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Unions and equality advocates are calling on the Government to put more energy into pay equity and step up attention to the private sector. This follows the latest Income Survey data revealing a widening gender-pay gap.

 

“The gender pay gap will not be resolved through ordinary market approaches and bargaining mech-anisms”, the EEO Commissioner Judy McGregor said, recom-mending the Government accelerate and strengthen the work of the Pay and Employment Equity Unit.

 

Minister of Labour Ruth Dyson said it was too early to tell whether the Pay and Employment Equity programme should be sped up.  The Unit is just starting the roll-out of its Pay and Employment Equity Reviews to cover internal staff of ten government agencies.  The second-phase rollouts to all workers in DHBs and the compulsory education sectors have yet to be scheduled.  

 

Dyson said that the recent pay equity deal for DHB nurses should help even out the pay gap.  But New Zealand Nurses’ Organisation spokesperson Lyndy McIntyre said that the nurses’ deal “only covered 20,000 mainly women health workers.” This meant it was “pretty clear and simple” why the pay deal alone had not kept women’s incomes up to speed with men in the last quarter, and would be unlikely to impact significantly on the gap in the future when the full effect of the nurses’ pay-deal is felt. 

 

“Over half of the settlement has come through already, and if anyone is hoping one settlement for one historically underpaid group in the public sector will close the whole gender pay gap, they’re in for a big shock,” said McIntyre. 

 

To close the gap “there will need to be a lot of work done in the private sector,” she said. For example, “in health there are thousands of so-called private sector jobs dependent on government funding.  Women working in aged care, and in primary health, are grossly underpaid compared with their DHB counterparts.” Nurses in primary health combined with the number of nurses and female carers in private-sector aged-care and home-care, far outnumber the 20,000 DHB nurses who have achieved a pay equity settlement by 2006. 

 

McIntyre suggested that advancing pay equity for the lowest-paid women did not have to be restricted to the current programme or timetable of the Pay and Employment Equity Unit. For example, minimum wage movement could make an immediate difference to the pay of a large slice of care-workers.