A bit of bother over backpay

When you’re courting someone, it is not polite or politic to call them names. That’s a little advice that most people would understand. However, Workplace Relations Minister Iain LeesGalloway appears to have missed the memo.

His Labour-led coalition Government has been scrambling of late to kiss and make up with a business community lacking confidence in the relationship and also the labour of love that is the Government’s sweeping story for the future.

So it was probably a little unwise for Lees-Galloway to label his business community suitors ‘‘silly buggers’’. Unwise and perhaps also unfair.

Lees-Galloway was reacting to BusinessNZ concerns that the reward of backpay for those claiming equal pay for the same work – up to six years as allowed in the Equal Pay Act – will also be enshrined in legislation governing pay equity claims for work that is different but of ‘‘equal value’’.

Such a right does exists now, but only as a result of a court ruling that pay equity claims can be brought under the Equal Pay Act. It is not spelled out in legislation, and is not part of what could be called an established and accepted status quo.

The business lobby group believes the Government is going too far, operating in a ‘‘unilateral’’ way to enshrine backpay in successful pay equity claims. Its concerns are at least understandable.

Lees-Galloway admits the Government quite deliberately instructed the working group looking into pay equity to ignore considering backpay because it was deemed too controversial. ‘‘It is then over to the Government to make decisions about the slightly trickier issues,’’ he said.

He called it ‘‘showing leadership’’. BusinessNZ might argue he’s ‘‘playing silly buggers’’, given its concerns about the fairness of such a move and also its potential impact on businesses and the economy.

The idea that someone should be paid the same amount of money for doing the same job, regardless of gender, is one we can all understand, even without the greater scrutiny afforded the subject in the week we celebrate women’s right to vote.

But the arguments around pay equity, which involve different genders, different jobs, across different industries, are a great deal more subjective. It is not a comfortable, like-for-like comparison, and a business operating in good faith in one industry faces being punished by that perceived inequality in another, and that punishment magnified by the application of backpay.

It is quite natural and fair that an organisation representing business would be a concerned stakeholder in such a matter. It is also quite natural and fair that it would raise those concerns in public.

Lees-Galloway believes the prospect of backpay being awarded will inspire all parties to make greater, quicker progress on pay equity claims. He’s probably right, but it could also lead to businesses pushing to settle claims even if they might think them unreasonable. That would have a knock-on effect for other businesses and possibly the wider economy. It also indicates that Lees-Galloway has settled on his main dance partner and that business, once more, stands to be the jilted lover.