Welcome to the winter 2026 edition of E tū and you.
We can be proud of the powerful base of more than 48,000 working people who choose to be E tū members.
E tū is democratic. Members make democratic decisions about who represents us as our delegates, and about the outcome of our collective agreement negotiations. E tū is often the first place where working people get to experience democracy in our lives, with direct and clear results at work. Through workplace democracy, union members have won the right to have our voices heard by our bosses. Through democratic collective bargaining, we have won pay increases, health and safety protections, extra paid leave, skills training, and many other conditions that help make our work rewarding, and allow us to live decent lives. Union members get better deals.
As union members, we also experience democracy beyond our workplaces, across the union, and across society.
In April and early May, nearly 900 elected workplace E tū delegates attended forums around the country to learn, network, and to look to the future. They also elected delegates to represent them in the big democratic decisions of our union at Conference.
This year is a Conference year. The E tū Biennial Conference is the highest decision-making body of our union, where delegated members set the direction and agree on the shape of our union. One decision coming up this year is about strengthening our industry focus by creating industry conferences where delegates from right across each industry will come together to network, learn and share experiences to make our industry strategies more powerful.
This year is also a General Election year, and we will use our democratic voice to elect a government that will back us.
Right now we are building our voice by making sure that all our members are enrolled to vote. We have a challenge in the 2026 election because we all have to be enrolled before the start of the voting period. We can vote between 26 October and 7 November. The government is expecting 50,000 votes to be wasted because they are cast by people who weren’t enrolled by 25 October. We need to be enrolled to make sure that we, our whānau and our communities cast votes that will count.
We are campaigning for a progressive, Labour-led government that will support us to build our future on our terms: that will strengthen collective bargaining, that will fund pay equity, that will create industry-wide bargaining through Fair Pay Agreements, that will support worker health and safety, that will give us back our hard-won paid leave, and that will honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
This is how we build our future on our terms. Ake! Ake! Ake!
Our Biennial Conference is coming up
Our Biennial Conference is on 15 and 16 July 2026 at the Holiday Inn Auckland Airport in Māngere. Conference is where E tū members make decisions about the direction of our union. Delegates will debate remits, hear from speakers, and vote on important matters.
Our Conference elects our Presidents. Current North-Island Vice President Mischelle Moriarty has been elected unopposed as National President (Māori), and will formally start in that role at the Conference. A big congratulations to Mischelle, and a huge thank-you to outgoing President Muriel Tunoho, who has filled that role since the formation of E tū.
Two current members of the National Executive, Gadiel Asiata (current National President (non-Māori)) and Mark Anderson (current Convenor of the Engineering, Infrastructure, and Extractives Industry Council) are running for the position of National President (non-Māori).