More than 60 per cent of sworn staff voted against the offer.
More than 60 per cent of sworn staff voted against the offer.
Police officers are likely headed to arbitration after turning down their latest pay offer that non-sworn staff have accepted.
Police Association president Chris Cahill confirmed to the Herald that on Friday evening votes on the latest pay offer - the main parts of which included a permanent $4000 pay increase backdated to April this year and a 4 per cent increase from April next year - came back this evening.
Section 69 of the Policing Act prohibits strikes by uniformed, constabulary staff. This restriction does not apply to non-sworn civilian staff. Those thousands of police employees include call-takers, intelligence analysts, finance and human resources staff, among others.
The results of the latest vote showed 57 per cent of non-sworn staff voted in favour of the offer, while 66 per cent of sworn staff voted against it.
“We’ve clearly got an unhappy sworn membership and I can understand their frustration. The reality is that they haven’t got a settlement and they’re still hurting with the cost of living as it is today. They’ve still got to find the extra money for food and to pay their mortgages.”
Police Association president Chris Cahill. Photo / Kevin Stent
Cahill said the “slim majority” of non-sworn staff voting in favour showed that police were going to have “a lot of work” in the next two years to “keep a motivated and engaged non-sworn workforce
“There’s clearly still a significant level of dissatisfaction with this offer.
“But bear in mind many of these staff are the lower paid and it’s likely they had to take the pragmatic choice of accepting money in the hand today.”
Cahill said the biggest concern now was the delay to get to final arbitration.
“That delay will be added to with the current state of an election and a possible change in government.”
Delays would be “clearly frustrating for our members and will hinder the ability to get any negotiated settlement any time soon”, Cahill said.
He said ideally it would be better if both non-sworn and sworn staff voted the same way.
“But the reality is everyone has to vote based on how the outcome impacts them personally. That’s why we felt it was important members had the opportunity to make this decision.
“Clearly the message from our sworn members is that it wasn’t enough and we’ve acknowledged that and we’ve made it very clear to the police and Government they need to acknowledge that and there needs to be a significant improvement especially when you couple it with the time we’re now seeing a crunch on recruiting and some significant poaching of police staff to Australia.”
A police spokesperson told the Herald they were unable to comment as it was an “ongoing process”.
Sam Sherwood is a Christchurch-based reporter who covers crime. He is a senior journalist who joined the Herald in 2022, and has worked as a journalist for 10 years.
