Fair Pay Agreements Act Repeal Bill
This bill removes a law passed in 2022 that let unions and employer groups negotiate pay and conditions for everyone in a particular job type or industry — not just individual workplaces. If this bill passes, that system disappears. Instead, pay and conditions would again be agreed between individual employers and their workers (or unions), as long as they meet the basic minimums set by existing employment law. Because no agreements under the old law were ever fully completed, nothing currently in place would change.
What this affects
Tap a topic to see how this bill touches it — with the parts of the text it’s based on.
Workers and employers would go back to negotiating pay and conditions on their own, rather than having industry-wide minimum pay deals set for whole job sectors.
The FPAA Repeal Bill will remove the bargaining framework that enables unions and employer associations to bargain fair pay agreements that specify industry- or occupation-wide minimum employment terms
The objective of the FPAA Repeal Bill is to revert to the previous framework where employers and employees (or unions representing their members) have more flexibility to agree their employment terms (as long as these are above the minimum entitlement provisions specified in the Employment Relations Act 2000)
Progress through Parliament
Have your say
Submissions open once a bill reaches the select committee stage. In the meantime, you can write to your local MP about it.
Write to your MPBill text sourced from legislation.govt.nz (Parliamentary Counsel Office). Arapono’s summary and breakdown are drafted with AI grounded in that official text and reviewed by an Arapono editor for accuracy and neutrality before publishing. Arapono is non-partisan and takes no position on this bill.