Injustice won’t be ended by the system that created it.

By Bronwyn Larkins, Te Pou Whirinaki | National Women’s Officer

In reading Audrey Young’s article, “Behind the pay equity dispute over male vs female-dominated jobs”, you can see why the measure taken by the government was to stop all claims in their tracks. Regardless of what the PM says, it is and always was about the money. Pay Equity is about money. It is about money owed and money due to a group of workers for no other reason than their work was traditionally done by women, and on some occasions, was done by women for no salary at all.

The changes to the legislation will result in fewer and cheaper claims under the legislation as it currently stands. But that appears to be the whole point! Pay Equity is expensive and those claims where the government isn’t the employer does put pressure on the budgets of employers. The Minister of Finance, by leaving employers to work out how they will fund pay equity claims, is wiping the governments hands of this costly exercise. It seems to me that the government is then merely paying lip service to gender based issues, and worse saying let the market sort out what a woman should be paid. All good policy wonks know that one of the government’s jobs is to step in when there is market failure.

The market has continuously failed minority workers, whether that is wāhine, Māori, Pasifika, rainbow, because the system is patriarchal and colonialist in nature. Others in the article talk about using market methodologies to find comparators, but this is finding a solution inside the confines of a broken system. This is why as Aotearoa Pay Equity Practitioners we have fought to use the tool, Te Orowaru, as it reflects ‘soft’ skills and culture, and is a tool outside the confines of the broken system.

Pay Equity is about money; it is the way workers are compensated for historical wrongs. Waiting over 50 years to have work done predominantly by women valued the same as male dominated work has cost low paid workers in traditionally feminised workplaces more than they will ever be compensated for in a claim.

No more will we wait – the next version of the legislation has to compensate for the loss!