Pay gaps for Māori, Pasifika, other ethnicities, and gender exist in our workplaces. The legacy of this discrimination needs to be addressed now
Opinion: Another Downton Abbey movie is coming. Two hours of escaping to a world of gorgeous dresses and pearls.
And those romanticised kitchen scenes as the servants happily gossip.
I wouldn't be so happy in my work with the hours they had to pull, every day, all day.
If it weren’t for great leadership two centuries ago many of us might still have to work like that. New Zealand workers were among the first in the world in 1840 to claim the right to an eight-hour day.
It was thanks to the work of the Wellington carpenter Samuel Parnell. He organised his fellow workers to only work eight hours a day, threatening to chuck anyone in the harbour who didn’t get with the programme.
We can easily forget that if those workers were women they would have been paid “women’s wages” – a lower rate than men for the same work.
Women were also taxed at a higher rate.
It was only in 1960 that the practice of women’s pay rates were outlawed in the public service.
In 1972 it was outlawed for employees in all sectors and finally there were equal tax rates for men and women.
But the legacy remains.
Some of us work long hours for little pay. Some of us are paid less than others for the same work, even though it is illegal. Work that is predominately done by women – such as caring for others – is not valued in a monetary sense.
This matters even more in our inflation-riddled times when every cent counts.
We need leaders such as Parnell. We need their leadership backed by laws to rid our labour market of its centuries’ old prejudices.
There is a glimmer of hope.
About 50 business leaders are set to publicly report their pay gaps on the Mind the Gap registry.
In doing so, they are being transparent about pay gaps. They are committing to addressing their gaps. They are collectively saying that this is what modern business is – transparent, authentic, fair, and open to addressing problems.
Something to celebrate.
Pay gaps for Māori, Pasifika, other ethnicities, and gender exist in our workplaces. Pay gaps affect people, especially those who can least afford to be. It’s about how many bottles of milk and loaves of bread we can buy each week. How we cover the rent (or not).
Now is the time for the Government to get in behind these business leaders and reinforce their leadership in law. Pay gap reporting law is a simple, low-cost, and effective way of removing biases in our workplaces. Centuries’ old biases from the servant quarters of the landed gentry that need to be eradicated now.
