KEY POINTS:
As the laboratory strike enters its sixth day, calls to outlaw stoppages by health workers are growing.
About 1200 medical laboratory workers are on strike until Wednesday, causing postponement of more than 1000 operations and threatening some patients with the risk of permanent disability.
The Medical Council and the Orthopaedic Association want health workers' right to strike for pay rises replaced by compulsory arbitration, like the system used for the police.
Health unions say compulsory arbitration or related approaches have failed in the past, most recently under labour laws repealed by the National Government in 1991.
The Orthopaedic Association's president, surgeon Murray Fosbender, appealed to the striking workers and district health board negotiators to consider the risks for patients.
"We make a plea for more understanding by policymakers - and compulsory arbitration between parties."
But Dr Deborah Powell, chief executive of the Medical Laboratory Workers Union, said this "completely misses the point".
"The fact of the matter is that we don't have enough money in health to pay our health workers," said Dr Powell, a leader of unions for junior doctors, radiographers and radiation therapists, all of whom have gone on strike this year.
Problems with compulsory arbitration included its openness to political influence and that neither side felt it "owned" an imposed solution, weakening commitment to it.
Ian Powell, executive director of the senior doctors' union, said yesterday that compulsory arbitration in health, used in a number of Western states, would be a backward step, a return to relativity criteria.
Labour Minister Ruth Dyson said the right to strike, coupled with the requirement to provide life-preserving services, was a way to balance workers' rights and patients' needs.
The Police Act's 28-step process for settling disputes over pay and conditions culminates in final-offer arbitration. If the dispute comes to this, the act requires the arbitrating body to "accept in full the final offer made by one of the parties". It may not mix and match parts of the employees' and employer's final offers.
This strike has exposed what the senior doctors' union and Council of Trade Unions see as a legislative flaw.
Under the Employment Relations Act, striking health unions can be required to help to provide life-preserving services, such as lab tests, x-rays or treatment - but this does not cover services that might avert the threat of permanent disability, even though these are discussed in the act.
The CTU and its health unions - the senior doctors, the Public Service Association and the Nurses Organisation are CTU members but Dr Powell's unions are not - negotiated an agreement with district health boards in 2003 that covered both life-preserving services and permanent disability.
The CTU was surprised that the subsequent law change omitted strike cover for permanent disability, said president Ross Wilson.
This appeared to have been an error, one that would be looked at as part of a wider stocktake by the CTU, health boards and Health Ministry of health-strike arrangements.
