New Zealand first tackled pay equity in female-dominated jobs 50 years ago.
Did you know? New Zealand first tackled pay equity in female-dominated jobs 50 years ago, by imagining what a man would be paid to do the same work.
In 1973, unionist Graham Kelly QSO (my father-in-law) became secretary of the Wellington Shop Employees' Union and immediately faced a challenge: employers were creating new, lower-paid job classifications to defeat the intention of the Equal Pay Act 1972.
Together with renowned women's advocate Sonja Davies ONZ JP, Kelly fought for retail workers, a sector where women dominated the workforce.
The union wanted to adopt the higher and much longer male pay scales based on years of service for female workers, while employers tried to introduce categories of work at lower rates instead of bringing women's wages up to match men's.
In the case of meat packers in supermarkets where only women undertook this work, their solution was the revolutionary "notional male rate", a benchmark requiring employers to pay women what they would pay a man "doing the same or a substantially similar job", even when no such man existed in that workplace.
What followed was a 14-month struggle with numerous short-term strikes across Wellington, Hutt Valley and Kapiti Coast. Eventually, Kelly's persistence paid off: the notional male rate was adopted for meat packers, establishing that value shouldn't depend on which gender traditionally performs the work.
Some 40 years later, this same principle underpinned Kristine Bartlett's landmark case against TerraNova, which ultimately raised wages for 55,000 care workers in 2017, validating Kelly's pioneering work decades earlier.
As we face recent changes to our pay equity laws that once again limit wage comparisons to men in the same workplace, it's worth remembering: the structural devaluation of women's work is not new, and neither are the solutions we've already proven can work.
You can read more on this topic in Graham's book "Keeping the Party in Tune: How Politics and Music Shaped My Life"
Image of Sonja Davies and Graham Kelly.
