The Pay Equity Challenge

We like to think New Zealand is a world leader in gender equality issues.  We were the first country in the world to give women the vote, don’t you know?

But New Zealand is now lagging behind on this record.  To our shame, we still have a significant gap between what women and men are paid for equivalent work.  Women's hourly earnings are on average 12% to 15% less than men's - but that's a minimum estimate of the gap.  Because women move in and out of the labour force more and spend more time in unpaid work to bring up children, the annual earnings gap is even bigger than this.  And for workers working in women-dominated work, the gender pay gap is bigger because the work is undervalued.

24 March 2009

Dear members

Please contribute to this campaign petition by signing the attached petition and also by distributing and promoting it throughout your regions and networks.
 
The petition asks the government to

• reverse its decision to scrap pay equity investigations for school support staff and social workers,
•  implement the findings of previously completed pay and employment equity reviews (including the schools review)  
• develop a strategy to eliminate the gender pay gap in New Zealand.

The struggle for pay and employment equity has been an ongoing union priority for decades and just when real progress was being made by the Pay and Employment Equity Reviews and the pay investigations, this government has halted the pay investigations and is looking pretty shaky on implementing any other aspects of the PAEE Reviews.

Recommendations to Government

1. That the Minister of Education accept the Tripartite Schools PAEE Report and its recommendations; and
2. That the Minister instruct the Ministry of Education to coordinate implementation of the Report recommendations; and
3. That the Report be released.

Background

As part of the Government’s Pay and Employment Equity (PAEE) five year plan, a Tripartite Committee was formed in 2005 to undertake a PAEE review of the compulsory school sector. The Tripartite Schools PAEE Review Committee consisted of representatives from the Ministry of Education (MoE), the NZ School Trustees Association (STA) and the four unions involved in the School Sector review (PPTA, NZEI, PSA and SFWU).

The process for the schools review was difficult and lengthy as the review tool was primarily developed with large government departments in mind. While the review tool proved reasonably adaptable to large institutions, such as hospitals and universities, the large number of self governing schools, each a relatively ‘small’ employer, posed a considerable challenge to the parties conducting the review.