Ele Ludemann: Where’s the balance?

The Opposition, their allies and most of the media have seized on changes to improve pay equity legislation as a stick with which to beat the government.

News reports repeated speeches by opposition MPs and quoted union representatives and others who wouldn’t support anything the government does.

I haven’t come across any reports quoting Business NZ’s media release which was supportive and said:

BusinessNZ supports amending the pay equity process to make it more transparent, evidence-based, and more able to achieve robust settlements.

BusinessNZ Chief Executive Katherine Rich says the current process is bringing large anomalies between the public and private sectors, in effect leading to new equity problems – between those employed in the public sector and those in the private sector.

That’s a very good point. The public sector can keep taxing us to pay for wage increases, it’s much more difficult for the private sector to cover higher costs.

“Increases in public health sector remuneration have created difficulties in the private sector where they can’t afford those pay rates. Where those private sector employers receive government funding for some services, it is not enough to cover the contracted services they provide. As a result, they are losing staff, suffering from industrial action and face problems in delivering their contracted work.

“These outcomes indicate that the pay equity process needs attention.

“Current problems include unclear evidence for some pay equity claims, a lack of transparency around choice of comparators for the pay equity process, and insufficient incentives for the bargaining parties to resolve pay equity claims themselves, without recourse to the government.

“BusinessNZ supports a review of the settings for pay equity claims, in the interests of fairness and a more balanced economy,” Mrs Rich said.

The only balanced analysis of the changes isn’t in the mainstream media, it’s in a Substack post by Ani O’Brien who gives both sides of the story then writes:

. . . Some truth is located in both narratives. One appeals to logic and one appeals to emotion, but both communicate elements of reality. They dial up the truth that suits them and dial down the bits that don’t.

It is true that the 2020 amendments have allowed for librarians to be compared to transport engineers, for example. It is true that the 2025 amendments will tighten criteria and this will make it more difficult for broader claims to win. It is true that 33 claims are being discontinued and will need to start again. It is true that this will save the Government money. It is true that this will be disappointing and upsetting for those who have existing claims. It is also true that the unions benefit from the criteria remaining broad. It is true that the Government is passing the Bill under urgency and skipping public consultation. It is also true that Labour did this many times when they were in Government.

It isn’t true that this is a war on woman or a particularly dark day. It isn’t true that this will impact women’s rights in any broader terms and certainly won’t prevent genuine cases of pay discrimination from progressing. It isn’t true that passing Bills under urgency is unprecedented or even unusual.

The truth is likely not to be located in the angry TikTok videos that claim New Zealand women can now be paid less than men without consequences. But that is how many, many New Zealanders get their news. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a media willing to provide the balance?

Editorials and opinion pieces I’ve come across have been united in their condemnation of the changes, the most vitriolic of which was this one by Andrea Vance , and in a rare example of balance, Nicola Willis was able to respond with facts and commendable restraint:

Having the C-word directed at me by a journalist in a mainstream publication wasn’t on my bingo-list for Mother’s Day 2025. Nor was being accused of “girl-math”.

But there you have it, that’s what was thrown at me and my female colleagues in a recent newspaper column as hopelessly devoid of facts as it was heavy on sexist slurs.....

And the facts are:

First, the right to equal pay remains as it ever was. Equal pay has been protected in New Zealand law since 1973. It’s the simple concept that a woman doing the same job as a man should get the same pay. Nothing has changed there. I’d resign my job before I’d let that happen.

Some of those responding so negatively to the changes have confused equal pay and pay equity.

Second, no woman has had her pay cut. Twelve existing pay equity settlements including for nurses, social workers, midwives, teacher aides, school librarians, care and support workers and a range of other female-dominated workforces remain. Those settlements resulted in higher pay for tens of thousands of women, and they continue to be funded by the Government, at a cost of around $1.8 billion a year. Our Government values those workers and none of them should be scared into thinking their pay is at risk. It’s not.

Third, additional pay equity settlements for further workforces are expected under the Government’s improved pay equity regime. In fact, the Government is so certain that there will be future pay equity settlements that we have set aside large amounts of funding for them in the Budget. We fully expect other women-dominated workforces to be getting pay-equity driven pay rises in future.

Changes aren’t ending pay equity, they are changing the legislation to make it more reasonable.

It’s clear people are choosing to weaponise the concept of pay equity by conflating it with all number of other issues, including those that should be dealt with through standard pay negotiations.

Unlike equal pay which compares men and women doing the same job, pay equity is about recognising and correcting for the fact that some female-dominated workforces have been historically underpaid and undervalued due to sex-based discrimination. Our Government supports that principle.

The tricky bit is how to define in law what jobs are of ‘equal value’ and how we work out which aspects of pay are down to sex-discrimination and what are the result of other market-based factors.

The first pay-equity claim was proved in the Supreme Court by Kristine Bartlett on behalf of thousands of care and support workers. In response, the last National Government delivered the first ever pay-equity settlement in New Zealand. It then moved quickly to design a clear legal regime so that other claims could be progressed without workers having to resort to the courts.

In 2020, a full three years later, Labour finally got around to putting its own, very loose, regime into law. Unfortunately, like almost everything Labour got its hands on, the system got way out of whack and became completely unaffordable; admin workers were being compared with civil engineers; social workers were being compared with detectives; and librarians were being compared with fisheries officers. Multiple employers were being joined to claims and some had dozens of very different jobs in scope.

Such comparators are ridiculously comparing apples with oranges.

What started as a pay equity regime had become a Trojan Horse for a multi-billion dollar grievance industry driven by public sector unions. It had departed a very long way from issues of sex-discrimination.

It has also imposed pay rises on both the public and private sector which aren’t always sustainable.

What the Government did last week was put in law a much more workable pay equity regime that focuses squarely on the actual issue of sex-based discrimination, setting out a transparent process through which employers and employees can negotiate the question of equal value.

The changes will save the government and other employers money.

Yes, these changes mean the Government has been able to unwind a blow-out in costs that Treasury had been forecasting. The simple fact is that Labour’s broken regime had a hidden, exploding and ultimately unaffordable price tag. Sticking with it would have meant large new taxes, reckless amounts of borrowing or significant spending cuts elsewhere.

Yet another examples of Labour’s very expensive legacy.

Yes, fixing Labour’s flawed regime has released billions of dollars that we can now invest in this and future Budgets. Yes, that will mean there is more funding available for things like cancer drugs, new schools, new hospitals and other much needed initiatives. Yes, that means our Government won’t have to tax and borrow even more to balance the Budget. You can call that ‘girl-math’, I call it facing-up to financial reality.

I’m a feminist, I wear the badge proudly and I’ve upheld those values throughout our Cabinet’s consideration of pay equity issues. I’m up for a debate on how to define sex-based discrimination, but I’m not up for misleading rhetoric and seeing women MPs having their gender weaponised against them and their views dismissed. All our daughters deserve better.

The public deserves better too.

Media distrust is fed by lack of balanced analysis explaining facts rather than exploiting emotion.

Workforces in which women are, and traditionally have been, the majority have generally had lower pay rates than those in which men are the majority.

Changing that is neither easy nor inexpensive and will only be sustainable if changes are based on what is both reasonable and affordable. Achieving that will be much more likely with the changes the government has made than it was with Labour’s unaffordable scheme.

As for using the c word, the writer let emotion cloud her judgement, and where was the subeditor who ought to have cut it?

Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.