The Post-Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) announced on Thursday that secondary school teachers had voted to accept the New Zealand government’s revised pay-cutting offer.

Teachers will receive pay rises of 2.5 and 2.1 percent over the next two years—significantly below the 3 percent inflation rate and 4.7 percent increase in food prices.

The deal is a blatant sellout of teachers, who have undertaken repeated strikes since August in opposition to the National Party-led government’s moves to slash wages and starve schools of staff and resources.

The PPTA’s 20,000 members joined the October 23 “mega strike” involving more than 100,000 public sector workers including primary school teachers, nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers. With 3.5 percent of the country’s workforce involved, it was New Zealand’s biggest strike since 1979 and part of a growing upsurge of the working class internationally.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s coalition government, like its counterparts in Europe, the US and Australia, is responding to the worsening economic crisis by slashing spending, cutting jobs, and intensifying the exploitation of working people. With the full support of the opposition Labour Party, the government is also preparing the country to join US-led imperialist wars by doubling spending on the military.

The PPTA’s sellout confirms the Socialist Equality Group’s warning, in a statement distributed to workers during the October 23 strike, that the union leaders were determined to block a genuine struggle against austerity and militarism.

The only way to fight the government’s agenda is in a rebellion against the union apparatus, which enforces the dictates of big business and the government. This requires the building of new workers’ organisations: rank-and-file committees, controlled by workers themselves and independent of the unions and all the capitalist parties.

PPTA president Chris Abercrombie cynically told the New Zealand Herald that the union’s national executive decided not to recommend a vote for or against the final offer, in order to allow teachers to “decide for themselves what they thought it was worth and to freely vote.”

In fact, the PPTA leadership presented the offer on November 25 despite a vote by teachers to reject a very similar proposal in September. In doing so, the PPTA was seeking to wear down its members’ resistance to pay cuts by effectively telling them: this is the best you are going to get.

Abercrombie declared that there were “significant” improvements in the final agreement. However, he could only point to a slightly shorter term of agreement (24 months instead of 30 months), small increases in some allowances, and “a $1 million PLD [professional learning and development] fund that the PPTA will administer.”

The union has not revealed how many teachers voted for and against the revised deal. In the Reddit forum r/newzealand, one teacher commented: “A lot of teachers are disappointed, this was a really divisive vote from what I see—I think a lot of people were just afraid that there wouldn’t be a better offer/that the govt would insist on more clawbacks in any future offer, even if the salary offer was improved.”

A primary school teacher added: “They’re obviously going to use this to try push through basically the same [deal] for primary on the grounds [that] secondary accepted it.”

The primary teachers’ union NZEI will certainly use the PPTA’s sellout to pressure about 30,000 primary teachers to accept the same deal. Following nationwide strikes in 2019 and 2023 both unions used similar tactics to persuade their members that they had no alternative to accepting what were essentially pay freezes demanded by the then-Labour Party government.

In a provocative move, the New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union released a statement titled “NZPFU congratulates PPTA on settlement.” Around 2,000 low-paid firefighters have taken strike action in recent weeks to oppose a below-inflation pay offer (5.1 percent over three years) and now the union leadership is publicly applauding a real wage cut for teachers. The NZPFU echoed the government’s propaganda that teachers are highly paid and privileged.

The New Zealand Nurses Organisation, the Public Service Association (PSA) and the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists will likewise use the PPTA’s agreement to insist that nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers must accept a pay cut.

PSA leader Fleur Fitzsimons spoke for all these unions when she told Newstalk ZB on October 26 that they were “simply asking for pay to remain at its current level; they’re not asking for big pay increases.” About 17,000 healthcare workers in the PSA took part in a strike on November 28, but the PSA leadership has made clear that it would accept a pay freeze.

The union bureaucracies called the October 23 strike with extreme reluctance. They did so not to launch a real industrial and political campaign against government austerity, but to try and maintain control over tens of thousands of workers, who are deeply outraged over soaring living costs and unbearable conditions in public hospitals and schools.

No further joint strikes were scheduled. Instead, the unions went back into separate negotiations with the government behind closed doors, designed to isolate and demoralise workers.

Unions and pseudo-left groups are also encouraging illusions that workers can reverse the current attacks by voting for the Labour Party and its allies in next year’s election. The last Labour Party government lost the 2023 election in a landslide precisely because it had overseen worsening social inequality, poverty and homelessness, as well as attacking health and education workers.

Defending wages, living standards and public services requires a political struggle not only against the government but the entire capitalist political establishment, including Labour, the Greens and the union bureaucracy.

The Socialist Equality Group repeats its call for workers to build rank-and-file committees in schools, hospitals and all workplaces. These committees must expand the fight against austerity to all sections of the working class, in the public sector and private industries, in opposition to the unions which are doing everything to prevent such a unified struggle.

They must also forge links with workers in Australia and other countries who confront the same attacks.

This fight requires a socialist strategy. Workers should base their demands not on what the government, the corporate media and the unions claim is “affordable” or “realistic,” but on what workers actually need, including an immediate 30 percent pay increase to make up for decades of stagnant wages.

The wealth hoarded by the financial and business elite must be expropriated, and the money wasted on militarisation must be redirected to pay for a vast expansion of public health and education and to end homelessness, poverty and inequality.