Sharing stories for equal pay push
Urgent pressure is being placed on the Government to make employers open up their pay scales and progression opportunities to ensure women are not being paid or promoted less than their male counterparts.
The Human Rights Commission yesterday launched a Pay Transparency campaign, asking for the Government to urgently address pay transparency in the workplace to close the gender pay gap and set up an independent body to ensure transparency in reporting about pay equity.
The HRC is also collecting signatures for a petition calling on the Government to include pay transparency in law. So far more than 1500 people have signed.
As part of the campaign four women have shared how they have missed out on promotions or been made to work harder for it because of gender, colour or ethnicity.
Nia Bartley, a Wellington accountant at Capital and Coast District Health Board, said as a Pacific woman it was wrong she had to make extra effort and jump through more hoops than others.
Auckland social worker Lauren Bartley said social workers, most of whom were women, were almost conditioned to think that they did their jobs for the love of it and not for the pay.
“Because it’s a femaledominated workforce, it has been underpaid forever,” she said. “As women, as social workers, we shouldn’t be settling for that.”
Bartley, who became a social worker two years ago, said she noticed those starting their careers with the same degrees at the same time had all started on different levels of pay and said having transparent pay scales would address this.
The aim of having pay transparency would ensure people in similar or comparable roles are all being paid fairly. It would also aid employees with enough information to make a pay equity claim against employers, says the HRC.
Christchurch woman Nancy McShane said pay transparency would make it much easier to prove people were being paid unfairly. “Without pay transparency, it is sort of like fighting fog.”
Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Saunoamaali’i Karanina Sumeo said New Zealand needed pay transparency because workers, especially Ma¯ ori, Pacific and Asian women, were being undervalued and underpaid in the workplace.
“Many are parents, carers or the main income earners for their households.
“We need to stop talking about fairness and dignity and just get on with it.”
The HRC has partnered with a range of organisations to lobby the Government for equal pay.