Where are women in the social insurance scheme? On the benefit
Friday, 4 February 2022
Michelle Duff is a National Correspondent for Stuff.
OPINION: How many women were in the room when the social insurance scheme was cooked up, do you think?
Finance Minister Grant Robertson announced the shiny new unemployment scheme this week, backed up by Business NZ head Kirk Hope and Council of Trade Unions President Richard Wagstaff.
Those men form part of a shadowy Future of Work triptych that has come up with a plan which is going to impact all New Zealanders, even women. Now there’s a discussion document to which we are invited to contribute, after the nuts and bolts of the scheme have already been hammered out, and its existence is seemingly not up for debate.
Before ACC was established in 1974, there was a Royal Commission of Inquiry which bashed around the idea of the scheme, whether it should exist and in what form.
**READ MORE:
* Government proposes unemployment insurance scheme funded by 1.39% tax
* How social insurance could provide a safety net for NZ's most vulnerable workers
**
We all mostly accept ACC now, and it has helped many of us recover from injury. It’s also plagued with flaws and is extremely inequitable, with ACC’s own research finding it discriminates against women, Māori and Pasifika
Yet here we go barrelling into social insurance, which plans to pay 80 per cent of a former worker’s previous income for seven months, is meant to help buffer against economic shocks and could cost $1.3 billion a year.
Women have been disproportionately impacted by Covid-19 job losses. But the person who stands to gain the most from this scheme, as proposed, is a white, middle-to-high income man who works a 9-5 job and has no dependants.
If their income is around $130,000 a year, the suggested cap, and they lose their job, they would likely receive around $1500 a week after tax.
If someone on minimum wage loses their job, that’s about $540 a week.
In both these scenarios, they’ve been paying a levy of 1.39 per cent - on a minimum wage that’s about $11 a week, and at the highest income it’s $35.
If you lose your job now, the Jobseeker Support benefit rate is around $315 a week.
In some ways, social insurance looks like a better deal. Because it is tied to earnings, someone who has been paid minimum wage and loses their job gets $225 a week more than that rate.
But the person on a higher salary stands to benefit much more, even compared to the levy they’ve paid. They would pocket $1200 a week over the current benefit rate.
Who is more likely to be on a higher income? Able-bodied, Pākehā men, who work full-time in traditional salaried roles. The proposed scheme does plan to allow for casual workers, though there is far less clarity about how this might work and how high the rates might be.
But yet again, there is no monetary value attached to care-giving or unpaid work, no mention of sole parents (who are mostly women), people who have to leave their jobs to take care of dependants, or are sick or disabled and can’t work.
Did anyone in the Future of Work group think about fully funding childcare, so that women can find, seek and keep work? Or introducing paid parental leave entitlements, like comparable schemes overseas have done?
The discussion document acknowledges that caregivers are more than twice as likely to be women, and Māori. They won’t be covered by the scheme, but they are, supposedly, taken care of by the health and welfare systems.
Is this the same outdated welfare system which has barely kept up with inflation, and that the Welfare Expert Advisory Group [WEAG] said needed a major overhaul in mid-2019, coming up with 42 recommendations which critics say have barely been touched?
Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni told Stuff reforms are underway, but need structural change, and will take time. She said the income insurance scheme did meet some of the recommendations around support, just done differently.
Still, in announcing a completely separate safety net without fixing the old one, this Government appears to be signalling a disregard for those who need help the most. A large chunk of children live in poverty, many to single mums on the benefit, many Māori. How much do we really care about raising their quality of life, or supporting the unpaid labour that primarily mothers perform?
In other countries where social insurance exists, paid parental leave is usually included as part of the levy, allowing more generous provisions for men to stay at home with their children.
Despite Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Michael Wood saying this would be considered by this Government, there is no mention of it at all in this policy, which would be a logical place for it. Why not?
Instead of making our system better, this new one it looks set to make moral judgements on who deserves government money the most, who should get more of it, and whose work is more important.
Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise to see who looks set to come out on top.