Did the "Five per cent in 05" Campaign leave Women in '97?

November 2005

 

Unforgettable not only for the advent of the Spice Girls or the death of Princess Diana, 1997 was also the last year that women in New Zealand earned as little as 82% of men’s average hourly income, down from 86% of men’s income in 2004.

Good wage and salary increases may reflect the victories of the ‘Fair Share: 5 in ’05’ campaign said Helen Kelly, Secretary of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions. But she feared that “women did not get an equal share” of workers’ gains, based on the new figures. Pay for men working full-time increased 6.3%, but women only managed 3.2%. EEOCommissioner Judy McGregorobserved that gender-segregation across occupations has meant that the big pay increases in agriculture and fisheries, trades, and plant and machine operators and assemblers, have less impact on women.

 

Andrew Little, National Secretary of the Engineers, Printers and Manufacturers Union, said of the 2005 Union campaigns for pay rises that “without detailed analysis, I’d find it difficult to draw the conclusion that it’s a campaign that has predominantly benefited men.” He points to the Service and Food Workers and National Distribution Union’s settlement with Progressive Enterprises, which covers supermarkets.

       

However, Little said some large workforces within EPMU like New Zealand Post were female-dominated, but the union had not been bargaining for them in the current round, and would not be until next year. “The campaign hasn’t finished it’s a campaign to benefit all our members,” he said.

 

The gender pay gap closed slowly from 1997-2000, but widened in 2001. Then women’s income rose to a high of 86.9% of men’s income in 2003, before falling for two consecutive years. This year’s 3.8 percentage point increase in the gender pay gap is the largest in the Income Survey’s nine year history.