Today's post is by Maanya Tandon
Wage and income equity! The distant and much belated cousin to suffrage and equality – remains much desired but ever elusive in Aotearoa today.
What I mean by this is that women, ethnic
minorities, people with disabilities, and nondominant
populations find themselves working for less pay, or in situations where their
work is less-valued, or unworthy of substantive remuneration and empowerment,
often due to deep-rooted ideas about the relative value of their gender, ethnicity,
and social position.
It’s pretty hard to figure out a clear
picture on this in Aotearoa. Below, I do my best to examine what wage equity is, where we stand in
Aotearoa, and what the likely future looks like in light of some recent legal,
political, and election-related hubbub on this topic.
Income
equity – what is it?
Broadly put, this means equal pay for work
of equal value – but this encompasses more than just the notion of ‘equal pay
for identical work’. It also requires ‘work assessed
as needing similar overall levels of skill, responsibility, effort, and work
conditions to be paid equally’ [1].
I’ve italicised what I think is important here, as there seems to be an aversion to
acknowledging that our attitudes and dialogues around pay, labour, wealth, and
income are as racialised as they are
gendered.
What’s
the current situation in Aotearoa?
Every so often, we hear about where we
stand on wage and income equality in New Zealand, and how well or not-so-well
we’re faring.
Last year, we heard that the gender pay gap
was the worst
it has been in ten years. More recently, in our second leader’s debate, National leader Bill English mentioned
that women’s wages were, in fact, rising
at a faster rate than men’s, and we saw headlines celebrating the fact that the
gender pay gap is its smallest since 2012.
However, read further and we find that the gender pay gap is not at the level
it was five years ago – it’s larger (9.4% in June 2017, compared to 9.1% in
June 2012). If you’re confused, that’s natural – not everyone agrees on which
set of numbers to use or how to interpret them.
This is a topic that lends itself to conflicting
and confusing headlines as well as sporadic attention in electoral politics,
but it cannot easily be looked at in isolation. This makes it hard to draw any
real conclusion about the health of wage parity across ethnicities, and
genders, in our country.
Nonetheless, what we can sadly continue to
conclude is that women continue to earn less than men for work of equal value,
and Maori and Pacific peoples tend to earn less than European populations. This
has been true over time, and while incomes have risen – it’s worth noting the
pattern below before we rejoice (re-Joyce?)
Source: Coalition for Equal Value, Equal
Pay
For example, the New Zealand Income Survey in
2015 showed that Māori earn $166 a week
less than the average New Zealander’s weekly income. The continuation of this
survey (the MSD’s Labour Market Statistics (Income)) survey shows that median weekly earnings for Europeans
rose $38 (4.0 percent) to $997 – for European women, their earnings rose $32
(4.0 percent) to $832.
Just last month, as Jess Berentson-Shaw wrote in the Spinoff, researchers at the Motu Institute found that “when we make other things the same, including the hours worked, the types of work, skills and
expertise, we consistently find women are paid less than men”, and that Maori and Pacific women are paid even less. Further,
discrimination against women based on employers’ beliefs about gender
differences were clearly present.
“In other words, men
and women are basically equivalent in terms their productivity. Yet for some reason,
women are paid 16% less in relative wages. This effect was worse in more
‘skilled’ industries and industries which faced less competition.”
“Men
are more likely to over-promote their future performance than equally competent
women, and biased employers are more likely to believe these claims, even when
presented with performance data.”
Why
should you care?
While wage equity cannot be divorced from
broader issues such as racism, education policies, housing, tax, and health,
it’s worth noting that even as incomes rise:
- families on low incomes will need to spend a much higher percentage of income to purchase basic healthy foods; and
- since the late 1980s, there has been a substantial increase in the proportion of households spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing.
While
income inequality has not (according to the Ministry of Social Development)
increased in the past decade, New Zealanders are spending more of their income
on housing. Nor has this gap been filled
by social benefits – for example, while benefits for families with children
were raised by $25 per week last year – average
rents have risen even more.
Existing
legislation
The Equal Pay Act 1972 and Government Services
Equal Pay Act 1960 got rid of discriminatory female wages and sought to eliminate discrimination in wage negotiations. For
reasons better elaborated by CEVEP and beyond the
scope of this short article, the effectiveness of this existing legislation is
questionable, particularly for addressing
the systemic pay gap.
