Next Steps Towards Pay Equity Submission

The New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) welcomes the ‘Next Steps’ towards pay equity and is keen to work in partnership with government, employers and other unions to achieve a socially-just pay system in New Zealand for all workers and especially women.

The NZNO represents 33,000 nurses and health workers. With over 85% of female membership, NZNO is the single largest representative organisation of women workers in New Zealand. Pay equity is a fundamentally important issue for NZNO.

When the Employment Equity Act was passed in 1990, nurses were first in line for a job evaluation process that promised to lead to pay equity. The repeal of that legislation within a few months, the introduction of the Employment Contracts Act and the market-driven health sector imposed a cruel ‘divide and underpay’ regime on the nursing workforce in the 1990s. 

We now look with optimism and hope towards this current exercise to provide the legislative, administrative and industrial structures necessary to end the economic disadvantage of women in this country and in particular of nurses.

The urgent need is to agree that occupational segregation contributes significantly to the gender pay gap and that mechanisms must be put in place to overcome that effect. Women and men should not have to do men’s work to get men’s pay. Women and men should not have to compromise their parenting or caregiving tasks to receive incomes commensurate with their training, skill and responsibility.

It has often been lamented that the fragmentation of wage bargaining makes it difficult to develop an effective pay equity mechanism. There are two important responses to this from our members.

Firstly, they are almost all employed in the state sector, and most of those that are not are employed by private providers funded by Vote:Health. The government as employer or funder could thus directly address gender pay inequality through mechanisms already available to it, including contract compliance, the size and structure of the vote, and ministerial direction.

Secondly, where fragmentation of bargaining restricts the implementation of equal pay for work of equal value it needs to be challenged. The alternative is to tolerate a pay fixing system with the knowledge that its outcomes are discriminatory.

>> Next Steps Towards Pay Equity Submission (PDF)