NZNO nurses working at Bupa aged residential care homes throughout Aotearoa New Zealand have raised a pay equity claim to address historic gender-based wage discrimination. 

Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa NZNO has more than 380 registered nurse members working at Bupa’s 40 aged residential care homes across the country. 

NZNO aged care national delegates committee member and registered nurse Maree Ross says the formal claim follows workplace meetings and a recent member ballot. 

“Aged care nursing has been historically and systematically undervalued because it is work predominantly performed by women.  

“Aged care nursing is highly skilled and clinically complex work, often done under considerable pressure. In many facilities, a single registered nurse is responsible for the clinical oversight for the whole facility for an entire shift.  

“Our pay equity claim calls for our work to be properly recognised and paid,” she says.  

During the member meetings, nurses spoke of the risk to resident safety caused by chronic understaffing caused by caring for increasingly unwell people and growing workloads, Maree Ross says. 

“Their concerns echo the findings of NZNO’s Care in Crisis: Manaaki i te Raru report that aged care nurses are constantly forced to make impossible choices about who gets help first because they are stretched so thin. 

“While our pay equity claim is specific to Bupa nurses, historic gender-based wage discrimination occurs across the aged care sector. We are standing up for all our aged care colleagues to be valued and paid comparably to male dominated workforces with similar skills. 

“It is timely this claim was lodged a year after the Coalition Government gutted our previously world class pay equity scheme to 'save the Budget’,” Maree Ross says.