Where
do existing parties stand on this?
The following parties have equal pay
policies publicly available: Labour (scrap and
replace the existing proposed legislation), National, and the Greens (substantially amending equal pay laws),
While (some) parties do acknowledge the pay
gap and have publicised their policies and plans (or existing efforts) to address
it, it’s worth noting that almost none of the parties acknowledge the
intersection between gender, ethnicity, disability or other factors that
intersect to form these wide-ranging income inequalities. Over time, the gender
gap is largely analysed or presented as one comparing men, and women, with the
rare acknowledgement that the situation is worse for minority ethnicities.
This misses that Maori and Pacific peoples, especially women, are over-represented in low-wage sectors – and often face additional, racist, barriers or attitudes than others when seeking employment or upward trajectory. A focus on employees as victims of unequal pay also fails to acknowledge that employers themselves must themselves become more flexible around non-work commitments and parental leave, for all men and women.
The
Employment (Pay Equity and Equal Pay) Bill and its critiques
Currently in the Select Committee stage
before the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, National’s Employment
(Pay Equity and Equal Pay) Bill would repeal the Equal Pay Act and the
Government Service Equal Pay Act, and amend the Employment Relations Act.
This would introduce a system for
determining those whose salaries it is fair to compare pay with – so that
people attempting to make an equal pay claim must first look at others employed
by their employer, and only if they can find no appropriate comparator, can
they look to others within the same industry.
The inability to compare with other industries is seen as a major problem. It
also contradicts
our Court of Appeal's decision in Terranova
v Bartlett where the court was clear that comparators did not need to be
confined to the employer and sector of the employees bringing the claim. It
would also remove the ability to ask for back pay, and apply this
retrospectively to existing claims.
As an aside, if you feel like this is
important to you – whether you agree or not with this bill’s methods or rules –
make a submission!
Select Committee submissions close 1 November.
Jacinda Ardern has confirmed that Labour
would scrap this bill and ‘start again’ if Labour is elected to government and,
in particular, that Labour would alter the bill’s restrictions to bringing a
claim.
Earlier this year, Green MP Jan
Logie’s members’ bill, which would have required businesses to report their
gender pay gap to MBIE, was voted down (60 votes for, 59 against). This sought
to ‘to increase the amount of information publicly available so that cases where this discrimination persists can be
clearly identified, with the object to improve the likelihood of successful
cases to be taken under the Equal Pay Act 1972 to seek remedies when such
discrimination exists.’ It would have compelled employers to disclose the aggregated data showing the pay and
gender for all employees doing the same kind of work, and would have drastically
increased the penalties for a breach of the Equal Pay Act 1972 (from $400 to $5,000 for an
individual or from $1,000 to $10,000 for a company or other corporation).
This was
opposed by National, Act and United Future on the grounds that it would be too
great a burden on businesses and compromise privacy.
It seems
likely that whatever the outcome of the election, equal pay legislation is on
the horizon. What matters is what values underpin it – how claims should be
made, what assumptions we should make (e.g. equivalent Australian legislation
does not rely on discrimination as the foundation of inequity, but has adopted
the framework and assumption of ‘undervaluation’) [2], and how relative burdens
should be shared.
Going
forward?
As CEVEP notes, it will take much more than
pay equity to remedy the inequalities in the labour market and its permeations
into the education, justice, and other sectors.
However, if our currently triumphant
narrative of continual economic growth and success is to be a believable one,
it must show for all those working in Aotearoa. Everyone deserves a piece of
the pie – and currently – some deserve a second helping before others.
Maanya Tandon completed her LLB/BA at the University of Auckland, and
her LLM at NYU, and has recently returned to Aotearoa after studying and
working abroad. She is excited by the prospect of one day earning as much as
her male counterparts will.
[1] Prue Hyman, “Is Active Intervention
Still Needed to Improve the Position of Women in the New Zealand Labour Market? If so, what can be done?” in Policy
Quarterly, Volume 11, Issue 1, February 2015, p 7.
[2] Heap, L. ‘Point of View’. Working Life: The
PSA Journal June 2015: Wellington, PSA. P 20, available: https://www.psa.org.nz/assets/Working-Life.../Working-Life-June-2015-SCREEN.pdf
Brilliantly written!
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