A Fletcher

Sue Whale’s report on the Zonta Club meeting addressed by former Labour Minister of Women’s Affairs Steve Chadwick, QSO, on Pay Equity was, I felt, a tad naïve.

Sue is a real treasure of community service; however, I wondered if she fully understood the background of the Pay Equity Scheme that the current government were shocked to find when they took office.

It was described as a “hidden Labour depth charge”, costing $1.8 billion annually to cover the 12 to 14 completed pay equity settlements, then there were 33 pending claims that were still in progress, estimated to cost $12.8 billion over four years.

The Coalition government, which had inherited a debt loading that moved up from $50 billion to $175 billion under Labour, were struck by the massive fiscal burden this would have on our economy.

An economy that is now faced with $9.5 billion per annum of debt servicing. They were placed in a situation of “letting women down” and Labour now attempting to make political mileage from it.

To give my letter some context in the scheme of things, and to add to the stories of “local women”, Sue was calling for; I know what women go through at the coal face. I worked as a support staff person in a secondary school.

I was Edgecumbe College’s onsite project manager (support staff equivalent, “administration”) working with the MOE after the 1987 earthquake and charged with putting the school and nine staff houses back together. Then in 1989, just as I finished, Tomorrow’s Schools was introduced and the board of trustees had much broader responsibilities that moved across my job description.

The principal, who had health issues, saw his job as public relations, so I found my job description spread to include the following; secretary to the board, financial manager, support staff manager and grounds manager; the school had 750 students.

I was one of seven women from across the country who met in Hawke’s Bay to set up the inaugural Executive Officer’s Association, which grew very quickly with nationwide membership.

This was set up to gain some pay recognition for women who were the glue in the non-teaching departments of secondary schools.

Now here is the twist; at no point did we gain any support from the teacher’s union, PPTA. In fact, it was the opposite. Their words: We “weren’t professionals”.

Classified as just support staff, lesser beings and were treated as such. The PPTA was and still is closely aligned with the Labour Party and its ideology.

I do believe that successive governments have not attended to the “work of women” in lower paid jobs and in some cases, it is a market economy and government jobs with our debt loading, that won’t be rectified any time soon. However, in education, men and women get equal pay, as do male and female nurses, and so on, so equal pay is moving forward.

In saying this, suggesting, as Labour does, that pay equity should be measured with comparisons, including administration staff compared to civil engineers, social workers compared to detectives; librarians compared to fishery officers, appears as a Labour Party grift, using working people for political gain in suggesting it is a correction of the systematic undervaluation of skill, effort and responsibility.

This is a good example of why Labour can’t be given credibility.