There’s mounting frustration among healthcare workers who are still waiting for the almost $2 billion they’re owed in holiday pay – years after the mistake was discovered.
In 2016, it was found that the former district health boards had not been paying holiday pay correctly since 2010.
The complex issues with holiday pay have dogged the public and private sectors for years but, because of the size of the health workforce, remedying it has been slow.
There are 220,000 workers – made up of 130,000 former and 90,000 current staff – caught up in the payment limbo.
Among them is Nelson support worker Denise Heath, who turns 80 years old in August.
“My workmates laugh and joke that you’ll die on the job… you’ll die before you get it,” she said.
Heath said she and some of her fellow support workers – all members of the Public Service Association – had recently been given multiple dates of when the payments would be made, only for them to change.
All were sceptical of Health New Zealand’s latest promises.
Heath said she and her colleagues didn’t want to retire because it would place them further down the list for payment.
“It’s about the principle, but it’s also about the money because here’s a couple of things I’d like before I retire that would help me,” Heath said. “I need new hearing aids and I could also spoil my grandchildren a bit more.”
In a statement, Health NZ’s interim chief human resources officer Fiona McCarthy said they’re committed to completing the payments as soon as possible.
“I recognise that staff and former staff waiting for payment are disappointed at how long this work is taking, but we are working hard on pragmatic solutions to get payments out,” McCarthy said.
While some regions, such as Auckland, have received payments, most are still waiting.
McCarthy said the “scale and difficulty of the work cannot be underestimated”. As an example, McCarthy pointed to Hawke’s Bay, where 4000 staff were given backpay in November. It required 700,000 lines of data to be checked and corrected.
The latest promise is that current staff will be paid by July and former staff will be paid by the end of 2025. Around $1.8 billion has been put aside to cover the cost of remediation.