Female workers still burning with fury over pay equity converge on Wellington
Wednesday, 6 May 2026
To be able to go on holiday and to avoid a state of panic about sudden car repairs are two luxuries Hawke’s Bay woman Tamara Baddeley doesn’t have.
In fact, contacted by The Post as she prepares to travel to Wellington to attend a pay equity announcement today, exactly a year after a law change that deprived her and thousands of others of pay claims that might have bumped up their meagre pay, Baddeley admits her car battery has just died.
“When I finish with you, I will be ringing AA roadside rescue, or whoever it is I'm covered by, to see if they can come and find out what's going on. And if I have to get another battery, I have to.
“But that’s a couple of hundred bucks that I haven’t budgeted for, that pay equity would have made easier.
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“It would mean not having to juggle your grocery bill and your petrol bill, not having to either buy groceries this week, or put petrol in the car. Or ask yourself, ‘do I be a bit selfish and go to the movies with a couple of friends and maybe have a drink afterwards, or do I go and buy groceries?’
“It's that sort of difference that it would make.”
Baddeley, who has been a home and community support worker for more than 25 years, is paid a “level 3” wage ‒ there are four levels in all ‒ of $27.48 an hour. That is above the minimum wage of $23.95 per hour, but below the living wage of $28.95 an hour.
Her line of work, which sees her drop in on a vast array of clients needing care in the home across the region all day long, relies on a dependable car, largely because the kinds of people she’s seeing do not live on bus routes. But it’s quite difficult on the wage she’s paid, even if she does also earn 82.5 cents per km towards petrol.
That was the third increase to mileage in 11 years and came in, in early April, in recognition of fuel price spikes because of the Iran war.
“It doesn’t go anywhere near covering the petrol, let alone the wear and tear and maintenance on the cars, which still doesn't cover the petrol, let alone the wear and tear and maintenance on the cars,” she observes.
Baddeley remembers the day a year ago when she heard that Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden introduced major changes to New Zealand's pay equity system by passing the Equal Pay Amendment Act 2025 under urgency.
The change immediately extinguished 33 in-progress pay equity claims, affecting 180,000 mainly female workers. It extinguished a claim for care workers that would have seen some earn as much as $145 more a week, according to the Public Service Association.
“I was in my car ‒ I had just finished with a client and was heading to another one, and the phone went, so I pulled over, just because I’ve got an older car and I don’t do hands-free. I was told about the change, and I felt myself physically just deflate like a balloon. I was winded.
“And then I got this little ball of fire and anger in the pit of my stomach, and it's been there ever since.”
‘We’re not going to forget’
Ally Kingi, a teacher aide in Central Auckland, agrees there are things many people take for granted in their lives that women at her pay grade of about $30 an hour can’t really contemplate ‒ going on holiday is one, “even within New Zealand; we don’t catch planes or drive cars, we catch the bus.
“Even going to the hairdresser, or, apparently there’s something called a physio that people go to when their bodies get sore - all of those things are extras, luxuries.”
She is also carrying a fire inside, lit by the extinguishing of pay equity claims.
Kingi is a national member leader in the primary education sector union the NZEI, and was part of a contingent of women ‒ teachers, teacher aides, librarians and school administrators ‒ whose claims were already settled or determined, but were subject to mandatory review processes within three years.
Teacher aides were already facing a 17% pay gap that had re-opened since their 2020 settlement, and were trying to get an answer out of the Government about when the review would take place. The answer came in the form of van Velden’s 2025 changes, which scrapped existent reviews and imposed 10-year reviews on any new claims.
Kingi will also be in Wellington today, where not only will a year after pay equity retrenchment be marked, but so will the fact a group of organisations ‒ the Pay Equity Coalition Aotearoa (PECA), New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, and Te Kāhui Tika Tangata Human Rights Commission ‒ have lodged a formal complaint with the United Nations, asking it to investigate whether the Government’s changes to the country’s pay equity laws amount to systemic discrimination against women.
“I'm hoping [the complaint to the UN] signals really clearly to the Government that they didn't just do a thing a year ago, and we suddenly went, ‘Oh, well, that sucks a bit’, and we'll forget about it,” she says.
“I'm hoping that they realise that the righteous outrage is burning as hot as it was on the day they did that, and that it is an election issue, because it involves 180,000 working women, and we're not going to forget that we just got ripped off overnight a year ago.
“We're not going to put that aside and say, ‘these things happen for the good of the country’, because we know that money hasn't been used towards the good of the country.
“And we know that it's our money that's been taken to do it.”