Why carers and prison officers should be paid the same
New Zealand is (again...) showing the world how it's done...
For over 24 years Kristine Bartlett had worked as an age-old carer on Te Ika-a-Māui, the north Island of New Zealand.
The year was 2011 and she loved her job. But she was earning just above minimum wage. The male gardeners cutting the grass outside the care homes were routinely paid more than the women who worked inside. Why?
Kristine Bartlett filed a claim with the Employment Relations Authority arguing she was not receiving equal pay as per the Equal Pay Act of 1972.
Her employer was surprised: What was Kristine talking about? They paid their four male caregivers EXACTLY the same as their 106 female caregivers. How could that not be “equal pay”?
Kristine Bartlett argued this was beside the point.
Caring for elderly people was just as demanding as better-paid jobs mostly performed by men. These were the jobs her work should be compared to. Why was she, for example, paid less than a prison officer!?
Both carers and correction officers deal with “challenging behaviours including sexual behaviours and/or aggression” her union argued. For the prison guards these risks are reflected in the size of their salary, for the carers it’s not.
After 5 years, 3 court cases and 2 appeals Kristine Bartlett won the argument and it led to significant pay increases for more than 55 000 workers. It also sparked a wave of new claims from other female-dominated occupations: school support staff, midwives and social workers. Last year it made Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern amend the law.
Now, this is an economic story about “skills” and what we define as “skills”.
In the factories in the 1800s male workers tended to be described in terms of their “skills”. Women workers on the other hand were described in terms of “speed” and “accuracy”. Does this sound familiar to you?
The tasks women excelled at were presented as an extension of their female nature. This is THE big trap for women: if what you do is basically an extension of your biological nature – then why should you be paid well for it? Women simply can’t help themselves from weaving with quick fingers, looking after the elderly or being good at relationship-building at the office. That’s just what women do!
However the logic behind this reasoning is actually crazy. COME ON! If a woman is good at something that’s suddenly proof of why she should be paid LESS…
That’s however how we tend to think about care. We see women come into these jobs and do them well without a great deal of formal training. Then we take that as proof that the jobs are ‘low skilled’ and therefore shouldn’t be well remunerated.
This was the thinking Kristine Bartlett challenged.
But there’s also something else going on here: this story is a lesson in inclusion.
If feminism is dominated by white, university-educated women it’s only natural that the discussion focuses on the old principle: “equal pay for the same job”. Which it did for a very long time (before culminating in Sheryl Sandberg telling us all to “Lean In”).
If you are fighting for the right to work alongside men at law firms, hedge funds and universities you naturally want to make sure you are paid the same as the man sitting next to you. “Equal pay for the same job” can achieve this. The problem is that it hardly does anything for low-wage women in pink-collar jobs. They are often not working alongside any men at all, so there is nothing to compare their salaries to.
Unless of course… you bring in the prison officers!
Happy Thursday!
Katrine
PS. My forthcoming book now has a cover! VERY EXCITING. What do you think?
NOTES
New Zealand’s Equal Pay Amendment Act 2020
Combating the Undervaluation of Women’s Work: Why New Zealand Should Have Pay Equity Legislation, dissertation by Lauren Zwi
Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization by professor Michael McCann (about the issue in a US context)