Covid-19 Action (New Zealand)

Helping you raise a personal grievance for unfair treatment.

"For the last two years it seems like the only reason folks are getting the sack is 'cos of the Cov!"

Understanding the PG process

There is a process involved in raising a personal grievance. In the case of anyone falling under the Covid-19 PHO (Vaccinations) Order or amendments it would be almost impossible to raise a grievance against the employer, because the employers were forced by legislation to dismiss - that is their defence. Those cases are for the lawyers who are representing whole groups of mandated employees.

We can consider grievances against private companies who have dismissed their employees under their own Vaccination Policies however. Grievances can only be based on a limited number of causes (known as 'causes of action') applying to the Covid-19 dismissals, per the Employment Relations Act (s103):

103 Personal grievance

  1. (1) For the purposes of this Act, personal grievance means any grievance that an employee may have against the employee’s employer or former employer because of a claim—
  2. (a) that the employee has been unjustifiably dismissed; or
  3. (b) that the employee’s employment, or 1 or more conditions of the employee’s employment (including any condition that survives termination of the employment), is or are or was (during employment that has since been terminated) affected to the employee’s disadvantage by some unjustifiable action by the employer; or
  4. (c) that the employee has been discriminated against in the employee’s employment.

Note that (c) above depends upon section 28(3) of the Human Rights Act:

  1. (c) Where a religious or ethical belief requires its adherents to follow a particular practice, an employer must accommodate the practice so long as any adjustment of the employer’s activities required to accommodate the practice does not unreasonably disrupt the employer’s activities.

To determine whether you can raise a grievance under any of these causes, we need to see all of the information relating to the dismissal. You mustn't leave anything out!

What do you need to do?

We need you to collate your information for us to speed up the process. There are some rules (we hate rules, but they need to be set for this!):

  • Every file must be accompanied by a Cover Sheet, which gives us all the information at a glance that we will use to 'on-board' you as a client.
  • Every letter, email, memo, policy, text message, Facebook group message etc needs to be provided as a separate file.
  • Never use staples! Never use highlighters! Never write notes on anything! If you want to draw attention to something, use a post-it note that we can easily remove later.
  • Threads of emails are not acceptable to present in litigation because they create a difficult bundle of documents to follow. The easiest way to gather the information out of threads is to click 'Forward' on the emails individually and copy/paste everything (including the To, From, Date, Subject, and Attachments lines) into a Notepad file on your computer. The file should then be printed, either in hard copy or to pdf. See below for file naming conventions for your electronic files.
  • Text messages or online messaging should show the dates of the messages (not just the weekday). You should also get a screenshot of the profile image and banner from the personal page of everyone in chat groups.
  • To make if faster and easier to see the full story when viewing the files electronically the filenames for files should be in reverse date order and have a brief description (i.e. "20220117.0 Email from employer", "20220117.1 Letter - attachment to email from employer", "20220117.2 Text message to manager.jpg") When we open the folder of documents, everything will be in the order that it was sent/received and they will be 'grouped' according to what email they were attached in.
  • Once you've collated all of your information, it should be stored on a flash disk for safe-keeping, printed and bound and sent to us as hard copy through the post/courier, and saved in your OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox (you can make one with a random Gmail address) and shared with us via an open link so we can download it at our end.