Source: PSA
The Public Service Association Te Pūkenga Here Tikanga Mahi says the Ministry of Education’s proposal to disestablish its specialised pay equity team is yet another betrayal of women who need pay equity and goes to show how unworkable the current Government’s changes are.
The Ministry of Education proposal would disestablish 28 roles, citing the Government’s changes to pay equity legislation in May and what it describes as “evolving government priorities.”
“By disbanding the very team whose job it is to identify and fix this discrimination, the Government is sending a clear message that contrary to its assurances, addressing gender pay discrimination is simply not possible in New Zealand.
The PSA is calling on the Government to abandon the proposal and genuinely commit to ending gender-based pay under-valuation of work done by women.
“The Ministry’s pay equity team are specialist professionals with important expertise in supporting New Zealand women to resolve pay equity claims. The Government’s new unworkable pay equity regime has prohibited the workers covered by those cancelled claims from re-raising their claims and the direct impact on the pay equity team is they can no longer do their job.”
The pay equity team was actively working on critical claims affecting thousands of education workers, including specialist residential school workers represented by the PSA, teachers represented by NZEI and PPTA, and Ministry of Education employees in three separate NZEI claims.
“These cases represented genuine instances where predominantly female workforces have been systematically undervalued and underpaid compared to male-dominated roles of equivalent skill and responsibility.
“Gender-based under valuation doesn’t vanish simply because the Government has stripped away workers’ legal rights to pursue pay equity claims,” PSA national secretary Fitzsimons said. “The inequities that drove these claims remain as urgent today as they were before this Government changed the law.
“Specialist residential school workers, teachers, and Ministry employees are still doing the same valuable work they were before, and they still deserve fair pay that reflects the true value of their contributions. The Government should be working to resolve these inequities, not pretending they don’t exist by dismantling the teams designed to address them.”
