Social worker vs air traffic controller: meet the pay equity matrix
Friday, 9 May 2025
Underpinning Equal Pay settlements is the starting point that female-dominated industries have been chronically underpaid. But demonstrating that through like-for-like comparisons is complex, those involved agree. Kelly Dennett investigates.
Hundreds of hours of interviews and a 14-factor mathematical matrix were among the ways pay equity claimants compared the skills of women working in healthcare, social work and education to jobs like police, Corrections and Customs officers.
Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden on Tuesday announced the Government was urgently changing the Equal Pay Act to narrow the claims threshold.
The Government says the old system was too complicated; unions and proponents say it was comprehensive.
The bill, passed under urgency less than 36 hours later, dissolved 33 current claims mostly relating to teachers and health workers, and thought to impact hundreds of thousands of women.
The Government says the change is about workability - that claims were complicated, costly and becoming conflated with general bargaining.
The move blindsided unions and opposition parties.
But some involved in the claims process The Post spoke to agreed it was slow and resource intensive.
A significant point of contention has been why and how the job of a social worker could be compared to that of an air traffic controller, for pay equity purposes.
The example was not an outlier.
A list of settled claims show some of the comparisons included librarians to Customs officers, nurses to police officers, teacher aides to Corrections officers and administrative support staff to civil engineers.
So how were these comparisons made?
The process, before the urgent changes, was borne from the landmark 2012 court case taken by rest home worker Kristine Bartlett which saw the National-led Government, in 2017, agree to adopt pay equity principles.
That meant workers in industries with a predominantly female workforce could make claims that they were undervalued, compared to comparative male dominated industries, with the hypothesis that “women’s work” was inherently undervalued.
What followed were a dozen claims representing thousands of female workers largely in social, health and education settings, in which complex and formulaic comparisons were made with male dominated industries.
One such claim was made in 2020 by librarians and librarian assistants, taken by the New Zealand Education Institute (NZEI). According to a “Librarian and Library Assistants’ Pay Equity Claim Report”, the process involved interviewing 36 librarians and assistants to establish their skills, responsibilities, experience, and conditions and demands of the workplace.
A potential list of comparable jobs was then developed by NZEI and the Ministry of Education, by reviewing comparative selection criteria from other claims. The act provided that comparators should be work that was similar or substantially similar - but it also allowed for comparisons where the work was different, but the skills, experience, responsibilities, working conditions and degrees of effort were considered the same or substantially similar.
In the case of the librarians, it was also agreed that comparative jobs had to be male dominated, of a substantial workforce size, accessible, New Zealand based, not significantly impacted by Covid, and not involved in an industrial dispute.
The shortlist of comparative jobs included teacher aides, school administration support staff, fishery officers, parking wardens, corrections and customs officers, and cadastral surveyors (land surveyors). It’s worth noting these are workforces - besides the surveyors - where the Government funds and sets market rates.
According to the report the research hit a snag when no worker on the agreed comparative shortlist agreed to be interviewed during the pandemic.
That was except for eight willing cadastral surveyors and two supervisors. The union and ministry agreed to use data from previous claims in relation to the other jobs instead.
The comparison matrix was formulated with a 14-factor mathematical assessment called the Pay Equity Aromatawai Mahi tool. That measured skills like planning, organisation, and problem-solving, and factors like responsibility for services to people, emotional, sensory and physical demands and working conditions.
Each of these factors corresponded with a level, which aligned with a score. The scores were then tallied, collated and analysed. A panel would then arrive at a consensus on the scores for each job.
The report noted a gap in the entry pay rates across the board: While claimants’ entry pay ranged from $22.75 to $27.17, a parking warden was on $24.50, a Corrections officer $28.61, and cadastral surveyors $45.95.
End to end, that claim took about three years to settle.
Figures provided to The Post by the Ministry of Education show its settled claims, through a specialist resource team, took between three and four years.
Public Service Association national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said the system was “comprehensive … by design”.
“The outcomes were important and the stakes high.”
Fitzsimons agreed it took too long to reach settlements and that improvements could have been made. The union would have been open to discussing improvements, “but the Government never opened up that conversation”.
“There are many similarities in roles that at first blush might not seem obvious, and part of the reason for that is we are attempting to overcome systemic undervaluation of women’s work.”
New Zealand Nurses Organisation senior pay equity project lead Glenda Alexander said the previous Treasury requirements for milestone reports made the process “unnecessarily complex”.
The lack of pay equity personnel and resources also caused delays, but its more recent claims had been faster.
“The original nurses and midwives’ claims were testing new ground. We have developed significant expertise now and so getting to settlement sooner. I don’t believe the government’s amendments are going to speed the process up or make it easier to progress claims.”
Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) president Chris Abercrombie said it was in the process of considering potential comparators for a claim relating to 95,000 teachers, when it was extinguished by the legislative changes.
Prior to that, Education Ministry analysts had spent a year doing 290 interviews with teachers.
“The process of selecting comparators was robust,” Abercrombie said. “Looking beyond the face value of the work to consider jobs that might require the same or substantially similar skills and experience, responsibilities, working conditions and/or degrees of effort.”
NZEI Te Riu Roa Te Manukura president Ripeka Lessels, calling the Government’s swift changes “deeply offensive” said, “the Government’s claim that it’s too complex to make comparisons between the skills, responsibilities and effort of jobs is a diversion from the real issue: that putting women’s pay to rights is a cost the Government doesn’t want to bear.”
“Women, whose work has been under-valued for decades, will always welcome swift settlements. Unfortunately, the Government’s changes are not designed to speed up the process for women.”
Minister of Finance Nicola Willis in the House this week said the build-up of expertise from previous settlements had partly informed the Government’s decision to “refine” the Act.
“Because what we found was that claims were being able to be progressed across a range of issues that went beyond the intended scope,” she said.
The merits of the comparison between a social worker and air traffic controller - volunteered by van Velden - were also raked over.
Van Velden said there were “many and varied different working conditions and terms and conditions, and it makes determining how much of the difference in remuneration is down to sex-based undervaluation easier under our rules than the previous regime”.
The goal, she said, was to have more confidence in the pay equity system and that the settlements were about genuine sex-based discrimination.