Pay equity hopes dashed
Learning assistants’ pay equity battle looks headed for court as hopes fade for groundbreaking mediated settlement.
It’s good to abandon your cynical side once in a while and feel real excitement, hope and trust. A year ago I sat in a Wellington bar with a group of women who were feeling all of those things.
These education support workers were to be the first ever group to enter pay equity mediation talks under a brand new system.
It had been less than a year since New Zealander of the Year 2018 Kristine Bartlett had won her landmark High Court case for rest home care workers. The National Government was facing hundreds of similar court actions, and the Bartlett case had set a precedent.
Calling a pause and trying to find middle ground made sense. Unions and the Government agreed to a new mediation system based on the principles recommended by a Joint Working Group.
In the bar that April night, the workers had a sense of history about to be made. Finally there was a process to follow that would consider all the attributes that had been so long overlooked – like social and communication skills, taking responsibility for the wellbeing of others, emotional effort, cultural knowledge and sensitivity.
I don’t want to sound overly dramatic – but all that hope and trust? That’s ashes now. Once again, just like Bartlett, it looks like women will be heading to the Employment Court to battle over fair pay.
The mediation turned into a traditional negotiation. And the negotiation has turned into gridlock. First the Ministry of Education dragged the chain, twice asking for extensions. Then the union threatened to take the dispute to court.
And yet these education support workers fit exactly within the principles on which mediation was based. These are people – mostly women – working in schools and early childhood education centres with children who face tough challenges, either physical, developmental or emotional. The workers earn close to minimum wage when they enter the job fully trained, and no matter how much experience they gather or how many years they work, the most they can earn is $19.87 an hour. All of those skills listed above? These women use those skills in every interaction with every vulnerable child they care for.
Jacoline Brink is one of them; she’s been in the job for six years, and she loves it.
She gives me a recent example, a child with hearing loss and almost no speech. Jacoline had to learn basic sign language and complex communications skills to help direct the child’s play. She had to analyse every sound made inside and outside the childcare centre, and whether the child could hear and respond to it too. She journalled every new word and sentence the child learned.
‘‘It was a joy to see her grow and develop into a young girl whose vocabulary grew, and her social skills. She could talk to us in little sentences by the age of 5 when she left for school.’’
She says on any given day, there might be five or six under-5s in a pre-school session with severe behavioural issues. It’s not easy work; a child will often ‘‘lash out by swearing, hitting, kicking, biting or throwing objects at me or other children.’’ Jacoline’s job is to help keep everyone safe, and work with the teachers as a team to help the child learn and progress.
These are some of our society’s most caring people. We assume they do it ‘‘for the love of it’’ and while most of them do love their work, that assumption is an asinine fantasy – they do it because they have to work, just like the rest of us do, to feed and clothe their own families.
Jacoline and her husband are keen to get into their own house, but when they fronted up to a mortgage broker, Jacoline was told ‘‘you need to go and get a real job’’.
‘‘For me it is a real job,’’ she says. ‘‘I’m already on the highest pay available and I’ve been here for six years. There are people who’ve been doing it for 20 years who’re on the same rate.’’
The compromise that stopped the swell of court cases last year was supposed to herald a new dawn for gender pay equality. It has failed.
So, what now?
When I walked alongside these women to the start of their mediation last April, I thought the ministry would step up too.
Deputy secretary of education Zoe Griffiths says the ministry values all its support workers and has proposed a three-step pay scale to address the gender equity disparities. The largest increases would go to the lowestpaid workers; a fourth step could recognise experienced and skilled senior workers with pay rises, too.
‘‘Of course everyone would like these issues to be resolved quickly, but it is not a matter of one size fits all,’’ Griffiths says. ‘‘We and the NZEI have been breaking new ground with the new pay equity principles, so it is not surprising that it is taking longer than the initial three months we had hoped.’’
If the new Government would like to keep its ministries out of the Employment Court, it should look back a decade and steal a trick from Helen Clark’s final term in office.
Back then, the Department of Labour had a Pay Equity Unit to gather expert advice on the proper implementation of the Equal Pay Act 1972. The unit developed an analytical tool to do away with the stereotypes of the usual market models, and evaluate the ‘‘invisible’’ skills women have.
When National came to power in 2008 it scrapped the unit, and notified the unions in writing that pay equity would no longer be discussed. And now here we are, a decade on, with more Kristine Bartletts filing for action in the Employment Court.
Fair pay for a large slice of the population will cost, but the benefits are clear too. It would be a great tool for addressing child poverty.
If it wants to stay out of the courts and off the front pages for dragging its feet on fair pay, the Labour-led Government should get its skates on and reinstate the Pay Equity Unit, pronto.