Restructuring Consultation: What Your Employer Must Do Before Any Decision
A restructure proposal is not a decision. Section 4 of the Employment Relations Act requires your employer to give you the information behind it and a genuine chance to comment before deciding, the Act sets no number of days, and the 90 day clock on a grievance starts when the action is taken. This guide is what to ask for and how to answer.
What good faith requires before the decision
A restructure proposal is not a decision. Under section 4 of the Employment Relations Act 2000, an employer who is proposing to make a decision that will, or is likely to, have an adverse effect on the continuation of your employment must give you two things before the decision is made: access to information, relevant to the continuation of your employment, about the decision; and an opportunity to comment on that information to the employer. That is section 4(1A)(c), and it is the whole legal basis of consultation. Everything in this guide follows from those two obligations.
In practice the information is the proposal document itself, the reasons behind it, the numbers those reasons rest on, the proposed structure, and the criteria that will decide who is placed in the new roles. If a reason is given, the material behind it is relevant to the continuation of your employment, and you are entitled to ask for it. The Act does not list the documents, so ask for them by name.
There are limits. Section 4(1B) says the employer does not have to hand over confidential information about another identifiable person where that would be an unwarranted disclosure of their affairs, information a statute requires be kept confidential, or information there is another good reason to keep confidential, such as avoiding unreasonable prejudice to the employer's commercial position. An employer can rely on those limits, but must still tell you the reasons for the proposal in a form you can respond to.
This guide explains the process and what the Act requires of it. It cannot tell you whether your consultation was fair. If you think it was not, the personal grievance guide in this series explains the 90 day time limit, and a union, Employment New Zealand or a Community Law centre can advise you free of charge.
How long you get, and what to ask for
The Act sets no number of days for a consultation. What it requires is a genuine opportunity to comment, and what counts as genuine depends on the size of the proposal, how much information there is to digest, and whether the people affected can actually get advice inside the window. A fortnight is common for a whole-of-agency proposal; a week is common for a small team. If the window is too short for you to read the material and take advice, ask for an extension in writing and give the reason. A refusal, in writing, is itself evidence about how genuine the process was.
Ask, in writing, for whatever you need to respond properly: the selection criteria and how they will be scored, the figures behind any cost saving or workload claim, the proposed organisation chart with numbers of roles before and after, the process for filling the new roles, and whether any of them are already advertised. Ask what happens to people who are not placed, and whether redeployment, retraining or voluntary redundancy will be offered. Each of these is relevant to the continuation of your employment, which is the test in section 4(1A)(c).
You may bring a representative or a support person to any meeting about the proposal, and you may have a union act for you whether or not you were a member before the proposal landed. In a public service agency the collective agreement usually sets out how the union is consulted on the proposal itself; the Land Information New Zealand and PSA agreement, for example, requires consultation and agreement with the PSA before reconfirmation or reassignment decisions are made. Read your own agreement's restructuring clause before the window closes, because it can add rights the Act does not.
| Stage | What happens | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Proposal | The employer releases the proposal and the reasons, and sets a date for feedback | Ask in writing for the information you need and for more time if the window is too short |
| Response window | You and your representative read the material and respond | Respond to the reasons, propose alternatives, keep copies of everything |
| Decision | The employer considers the feedback and announces the final structure | Check the decision document answers the points you raised |
| Placement | Reconfirmation, reassignment, or a notice of redundancy | Read the terms of any offer before answering; refusing the wrong offer can cost the payout |
| Notice | The notice period in your agreement runs, worked or paid in lieu | Work through the checklist guide, and lodge the Work and Income application before the last day |
Writing a response that counts
Respond to the reasoning, not the outcome. A response that says the proposal is unfair gives the employer nothing to consider. A response that says the cost saving assumes a workload that the team's own figures contradict, and attaches the figures, has to be answered. The test the Employment Relations Authority applies to a dismissal, in section 103A, asks whether the employer raised its concerns, gave you a reasonable opportunity to respond, and genuinely considered your explanation. Your response is where that genuine consideration is tested, so make it specific.
Propose alternatives. Reduced hours, a secondment, a fixed-term arrangement, redeployment into a vacant role, a different split of the work, or a later date. An alternative that is put forward in writing and rejected without reasons is a defect in the process. An alternative that is never put forward cannot be. Employment New Zealand's guidance is that an employer must explore all possibilities for finding an affected employee another position before making them redundant, and your response is the place to make those possibilities visible.
Keep every email, every version of the proposal, and a note of every meeting with the date and who was there. If a meeting is oral, follow it with an email that records what was said. None of this is adversarial; it is simply the record, and if the process later has to be examined, the record is what gets examined.
The paragraph to include
State, in one paragraph, that you are responding under section 4(1A)(c) of the Employment Relations Act, that you have asked for the listed information, that you are proposing the listed alternatives, and that you ask for written reasons if any of them is not adopted. It is a courteous paragraph, and it turns a comment into a record that the employer must engage with.
Signs the decision was already made
Some signs are familiar to anyone who has been through a restructure: the new roles are advertised before the feedback date closes, the proposal names a start date for the new structure, every affected person receives an identical letter, or the decision document arrives the day after the window shuts and answers none of the points raised. None of these proves the outcome was fixed, but each is evidence, and together they can be strong evidence.
What that evidence is worth depends on section 103A. The Authority looks at what a fair and reasonable employer could have done in all the circumstances, and subsection (5) says a dismissal is not unjustified solely because of defects in the process if the defects did not result in you being treated unfairly. So a short window on its own is not enough; a short window that stopped you putting forward an alternative the employer then never considered may be.
The clock is the thing to know now. Section 114 gives you 90 days to raise a personal grievance with the employer, counted from the date of the action or the date it came to your notice, whichever is later. Raising it means making the employer aware that you allege a grievance you want addressed; it does not need a lawyer or a form. The days run while you are also dealing with everything else in this pathway, which is why the grievance guide in this series comes before the checklist rather than after it.
Employment New Zealand answers questions about the process free of charge. A union will read the proposal and your agreement for you. Community Law centres give free employment advice. All three are more useful during the response window than after the decision.
Related guides and tools
- Redeployment Rights, what reconfirmation, redeployment and a comparable role mean, and what refusing each one costs
- Personal Grievance for Redundancy, the test, the 90 day clock and what changed in 2026
- Redundancy Pay and What To Do Next, the wider picture once the process ends in a notice
- Facing a restructure pathway, this guide is step one of fourteen, in the order the process runs
Test Your Knowledge
Ten questions on what a consultation must include, how to respond, and what the signs of a predetermined outcome are worth.
Sources: Employment Relations Act 2000 sections 4, 103A and 114, read on legislation.govt.nz on 3 September 2026; Employment New Zealand, redundancy, last updated 26 November 2025; Toitu Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand and PSA Collective Employment Agreement 2023 to 2025, clause 10, released under the Official Information Act.