Photo: Richard Tindiller
Primary school teachers belonging to union NZEI Te Riu Roa have begun a two-week series of stop-work meetings on Monday to discuss pay talks stalled on an offer of three 1 percent pay rises over three years.
The one-hour meetings were expected to close some of the country's 1900 primary schools for several hours and the first was held in Dargaville on Monday morning.
The union said principals, school support staff and Education Ministry learning support staff were negotiating separate collective agreements and would also join the meetings.
Meetings would take place Tuesday in Hamilton, West Auckland, Tauranga and Wellington.
NZEI said it had planned the meetings so that schools and ministry offices would not have to close.
"Measures include organising multiple meetings at different times so that members can split into groups and take turns attending different meetings, while others remain at school," it said.
NZEI negotiator Liam Rutherford said members would discuss the possibility of industrial action, though any vote on that would be made at a later date.
He said they would also talk about winning and maintaining community support.
"We know that where the government is most susceptible is to the voters of the country," he said.
Rutherford said the ministry's pay offer to teachers had "gone down like a cold cup of sick" but it was not the only reason members rejected the offer.
"Our members have been really clear that they don't expect any pay increases to take them backwards. Cost of living is something that is still huge. But alongside that, it was the fact that the offer from the government was really weak around the protection of Te Tiriti and any kind of day one solutions for a learning support system," he said.
"Everything just seemed to be promises into the future and so people saw it, they were pretty unimpressed. To be honest, there wasn't a huge conversation about it across classrooms just because they saw the kind of key points and thought it's not even close."
The ministry made the same three-times-1-percent offer to secondary teachers belonging to the Post Primary Teachers Association and they were scheduled to strike on Wednesday and begin rostering different year groups of students home from 15 September.
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