New Zealand - October 2025

More than 100,000 public employees, including teachers, doctors and nurses went on a one-day strike on 23 October, protesting low salaries, poor working conditions and underinvestment in public services. The strike was the largest since New Zealand’s only general strike in 1979, which included nearly 300,000 workers, and caps a year of growing labour activism in the country. While the country’s workforce was almost entirely unionized during the 1979 general strike, unionization is below 20 per cent today. Sectoral unions cited additional grounds for the strike, ranging from concerns over curriculum and exam procedures for teachers’ unions to short-staffing and a lack of support for training for doctors’ unions. Government representatives called the strike ’politically motivated’ and criticized the effect it had on schools’ and hospitals’ operations, which labour leaders and the political opposition rejected.

Sources: Reuters, Labor Notes, Radio New Zealand