PAY EQUITY UPDATE:
LIANZA was very pleased to see the recent announcement on the successful pay equity claim for teacher aides. We got in touch with Clare Forrest at SLANZA to get an update on the pay equity claim for school librarians. Clare advises:
School librarians are part of school support staff and pay equity is being worked through group by group with the Ministry of Education and NZEI. It took three years for teachers aides to get to a resolution of their pay equity claim which took years of agitation and work by many people. The support staff groups have been separated because the roles they perform in schools are wide and varied. Teacher aides were first-off-the-rank because they are the largest group of support staff in schools, so more people would benefit from pay equity quicker.
Next to start their pay equity process are administration support staff. This is happening right now and in theory will be done quicker than the teacher aide process as it is now known what to do, so should be completed by next year, pandemics notwithstanding. Once that has been done and dusted school librarians get their turn. SLANZA is staying involved with the union and keeping up to date with where things are at.
When it is school librarians’ turn, there will be SLANZA members who will be trained to become interviewers, and who will then be part of the process of finding out the range of skills involved in being a school librarian. Many interviews will be conducted by teams of Ministry of Education people and NZEI staff and school librarians, so a clear picture of all of the roles and skills of school librarians is gained and then male comparator occupations are chosen, interviewed and remuneration compared. A complicated business indeed. But essential to be happening. I can only hope that the commitment to pay equity by this government can be carried on in the very different economic climate we find ourselves in.
Back in 2019 LIANZA made a submission to the Equal Pay Amendment Bill. At the oral
submission to the Select Committee in March 2019 LIANZA President Rachel Esson and Moira Fraser had this to say:
LIANZA is pleased to see this bill. As a femaledominated profession, we believe that this has adversely affected the salaries paid to everyone in our profession. We are a small profession,
6000 people work in libraries in NZ, about
1500 in professional roles which require library qualifications. About 85% of us are women. Most library employers are state sector organisations – public libraries, educational libraries – schools, polytechnics, universities, government libraries including the National Library. We contribute strongly to information and digital literacy, to NZ’S well-being and sustainability.
The gender inequality impact is widespread across the profession. The impact is greater for those in the lowest positions – library assistants. The worst impact is seen in the school library sector. Not only are salaries lower, but many of them also have poor terms and conditions e.g. no job security from one school year to the next and little opportunity for professional development. The evidence of poor pay and poor terms and conditions for people working in school libraries is not universal, but it is widespread, particularly in primary schools.
LIANZA has individual members and institutional members. We welcome the negotiated approach as this makes it much easier for LIANZA to have a voice in the process which fairly represents both our individual and institutional members. We see the role of LIANZA as evidence-gathering.
Trevor Mowbray (retired librarian of about 25 years) got in touch with the LIANZA Office after he had heard this submission with this to say:
Thinking about it I remembered something vaguely but could not connect it. With more thought I recalled something that I thought the NZ Library Association could take pride in. In 1972 the Equal Pay Act was passed. Between 1975 and 1978 I was a member of a PSA Advisory Panel that dealt with library employment. We prepared a case, based on ILO measuring techniques, that librarians were underpaid because of the large number of women employed; at that time women were usually not as well paid as men. We compared ourselves with other similar working groups and claimed that we were not paid according to the work we did. This claim was put to some tribunal which existed at that time to oversee working conditions (I cannot remember its exact title). The claim was successful and librarians’ rates of pay were improved. This was a long time ago but it echoes recent cases taken by care workers and others where women predominate. I thought the association might like to look in the archives and if it is true it could be held up as an example of pioneering work done on this topic.
Earlier this year Elizabeth Orr’s book, Pay Packets and Stone Walls, was published by Steele Roberts. It is a hybrid book – half memoir, half a history of pay equity – containing stories that have never previously been told and which all New Zealanders should know about. LIANZA
President Rachel Esson attended the launch in March and took the supplied photographs. We connected Trevor with Elizabeth Orr, who responded with an open letter for us to share:
Dear Librarians
Your national association’s magazine seems the appropriate place to publish the first public report of an historical incident related to your profession.
It is an old pay equity story, and Trevor Mowbray is the person we have to thank for drawing it to our attention after many years.
Some time – we don’t know how long – after the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1972, Dan Long, the PSA Secretary who had been very active in support of the campaign for the Act, arranged for several committees to be set up to discuss whether public service occupations might be able to take a claim under the new legislation.
If we members of the National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women (NACEW) who had originally recommended the new equal pay act to the Government had been asked if it covered public servants we would have said ‘no.’ We believed they had been enjoying equal pay from the early 1960s onwards. It was not till the 1990s that Noel Woods, former Secretary of Labour, confessed to me that there had been inadequacies in the implementation of the 1960 Act.
Librarians were one group that established a committee. By that time the majority of librarians were women, and the profession had a problem over its relatively low salaries because Australian libraries were recruiting in New Zealand.
According to Trevor Mowbray the committee developed a true pay equity claim, comparing the skills of librarians to those of male dominated professions, They then submitted the claim to the Public Service Tribunal, which granted a salary increase.
Tribunal approval is one of the most interesting features of the story. My memoir, Pay Packets and Stone Walls, reveals that in the 1970s the judges of the Arbitration Court did not like the Equal Pay Act 1972. Its requirements contradicted some of those of the industrial relations system they were used to.
They decided they would render the new Act inoperable, and that is what they did. They ruled in favour of only two of the cases put before their court system, and both of those compared the skills and pay rates of women and men doing the same job. By 1980 the 1972 Act was inoperable, and over 30 years were to pass before the next successful pay equity case – the 2017 care and support workers case.
So librarians can surely now take a bow over that early pay equity victory. And I believe the PSA and Dan Long deserve thanks for supporting the claim, and the Public Service Tribunal for accepting it. And of course Trevor Mowbray for reminding us of it.
Unfortunately I did not recognise its significance until my publisher had sent off my manuscript to the printer. If Pay Packets is popular and a second edition is justified, I will include the story of the librarians’ claim. In the meantime I have sent a copy of this statement to Dr. Megan Cook, New Zealand’s leading pay equity historian.
With my congratulations, Elizabeth Orr