Time for NZ to end the pay bias against women-dominated workforces
Friday, 20 May 2022
Lana Hart is a Christchurch-based writer, broadcaster and tutor
OPINION: In our healthcare sector a storm stirs, of severe labour shortages, pay disputes, and persistent under-resourcing. Year after year, from one Budget to the next, healthcare workers argue for more pay, lower carer-patient ratios, and better working conditions.
In the past month, the Government announced a new immigration policy which left nurses and midwives off the list of jobs for a quick pathway to residency; fees-free education was extended for apprentices in construction and trades, but not nurses; and the Budget made no mention of an investment in frontline healthcare staff, with the NZ Nurses Organisation chief executive claiming the Government “seems oblivious” to staffing issues “worsening every day”.
Last week, 10,000 Allied health workers went on strike about the breakdown of bargaining on their multi-employer collective agreement, which has been negotiated for the last 18 months. The Public Service Association also has a pay equity claim in for these workers.
**READ MORE:
* Lowest-level Covid-19 office workers paid more than MIQ staff and hospital aides
* Nurses' strike to go ahead as latest district health board offer rejected
* Nurses and primary healthcare staff continue strike over pay equity issues
* Frontline nurses across the country strike over pay and conditions
**
The current Government is not alone in its neglect of resourcing the care sector. Every previous government has underpaid the healthcare sector, putting mounting pressure on nurses, healthcare assistants and midwives to endure rigid pay scales against the rising cost of living, more dangerous working conditions, and – especially through the pandemic – an erosion of workforce morale.
With such stubborn neglect, there must be something deeper going on.
Undervaluing caring work is as old as the hills. This antiquated rationale says because women have an inherent predisposition towards caring for others, its value is less than work requiring “harder” skills, such as using heavy machinery, policing, or fixing drains.
Historically, more women than men are driven into caring professions, bringing with them the curse of all female-dominated sectors: lower pay. This idea underpins classic pay equity comparisons between average annual salaries of male- and female-dominated sectors, such as NZ Police’s new graduates with four months’ training earning $63,000 in their first year of work, compared to enrolled nurses with 18 months’ training starting out on $49k (The equivalent current starting salary for registered nurses, with a three-year Bachelor of Nursing, is $54k.)
These traditional views of women’s worth really get up my feminist nose.
We’ve been working on addressing gender inequities built into our systems for decades. The 1972 Equal Pay Act, Marilyn Waring’s Counting for Nothing, which helped bring the invisible value of women’s work to light, half a century of academic and political discourse, pay equity jurisprudence, and international norms that guide governments to redress these injustices – but here we are in 2022, still paying less to people who work in female-dominated sectors.
To be fair, the current Government has done more to address this problem than probably any other. A 2020 amendment to the Equal Pay Act finally recognises the right to equal pay for work of equal value across the genders, with the unresolved NZNO pay offer including a redress payment for limited historical pay inequities.
But these are not enough to stop our biased brains, wired as they are with gendered notions of what work is of higher value, perpetuating ideas that are now so entrenched that many people are not conscious of the ways they operate all around us, in our employment contracts, our organisational strategies, and our funding decisions.
With equitable pay offered through the NZNO pay negotiations, there is the opportunity to move away from a system which justifies the idea that caring for a human patient is worth less than caring for a car or a cow. Here is our moment in NZ history to put our money where our mouths have long been, to bring concrete resources into the caring professions, while addressing equity issues that this Government says it cares about.
I understand the Government’s hesitancies; if it commits to the NZNO deal, it locks Health NZ into an agreement that subsequent governments must honour at a cost of $520 million a year. Then, they must continue to pay and build upon those costs for years to come.
But governments make expensive strategic spending decisions aligned with their goals all the time. In last week’s Budget, we saw $814m budgeted for a one-off winter payment and $777m for capital investment in schools. In other years we’ve seen $250m on infrastructure for a single sporting event, $1.775 billion for the 2010 bailout of South Canterbury Finance, and a whopping $1.25b for a motorway near Wellington. Finally addressing our country’s most serious gender pay gap will cost a tonne of money, no doubt. But in doing so, many will benefit.
Some 85% of sole parents are women, so a rise in health sector salaries will work towards lifting the quality of life for these households and continue to chip away at NZ’s mountain of poverty. Paying healthcare workers in female-dominated sectors a fair wage would also discourage losing healthcare workers to emigration. Attracting new recruits to caring work would be easier, eventually bringing an end to the years-long cries of understaffing throughout the health sector.
The deep-seated ideas we carry about the worth of work are gendered and sometimes hard to see. It’s time the NZNO pay equity claim and other forms of neglect in the caring sector are set right.
FOOTNOTE: CLARIFICATION: The seventh paragraph of this column has been updated to reflect that the nurses on a starting salary of $49,000 after 18 months’ training are enrolled nurses, and that the starting salary for a registered nurse is $54,000. (Amended, May 23, 2.04pm) The reference to the number of Allied health workers who went on strike was also corrected; it was 10,000 not 100,000, and the third paragraph was changed to reflect that the strike of Allied health workers was “about the breakdown of bargaining on their multi-employer collective agreement, which has been negotiated for the last 18 months” and not related to a separate pay equity claim (Amended: May 24, 12.20pm).