Pay freeze such a kick in the guts

Labour’s announcement that it’s freezing pay rates for public-sector workers is an astonishing kick in the guts for the heroes of the “team of five million”.

In case you missed it, the announcement is that nobody who is paid over $60,000 in a public-sector role should get a pay rise over the next three years.

Labour seems to be hoping voters will think this only applies to dusty Wellington bureaucrats. But that’s far from the truth.

The change will hit the managed isolation workers who have protected us at the border.

It will hit the nurses and doctors who were ready to risk their lives for us, who treated people with Covid-19, and are now rushing to vaccinate us all so that we can live normally again.

It means the teachers who did their best to keep teaching through lockdowns, and soothed children when they came back to the classrooms.

It means the cops who secured quarantine hotels, and patrolled the Auckland lockdown border, often in shocking weather, with no shelter or even bathrooms.

Thanks for your service, everyone please clap. But take a pay freeze, you greedy fat cats.

Then factor in inflation, which according to Reserve Bank records is on average just over two per cent per year, and the people who worked to protect us through a pandemic are actually going backwards. In real terms, those in the public service face a pay cut of about six per cent.

So the costs of living, particularly housing, utilities and food, will keep rising. And teachers, nurses and cops will be stuck with frozen pay packets.

New Zealand already faces a shortage of key workers, including nurses and teachers. Who would sign up to that career now?

If you want to address the widening gap between the haves and have nots, there are better ways than a blunt pay freeze for those earning more than $60,000.

You could introduce a new public-sector pay ratio, saying the chief executive can’t earn more than (for example) seven or eight times their lowest employee.

Or you could say the pay freeze kicks in for those earning over $150,000. Fair enough, those people are probably currently able to pay their bills.

You could even introduce a new top tax rate, so that you’re not just hammering the people in the public sector but rebalancing things in a wider manner. But that might lead to the revival of the old Taxinda nickname, and nobody wants that. How mean.

So what’s the rational thing to do, if your employer tells you you’re doing great, your work is really important, but you absolutely don’t deserve a pay rise? You leave.

Maybe our nurses and teachers should take up a new career as a house. I hear they earn a lot, and the Government is committed to keeping it that way.