‘Blank days’ left flight crew in roster limbo - until the union took it to court
Air New Zealand's flight attendants knew the drill. Some days on the roster came up blank - no duty assigned, no day off marked. Just a slash or an empty square.
For at least a decade, the airline treated those "blank days" as leftovers from its rostering system. If work came up, crew control could call a flight attendant in, provided they made contact by 5:59 pm the day before. After 6 pm, the attendant could say no.
The arrangement sat in a 2021 General Bulletin agreed between Air New Zealand and the union E tū. But when E tū took the issue to the Employment Relations Authority - and then challenged the Authority's ruling in the Employment Court - the question became whether the practice actually lined up with the collective agreement covering around 369 short-haul flight attendants.
The Court's answer, delivered on November 3, 2026: partly.
Not quite a day off, not quite a shift
Under the Short-Haul Collective Agreement 2022-2025, flight attendants work 28-day roster periods. They are entitled to ten "free of duty" days per period - designated on the roster as days off, weekend offs, golden days off, or best days off. The agreement does not set a minimum number of working days. Instead, it sets rules and limits around duties, rest, leave, and days off.
Air New Zealand uses what it calls "roster optimisation" - a system that builds rosters around operational needs, the collective agreement's rules, and flight attendant preferences. Sometimes, once all the days off, leave, and assigned duties are slotted in, there are days left over. No work to assign, but no contractual label for the day either.
Those are the blank days.
Flight attendants are paid the same salary whether they work a blank day or not. But Air New Zealand reserves the right to use the attendant for that day if needed.
The union's case: roster certainty
E tū's case turned on clause 6.3 of the collective agreement, which requires that duties, days off, leave, and rest be rostered in 28-day periods and published at least nine days before the roster starts.
The union argued blank days were inconsistent with the rostering obligations in the collective agreement. A flight attendant with a blank day could not make firm plans until 6 pm the night before - effectively a standby day, the union said, without the protections that come with actual standby duties under the agreement. That gave flight attendants "materially less notice" than the agreement required.
E tū also argued that the 2021 General Bulletin could not override the collective agreement, and had in any event expired on its stated removal date of March 15, 2022.
Air New Zealand pushed back
The airline said the union was overreading clause 6.3. Nothing in the agreement, Air New Zealand argued, requires every one of the 28 days to be designated as either a duty or a day off. Blank days did not reduce anyone's entitlement to "free of duty" days. And accepting the union's interpretation would have "significantly detrimental effects" on the airline's ability to roster flight attendants.
Air New Zealand also pointed to the rarity of the practice. Between June 2025 and May 2026, there were just 12 instances where a flight attendant was actually required to work a blank day.
A split result
The Court found that rostering blank days does not, by itself, breach the collective agreement. Blank days are the product of rostering inefficiencies - days where work could have been assigned but was not. The agreement does not prohibit them.
But the Court sided with the union on the second question. Requiring flight attendants to work blank days under the General Bulletin's notice period - contact by 5:59 pm the day before - breaches the collective agreement's requirement that rosters be published at least nine days before the period starts. The nine-day publication requirement provides certainty and gives flight attendants advance notice of their obligations. The blank-day call-in practice undermined that.
The result does not eliminate blank days. It eliminates the short-notice mechanism for filling them. Air New Zealand can still leave days unassigned on the roster, but if it wants a flight attendant to work one of those days, it needs to comply with the collective agreement's notice framework.
Costs were reserved. E tū has 14 days from the judgment date to file any costs memorandum, with Air New Zealand given a further 14 days to respond.
For HR teams managing rostered workforces under collective agreements, the takeaway is direct: operational workarounds - even longstanding ones agreed with the union - do not survive if they conflict with the notice and publication requirements baked into the agreement itself.
