Strike Sanctions and Penalties Under New Zealand's Industrial Relations Laws

Abstract

In New Zealand, from 1905, there has been progressively. repressive legislation against strikes. The Industrial Relations Act of 1973, however, reversed this trend by reducing both legislative measures and penalties, and gave the impression that strikes became legal. The aim of this paper is to show that this impression was mistaken, and to account for the probable cause of this mistaken view. It is argued that all strikes, including those over disputes of interest, are illegal except for one very rare exception. In fact, an analysis of the historical development of legislative measures shows that when the Labour Government removed the explicit penalties for strikes, it was merely removing the more recent and severe penalties imposed by the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Acts. Furthermore, after assessing the value of strike penalties it is argued that they fail to fulfil either a deterrent function, an acceptable punitive function, or a reformative function. Therefore, strike penalties should be removed from legislation, in both explicit and implicit form and it should be explicitely stated that sirikes are not considered illegal.