‘I think there will be a big rebellion’: Pay equity advocates blindsided after years of work

Wednesday, 7 May 2025

Marianne Bishop recalls when a home support worker she knew was finally able to afford a new car. This was not a fancy new car, but a “good, reliable trustworthy” vehicle they needed to get around for work.

That was in 2017.

Bishop, of the E Tū union and a former residential aged care worker, spent 13 years advocating for pay equity reforms, spearheaded by resthome worker Kristine Bartlett’s landmark 2012 court case which eventually saw the Government agree to give public service workers a pay rise.

At the time, it was described as the biggest victory unions had had in decades - a historic moment that saw 55,000 underpaid female aged-care workers get what Bishop described as a significant pay rise.

But for all those who campaigned and were in the queue to get a pay equity settlement, a shock came at 11am on Tuesday. Not only was the Government changing the standards by which pay equity claims could be made, all current claims would be cancelled and would have to be reapplied for under the new rules.

That decision affects hundreds of thousands of women in the queue for a settlement - largely health workers and teachers.

Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden said she’d been interested in changing the rules since she became minister, that in her view pay equity deals had become entangled with more general collective bargaining, and that it was expected to deliver significant Budget savings.

“These changes will mean the pay equity claim process is workable and sustainable,” van Velden said.

But for those who had spent years fighting against the idea that women’s work was inherently not valuable, there was an immediate and sharp reaction.

“To have this now be pulled out from under our feet, it’s just disgusting,” Bishop told The Post. “What do they think they are actually achieving?”

The changes are being rushed through Parliament, introduced to the House under urgency, and won’t see a select committee process.

They extinguished, as one former union leader described it, the efforts of advocates that began in 2012 with Bartlett, then a resthome worker, who was earning $14.46 an hour.

Then, she and the Service and Food Workers Union (now E Tū) filed a claim against TerraNova rest home with the Employment Relations Authority which would set in motion major reform.

Bartlett’s claim was not that she was lower paid than her male colleagues - she wasn’t. It was that certain types of work attracting a predominantly female workforce (some estimates put aged care work in 2012 as 92% female dominated) were typically low paid and largely contributed to the gender pay gap.

At that time, the pay difference between men and women in New Zealand was about 9%.

That case travelled through the courts for a number of years, with the Court of Appeal eventually upholding that the Equal Pay Act 1972 required equal pay for work of equal value - pay equity - not simply same pay for the same work, aka equal pay. The court upheld that someone like Bartlett should be paid at the same rate of men with comparable skills in other industries.

The case prompted a working group on pay equity principles and in 2017 the Public Service Commission and the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions agreed to apply the principles to the public sector, before amendments were made to the act in 2020.

Since then more than 100,000 workers have had pay rises following settlements, and van Velden said changes would likely affect hundreds of thousands more. There are 33 live claims at the moment, including 95,000 teachers and 65,000 care and support workers.

Bishop said after 13 years of painstaking work she was “blown away” by the move.

Pre 2017 she recalled that some new aged care staff completing orientation would leave before lunch-time, realising how difficult the work was for the pay. The pay rise had been a welcome boost, but going forward, “it’ll have a huge impact on the care sector. It’s hard enough to recruit and train staff, it will make it harder to do that if you’re not paid a decent wage. I just think it’s a kick in the guts”.

Bartlett told The Post van Velden’s changes were “gut wrenching” and after many years of advocacy people were tired.

She was particularly angry with van Velden: “She’s run us women into the ground.”

“I just want employees to realise how important this case, the equal pay case, was, and how we won it, and how it’s all gone,” Bartlett, now 76, said. “It’s not going to be pretty at all. I think there will be a big rebellion. I know for a fact it’s going to happen. What we’ve got to do now is get out there and rally.”

John Ryall, former assistant national secretary for E Tū who was part of the pay equity movement, recalled “a feeling of total elation” after the Court of Appeal upheld Bartlett’s claim.

“That opened the door … the women I met were in tears because they had fought so hard.”

He described the proposed reform as an “enormous backwards step” that would take the country back, not pre 2017, but pre the 1972 Pay Equity Act.

Female dominated industries include early childhood education (97% in 2020), primary and area teachers in state schools (85.% in 2020), social service workers (71% in 2023), and public service administrators (83%).

In Corrections, most psychologists are women (79.7% in 2018) and so are probation officers and senior practitioners (68% in 2020), according to information provided by Public Service Minister Judith Collins in response to written questions by Labour’s Jan Tinetti.

The Government’s move has largely been attacked by unions and opposition parties - with a modest Public Service Association-organised protest on the steps of Parliament two hours later. Labour leader Chris Hipkins has promised to reverse any changes if elected next year.

By cancelling the claims, the Government would likely save billions over the Budget forecast period, van Velden said, although Luxon said the issue was about workability of the law, and not Budget savings. But ACT leader and associate finance minister David Seymour credited van Velden with having “saved the taxpayer billions, she’s saved the Budget”.

The changes will see the threshold for an industry considered “predominantly” female to be lifted from 60% to 70%, and that will have had to have been the case for a decade before a claim can be made.

The changes will discontinue current equity claims but new ones can be made under the amended Act if they meet the threshold.

Corrections has three active pay equity claims for psychologists, probation officers and administrators, covering about 2000 people.

Public Service Association organiser Josephine O’Connor, representing Corrections PSA members, and who was at the protest on Tuesday, said those staff “produce an enormous amount of work for Corrections as public servants, but they also undertake some of the most integral work that Corrections perform, by mitigating threats of violence to communities. The fact this is occurring for them is devastating”.

She said some staff had waited five years for claims to come to fruition, and recruitment was already a struggle.

“Many of them have been staying in the hope that their claims would be settled. So this decision by the current Government that claims to care about law and order, it just doesn’t stack up.”

Nurse Laura Thomas said nurses working in primary healthcare and aged care sectors specifically would be impacted.

“We’ve already seen a lot of people moving to Australia. I think it will make it harder, it’s already quite hard to attract people.”