This govt does not value women;pay equity

[SueDonim]

As ACT have said, the Pay Equity Act was noble in its intention but completely missed the mark. Scrapping it does not equal "wanting to be able to pay women less".

As reported, under the act, librarians were equated to fisheries officers with the difference in pay decided therefore to be due to gender discrimination.  Whether librarians should be paid more, less or the same as fisheries officers is a debate you can have if you feel like it, but claiming that librarians are paid less "because it's predominantly a female occupation" is completely baseless.

THIS.

Comments about pay equity seem to always focus on librarians. For most people "the librarian" is the library assistant they see at the circulation desk when they get their books out. They do not always see and rarely have any understanding of the professional librarians behind the scenes. Their basic job qualification these days is a degree of choice followed by a Master of Library and Information Science. Most professional positions require LIANZA registration which in itself requires ongoing evidence of professional development. And all of that is is the generalist path. Special librarians then need to know and understand their individual fields - eg I once heard it said that a medical librarian's knowledge is a similar level to a second year house officer. It's not really that simple, but to understand the resources they are required to provide and manage and/or do accurate literature searches they need to understand the subject. Then there are reference and cataloguing librarians who again need to understand the subject matter of the material they are working with in order to access the correct resources appropriately. Etc. An oversimplification is to say that they need to know everything as they never know what the next question is going to be.

Coming back to the pay equity issue, the common theme of most of the occupations that are considered to be under-paid because the workers are women are in fact occupations where the majority of jobs are in the public sector. And I think that that is the reason they are low-paid and that is the hurdle to improvement. In my 40+ year career in both local body and government, we certainly always "knew" that we were way behind our colleagues who worked for businesses that could have more flexibility in what they chose to pay valued staff. In the public sector, you just had to accept your lot. When you are responsible for setting and spending budgets, you understand that for the staff budget to increase, the operating budget has to decrease and your awareness of responsibility to your organisation, customers and the tax/ratepayers mean that you do your best to provide the right service. And you stay in the job even though you know you could earn more elsewhere.

I did see a recent article that indicated the government sector has come up in relation to the private sector, so maybe it is starting to happen. And if that is the case, then scrapping the Pay Equity Act may have been exactly the right thing to do. There was no point in continuing something that was just lining the pockets of lawyers instead of providing real benefit to those it was supposed to be supporting.

It's another example of how our news media let us down so badly in reporting. They grab the "woe is me" story and then "balance" that with  a couple of superficial paragraphs about the counter argument. We should be getting proper and clear explanation of what is actually going on, and a variety of comment from expert laymen so that people aren't left thinking that everyone is hard done by by whatever the current action is. The reporters need to show a lot more knowledge and understanding of what they are reporting (maybe they should make more use of their librarians!). 

We saw how badly the Treaty Bill was misunderstood and how the public were incited into mass action against it, and a similar thing happened to the withdrawal of the Pay Equity Act. People need to take a step back, put themselves into the shoes of [whoever] is presenting [whatever] and figure out what's really going on. And start listening to those who actually understand the issues and are trying to right the wrongs and make things better for those who need it. Instead of just blindly following the media circus.