More than 400 scientists, technicians and support workers at the government’s public health and forensic science institute walked off the job this morning in a dispute over how their pay is decided. The stoppage at the New Zealand Institute for Public Health and Forensic Science, known as PHF Science, ran from 8am to noon on Tuesday.
The Public Service Association, which announced the action in a statement on Monday afternoon, said workers would rally on picket lines from 11am to noon at the institute’s four sites, which are Mt Albert in Auckland, Kenepuru and Wallaceville in the Wellington region, and Ilam in Christchurch.
At the centre of the dispute is a proposal to scrap the institute’s step-based pay system and replace it entirely with performance-based pay. Under a step system, staff move up a defined scale as they accumulate experience and time in the role, and the increases are written into the collective agreement. Under performance pay, any increase depends on a manager’s assessment of how well an individual has done their job over the year.
The union also says the institute has put a zero percent cost-of-living increase on the table. On the PSA’s numbers, that would leave three-quarters of the lowest-paid workers, those earning between $60,000 and $100,000, with no guaranteed pay rise at all over the coming year.
“Performance pay doesn’t make for more effective workers, and it doesn’t accurately reflect performance,” PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said. “It can introduce unconscious bias and contribute to gender and ethnic pay gaps.”
“Getting rid of performance pay in the first place was a hard-won breakthrough for these workers,” she said. “They do not want to go back to a blunt instrument.”
Fitzsimons said the institute had run a performance-based system before and that it had not served the staff well. “The last time PHF Science had performance-based pay, its workers were some of the lowest paid in the science sector,” she said. “Sometimes these workers were not reaching the midpoint of their pay band after 10 to 15 years.”
“In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, these workers are being asked to go backwards while doing essential work for the entire nation,” she said.
The point about gender pay gaps carries some weight given who works at the institute. PHF Science says on its own website that it employs roughly 550 people, that 73 percent of them are in scientific and research roles, and that women make up 66 percent of the workforce. On those figures, the more than 400 workers who struck on Tuesday account for most of the organisation.
The laboratories handle a spread of work that almost nobody thinks about until something goes wrong. Staff track outbreaks of infectious disease and run the national surveillance that tells health officials what is circulating and where. They test drinking water, food and the wider environment. They cover radiation science. And they carry out the forensic analysis that police rely on in criminal investigations, work that eventually has to stand up to cross-examination in a courtroom.
They also run the national drugs in wastewater testing programme alongside New Zealand Police. That programme samples sewage at dozens of treatment plants each month and converts what it finds into an estimate of how much methamphetamine, cocaine, MDMA and other drugs the country is getting through. It has grown from a three-site pilot in 2016 to a network covering roughly three-quarters of the population, and it is now the single best source of evidence on New Zealand drug use, far better than seizure figures or survey answers. Police publish the results every quarter, and you can see how the numbers have moved since 2018 in our interactive drugs in wastewater tool.
PHF Science is new as a name but not as an operation. It was established on 1 July 2025 as a public research organisation, taking over the work and the staff of the Institute of Environmental Science and Research, better known as ESR, as part of the government’s rebuild of the science system. That reform collapsed the old crown research institute model into a smaller number of larger public research organisations. Sir Ashley Bloomfield, the former director-general of health who fronted the country’s Covid response, is the institute’s chief executive.
The current bargaining round is the first serious test of what that restructure means for the people actually doing the work. Public research organisations were sold on the promise of sharper focus and better commercial performance, and how the new entities handle pay is the part of the change that staff feel directly.
Specialist laboratory staff are not easy to replace at short notice. Forensic scientists and public health microbiologists train for years, work to accreditation standards, and in the forensic case have to be able to defend their methods under questioning in court. Losing experienced people from that kind of team is slow and expensive to fix, which is the argument the union is making about pay certainty.
PHF Science had not issued a public statement on the strike or on its pay offer when this article was published, so the account of the negotiations above is the union’s version of them. The two sides remain in bargaining. The stoppage was a short one at four hours, and the PSA did not say what further action might follow if the talks do not move.
For most people the strike will have passed unnoticed. That is rather the point the workers were making. The results of what they do turn up in outbreak alerts, in food recalls, in the quarterly drug numbers and in evidence read out in court, and almost never with a laboratory’s name attached.
What do you think? Should pay in specialist public laboratories be set by fixed steps or by performance reviews? Leave a comment below and tell us where you land.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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