Nurses wait two months for pay rise

Thousands of nurses are being forced to wait two months longer than planned for the first instalment of their pay jolt.

Nurses Organisation members in February ratified a deal with district health boards covering 20,000 nurses, midwives and healthcare assistants. Most of the nurses and midwives will receive pay rises of around 20 per cent in the two-and-a-half-year deal.

Of the country's 21 district health boards, only the central Auckland and Otago boards have started paying the new rates, which took effect on April 1.

Managers at Auckland's Waitemata and Counties Manukau boards, which share staff administration, have apologised in a memo to staff and told them they must wait until early June.

A Waitemata nurse said yesterday that nurses were angry and upset by the delays, which came on top of persistent and widespread occurrence of under- and over-payment.

"The mood is really shitty. This [a rise early this month] is something that people were expecting and they weren't told until after the event that they shouldn't expect it."

Copies of the memo with Tui "Yeah right" labels had been posted around North Shore Hospital departments.

She said staff were depending on the money. One colleague had cancelled orthodontic treatment for her son and another had put off surgery at a private hospital for herself, after the expected pay rise and backpay did not arrive.

The registered nurse the Herald spoke to, who is at the top of the rank-and-file scale, earns about $2200 a fortnight. She expects a rise of at least $100 and backpay of around $2000.

An organiser for the Nurses Organisation (NZNO), Chan Dixon, said: "For the most part people are really angry. Some of that anger is being directed at NZNO delegates, which is a concern for us because they have no power over the situation.

"We've sent an email to delegates suggesting that when members inevitably vent their anger at them that delegates advise them to contact their operational managers and CEO."

Waitemata's chief financial officer, Rosalie Percival, said the delays were unacceptable and everything possible was being done to speed up implementation of the new rates.

"Our staff have a right to be paid what they are owed." She blamed the delay on complex changes to computer systems to handle the new rates.

"We are talking to the vendor [of the computer systems] and also trying to divert resources from other IT programming to make those changes."

She said the association representing health boards in the pay talks might have under-estimated the work needed to implement the new rates.

The union's industrial adviser, Glenda Alexander, acknowledged that hospital pay-roll departments had experienced genuine problems, but said the union would not be happy for the delays to drag on.