Chris Mulcahy

I was shocked two weeks ago, when the Government announced the sudden and radical changes to the pay equity legislation.

I thought it was unfair that 33 claimants and 190,000 mostly women workers would have all their work dumped and would have to start again.

I then watched Nicola Willis (National)  and Brooke van Velden (Act) avoid answering questions about whether or not particular groups would be eligible under the new legislation and this made me investigate further.

Let me answer for them. No secondary teachers will be able to make a claim under the new so-called fairer criteria because the new definition of a “female-dominated” workforce has been raised from 60 percent to 70 percent of the workforce. This means fewer cases will qualify and secondary teachers will not meet the 70 percent threshold.  

That’s about 25,000 teachers taking a pay cut. They would have got something, and it would have been back paid. Now they will never have their historical inequity issue dealt with under this legislation.

If that was not enough, the National/Act/NZ First Government also decided to make the new legislation use a far narrower set of possible male-dominated profession comparators to form the basis of a claim.

Comparators must be from the same employer, or a similar employer or within the same industry or sector. However, the education sector is female-dominated, like many of the other 33 claimants, and it will be impossible to find appropriate comparators for them. It effectively prevents teachers, carers, support workers, and librarians from making a claim. They have all been locked out.

It also shows that the Government has no understanding that equal pay and pay equity are quite different. The whole idea is to compare a group of mostly women workers with another group of mostly male workers because the reason the women need to make a pay equity case is because they are in a woman dominated workforce and they have been disadvantaged.

Despite Nicola, Brooke and Dana Kirkpatrick lamenting that they are for pay equity and have just tidied it up, they have locked out hundreds of thousands of women so they can try and balance their budget.  

I may not have used Andrea Vance’s C word to describe what happened two weeks ago and, but I know a few other C words I am happy to use. Try cuts, cruel, callous, and catastrophic.