Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa-NZNO has more than 380 registered nurse (RN) members working at Bupa’s 40 aged residential care homes across the country.
NZNO aged-care national delegates committee member and RN Maree Ross says the formal claim follows workplace meetings and a member ballot.
By raising the claim, “we are standing up for all our aged care colleagues to be valued and paid comparably to male dominated workforces with similar skills”, she said.
It follows NZNO’s re-raising of its hospice and Whānau Āwhina Plunket members’ claims late last year, covering about 750 and 800 members respectively. Both had been close to completion last May when the Coalition Government suddenly cancelled 33 active pay equity claims and made it harder to lodge new ones.
Ross said aged-care nursing had been historically and systematically undervalued as it was predominantly performed by women.
‘In many facilities, a single registered nurse is responsible for the clinical oversight for the whole facility for an entire shift.’
Yet it was highly skilled and clinically complex work — often done under considerable pressure.
“In many facilities, a single registered nurse is responsible for the clinical oversight for the whole facility for an entire shift.”
The Bupa claim called for aged-care nurses’ work to be properly recognised and paid, finally
Underpaid, overworked
During member meetings, nurses spoke about the risks to residents’ safety caused by chronic understaffing, in the face of increasingly complex needs and growing workloads.
Their concerns echo the findings of NZNO’s 2025 Care in Crisis: Manaaki i te Raru report, which found aged-care nurses were constantly forced to make impossible choices about who gets help first because they were stretched so thin.
Ross said while their claim was specific to Bupa nurses, historic gender-based wage discrimination occurred right across the aged-care sector.
She believed it was timely to raise a new pay equity claim a year after the Coalition Government gutted New Zealand’s world-class pay equity scheme to save $12.8 billion.
NZNO is also supporting a complaint to the United Nations over the pay equity rollbacks involving several unions and Pay Equity Coalition Aotearoa.
