You have no doubt heard a lot about pay equity in the last week. But a lot of what has been said is not based in fact.
First. The right to equal pay remains the same as it ever was- and has been in law since 1973. The simple concept that a woman doing the same job as a man should get the same pay has not changed.
Second. No woman has had her pay cut. Twelve existing pay equity settlements for nurses, social workers, midwives, teacher aides, school librarians, care and support workers and other female-dominated workforces remain and we are continuing to fund them, costing about $ 1.8 billion per year.
Our Government values those workers and none of them should be scared thinking their pay is at risk- it’s not.
Third. Additional claims under the new legislation we introduced last week are expected- and we have provisioned for them in the Budget. We fully expect there will be successful claims in the future.
The Pay Equity Change Explained
It’s clear people are using pay equity as a weapon to conflate other issues, including those that should be dealt with through standard pay negotiations.
Pay equity is not about equal-it’s about recognising and correcting for the fact that some female-dominated workforces have been historically underpaid and undervalued due to sex-based discrimination.
The tricky bit is how to define in law what jobs are of ‘equal value’ - which aspects of pay are down to sex-discrimination and what are the result of other market-based factor? The first pay-equity claim was proved in the Supreme Court by Kristine Bartlett on behalf of thousands of care and support workers, and after delivering that settlement, the National Government moved quickly to design a clear legal regime so that other claims could be progressed without workers having to resort to the Courts.
In 2020, a full three years later, Labour put its own, very loose, regime into law. Unfortunately, like almost everything Labour got its hands on, the system got way out of whack and became completely unaffordable; admin workers were being compared with civil engineers; social workers were being compared with detectives; and librarians were being compared with fishery officers. Multiple employers were being joined to claims with dozens of very different jobs in scope.
What started as a pay equity regime had become a Trojan Horse for a multi-billion dollar grievance industry driven by public sector unions. It had departed a very long way from issues of sex-discrimination.
What we did last week was put in law a much more workable pay equity regime that focuses squarely on the actual issue of sex-based discrimination.
Yes, these changes mean savings for the Government- but sticking with it would have meant large new taxes, reckless amounts of borrowing or significant spending cuts elsewhere.
We are now able to have more funding available for things like cancer drugs, new schools, new hospitals and other much needed initiatives for Budget 2025.
Nicola Willis
PS - you may have seen the piece in the SST on Sunday. I responded to that article
here, if you’re keen to read more.
