The Tertiary Education Union says polytechnics are resisting its attempts to retain a single collective employment agreement covering the entire sector.

It has asked the Employment Relations Authority to provide facilitated bargaining for a multi-employer collective agreement, or MECA.

The union’s assistant national secretary – industrial, Daniel Benson-Guiu, said for the past four years its members were covered by a single agreement negotiated while the polytechnics were campuses of the national skills and training institute Te Pūkenga.

The institute was winding up and Benson-Guiu said there was no reason they couldn’t shift to a multi-employer collective covering 11 employers – the 10 independent institutes and the group of four that remained within Te Pūkenga, but would next year function as a federation of individual institutions.