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District health boards around the country face a service workers' strike after contractor Spotless Services opted out of a $16 million pay deal.
After months of talks, the Service and Food Workers Union successfully negotiated a deal for 2000 public hospital workers but Spotless, which employs another 1000 workers, went it alone and has failed to reach agreement with its workers.
Union spokesman Alistair Duncan said the deal, which would increase pay rates for the cleaners, kitchen workers and orderlies by between $2 and $3 an hour, was acceptable to the DHBs who employed their own staff and to three other contractors - ISS, Compass, and OCS - but not to Spotless.
Spotless workers at DHBs around the country met yesterday to vote on a national strike scheduled to start at 7am tomorrow.
Southland Hospital has already indicated that its 49 affected workers are likely to walk off the job.
"The feeling is that we will be definitely out," said the union's Southland delegate Trish Kidd.
Mr Duncan said unsuccessful talks with Spotless and a mediator took place on Sunday night.
The DHBs and three other contractors have agreed to a range of pay increases for workers, to be staged over three years. The new pay scale will range between $14.25 and $20.56 an hour.
Mr Duncan said the lowest-paid Spotless workers were on $11.33 an hour - 7c above the minimum wage.
No more talks with Spotless were planned, he said.
The union was now relying on the DHBs to exert pressure on the company to agree to the pay deal.
"Our message is that you control these premises. Don't let a rogue boss get away with low pay," said Mr Duncan.
Spotless national human resources operations manager Peter Jennings said his company was committed to giving staff their fair share of the $16 million package, but on its own terms.
The company had no knowledge of the pay deal the other employers had agreed to.
It was not discussed at Sunday's talks, he said.
He wanted the union to withdraw strike notices and enter into "meaningful" bargaining over the next two weeks so that Spotless could achieve a single-employer collective agreement for its workers around the country.
The outcome could mean that pay rates on a Spotless agreement would be very similar to or the same as the rates in the current DHB document, Mr Jennings said.
He said the union had agreed to read a letter outlining the company's position to workers at stopwork meetings.
- NZPA
