Mike's Minute: Reform for the Pay Equity Act is good

Kristine Bartlett was, to many, a hero. 

She was a very likeable woman. She was a caregiver who argued her work was undervalued and she deserved more. 

The Labour Party who love “feels” and are not exactly unfamiliar with the unions leapt all over it and the Equal Pay Act 2022 was born. 

The downside was how to compare this so-called "underpaid work" like in nursing homes, where women dominate and a comparable profession dominated by men. 

They decided at the time comparing mechanics to rest home workers made sense, even though it didn’t, and doesn’t. 

That's why Brooke van Velden has announced pay equity is going to be, quite rightly, tipped up and sorted out. 

Now, whether you can sort it out sensibly is your next issue. 

Under current law the job must be performed by at least 60% of the same sex. That will rise to 70%. 

On grounds that lead you to believe that the work is historically and currently undervalued you will need evidence, and they are looking at comparators. That's your apples and oranges, or rest home workers and mechanics. 

The trouble with the Bartlett issue was twofold. 

1) Part of the argument was if you paid people more you would recruit more easily. Turns out that’s wrong as after huge pay rises rest home gaps are still a disaster 

2) The bill to reach this so-called equity was $2b. That's a lot of money then and a lot of money now. 

I wish van Velden well. But the simple truth is the moment you try to engineer something, you tend to strike trouble. 

Work is worth what work is worth, no matter who does it. 

Some work pays more than other work. It's based on demand, or skills, or sales and revenue, or scarcity, or demand, or a combination of them. 

Given no one makes anyone work in any given area, you strike extraordinary complexity in trying to gerrymander it. 

It also singles out just one element of work —money— as being the sole reason for work. Which it isn't. 

What we have doesn’t work, hasn’t solved anything and was done for poor reasons. 

So reform is good. But reform to what is a bigger trick than they may realise. 

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