The Post: How the pay equity ‘gift from the Government’ will keep on giving

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f you’d been underpaid by $18,000 over the last few years, you’d be fuming. Which is the situation that faces Tamara Baddeley, a Napier-based care worker who – in return for her socially essential labour – is paid the princely sum of $26.94 an hour.

Visiting the elderly and the vulnerable in their homes, she lifts them out of bed and gets them showered, fits catheters and colostomy bags, and provides much-needed social support. The work is mentally, physically and emotionally demanding. And it’d be much better paid if it were done mostly by men.

A decade ago, another care worker, Kristine Bartlett, won a landmark case proving that she and her colleagues were underpaid purely because they were women. That, in turn, forced the National government in 2017 to approve a $2 billion pay settlement for care workers and pass a law enabling further pay equity cases.

Having previously followed the Bartlett case, I must admit that at this point I switched off, thinking: job done, justice served. But not so.

Although Labour amended the law in 2020 to make pay equity claims easier, and approved several large deals, a further problem loomed. The Bartlett settlement gave care workers the biggest pay rise of their life, but that boost was rapidly eroded by inflation and other factors. And when the settlement came up for renewal in 2022, Labour, under pressure to constrain spending, balked at finding the money to once again close the gap between care workers and men in equivalently skilled professions.

Hence the situation in which Baddeley and her colleagues find themselves. She estimates that, in the 1000 days since their settlement lapsed, they would each have earned $18,000 extra had they got another 20% pay rise like the one Bartlett earned them in 2017.

When I interviewed Baddeley a few years back, she was already feeling “taken for granted, underappreciated, overworked and underpaid”. And since the current Government gutted the pay equity process in the Budget, dishonestly scuttling 33 deals already underway, those feelings have only intensified.

Much of the current anger is rightly directed at the coalition, which took away an estimated $2.7b a year in future settlements for care workers, midwives and the like. According to RNZ political editor Jo Moir, ministers “don’t think they are losing” on this issue, the public having been scared by the big costs being waved around. But that looks, for the moment, like a delusion.

Polling released last week by Talbot Mills showed just 29% of people think the pay-equity cuts are “a sensible way to reduce government spending”, while 62% believe they are “putting cost-cutting ahead of fairness”. The pay-equity message wins by a two-to-one margin.

Whether that sentiment lasts, once the media spotlight has moved on, depends heavily on how well the unions and other campaigners mobilise the issue. It is, as one activist said to me recently, a gift from the Government.

It crystallises the wider discrimination that women experience, harnessing and focusing the anger of the lower paid in particular. It could replicate – even if to a lesser extent – the Treaty Principles Bill’s mobilisation of Māori. And it exacerbates two of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s great political weaknesses: the public’s sense that he is out of touch with the concerns of ordinary folk, and his poor polling among women.

National’s only real strategy here is to argue that the male-dominated occupations with which women are claiming parity involve utterly different work; the comparisons are thus “ridiculous”. But such comparisons are based not on an exact job match but on finding occupations with similar levels of training, responsibility and experience.

Once the public understands that, it no longer looks so silly to claim that social workers should be paid the same as air traffic controllers. Or that care workers like Baddeley should earn as much as far better paid prison officers.

The public finances, however, remain a problem. Labour leader Chris Hipkins has been careful not to promise he would restore the $12.8 billion the Government has stolen from pay-equity claims over the next four years.

He can, quite reasonably, argue that it’s unclear how National has calculated that figure. But, in light of Labour’s past failure, one might also reasonably suspect his party is reluctant to fully fund pay equity if that jeopardises other goals.

While, in short, National must take the largest share of the blame for the current situation, a deeper, more disturbing truth remains. The caring work carried out by women is often of benefit predominantly to society, rather than any individual client, and so society needs to pay for it.

But we have not, under a government of any stripe, been willing to find all the requisite funds. We have never properly valued women’s work. That is the bigger failing that goes beyond current politics, and the basic attitude that must change.