following strike action this morning<\/a>.<\/p>\nDrivers employed by bus operator NZ Bus went on strike at 4am and resumed work again at 8am.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of services were disrupted and further morning strike actions were planned for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, at seven Auckland depots.<\/p>\n
FIRST Union organiser Hayley Courtney said the dispute centred around pay for workers.<\/p>\n
The drivers were asking for a higher hourly rate to bring them in line with their counterparts in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.<\/p>\n
Courtney said industrial action would continue until all parties could agree on new pay terms.<\/p>\n
The New Zealand Tramways and Public Transport Union was also representing the bus drivers.<\/p>\n
National president Gary Froggatt said drivers had not had a pay increase from NZ Bus for over 10 years. All they had received was cost of living increases.<\/p>\n
A formula had been given to the company to enable drivers to be paid $30 an hour.<\/p>\n
Drivers were being paid $26.76 at present, and have been offered an increase to $28 with a $30 rate to take effect next year.<\/p>\n
Froggatt said the union’s formula would increase the hourly rate faster – with quarterly pay rises.<\/p>\n
Speaking to\u00a0Checkpoint<\/i>\u00a0today, Froggatt said mediation talks had halted.<\/p>\n
“NZ Bus said that they’re not prepared to negotiate any further so we adjourned the mediation today,” he said.<\/p>\n
Froggatt acknowledged the strikes had caused disruption for travellers.<\/p>\n
“Probably too much,” he said. “Wish we didn’t have to do it, but those were my instructions and that’s what’s been happening.”<\/p>\n
While industrial action could continue into next week, Froggatt said school bus services would not be affected.<\/p>\n
“We don’t think it’s a good idea to have kids wandering around the streets unsupervised, so we’ll try and make arrangements to make sure that the school buses will run.”<\/p>\n
Further discussions were planned for this Wednesday, he said, where union delegates would decide if they wanted to start the process of facilitation, which followed on from mediation.<\/p>\n
Source RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Auckland commuters can expect more travel disruption this week with as industrial action by some of the city’s bus drivers continues. Mediation between Auckland Transport , NZ Bus and union representatives failed to reach an agreement today,\u00a0following strike action this morning. Drivers employed by bus operator NZ Bus went on strike at 4am and resumed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6160,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6338"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6339,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6338\/revisions\/6339"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}