, because the ERA’s standard, drawn from the Employment Court, is that “the employer must know what it is responding to.”
The risk hasn’t expired
The 90-day grievance window is strict, but appeals from ERA determinations extend timelines significantly, and the Employment Court retains discretion to grant extensions in exceptional circumstances. Any employer that dismissed staff under mandate pressure between late 2021 and late 2022 and has not audited those terminations for procedural compliance is carrying unquantified risk on the books.
The checklist from the case law is clear: records showing genuine exploration of alternatives, individual engagement with each affected employee, adequate notice, full information disclosure, and written documentation of whether a grievance was raised. Employers who cannot produce that paper trail should assume they are vulnerable, not protected. The pandemic created enormous pressure to act fast. The courts have made clear, repeatedly, that speed was never a defence.
Sources
- ERA shuts down worker’s claim of raising grievance on 10 occasions (2026-04-21)
- Woman who refused to get Covid-19 vaccine awarded $43,000 (2023-02-19)
- The lingering employment headache of covid-19 (2023-08-25)
- 2.2 Vaccine mandates – Covid-19 Lessons Learned
- 5.4 Health and education workforce mandates – Covid-19 Lessons Learned
- Dealing with the long-term legal and human impacts of Covid – EMA