Minimum entitlements are a long-established feature of the employment landscape in New Zealand and cannot be unknown to employers. Although calculating and paying bereavement, alternative days, public holidays and sick leave sounds simple enough, it is actually quite easy to get wrong – as has been demonstrated in multiple Authority and Employment Court cases.

According to Sir Isaac Newton, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This is a fundamental law in mathematics and physics, more commonly referred to as Newton’s Third Law of Motion. This means there must also be a First and Second such Law, but perhaps for the purposes of this brief blog post we’d best leave those to the more enlightened to mull over! For now, we’ll focus just on the third, but what could this have to do with Employment Relations and Human Resource Management, many would ask?

After teasing the prospect for the past few years, the Government finally released the Fair Pay Agreements Bill to Parliament. The purpose of this Bill is to set out the proposed framework for collective bargaining for industry-wide or occupation-wide minimum employment terms.

Nearly two years on from the emergence of Covid-19, everything has changed from our traditional way of working. Things are starting to settle into a new normal, however, with this new normal comes significant changes to the way that we work and the economic environment that we are working with.

We are about to enter a time where many Employers and Employees are going to be impacted by the requirements to isolate due to the COVID-19 Omicron variant. A BIG question facing everyone is “Do I have to pay employees when they are isolating and what support is available?”

Finding talent over the past year has become increasingly difficult. However, keeping good talent has also become crucial as we start to see the effects of the “Great Resignation”. We’ve touched on the Great Resignation already in a previous blog post and from what we’ve seen, a contributing factor to this trend is employee burnout.

Last month, a case came out of the Employment Court denying interim reinstatement for unvaccinated workers at Christchurch Airport.

Last month, a case came out of the Employment Court denying interim reinstatement for unvaccinated workers at Christchurch Airport.

The Great Resignation – the globally observed phenomenon of labour force exits due to greater opportunities, increased workloads, stress, and caring demands in the ongoing COVID environment. The movement started overseas during the pandemic and whilst it may not be occurring for the same reasons, we are now starting to see trends of it here in NZ with more and more resignations and shortages being reported industry wide.

New Zealand is now operating under the Traffic Light system, which means businesses may be wondering about how this will look in practice as our new ‘normal’, and how it will play out moving forward from a logistical and transactional point of view. However, there is more to think about beyond the ins and out of the rules – here is our red hot (not to be confused with a red light) take on what employers should begin to anticipate and think about if they are not already doing so: