Government hid pay equity plans for months

It’s commercially sensitive, they say, while benefitting from keeping it so

If the decision to disenfranchise tens of thousands of women and men in many of New Zealand’s most important professions seemed hasty or rushed to you at all, don’t worry — it wasn’t! The government just didn’t think it was important for you to know about it.

As far back as December, Cabinet have been discussing the massive expense they’ve been fully aware of but haven’t wanted to pay. It was included in the forecasts, but the precise numbers were not released to the public, and now we have to all pretend to be surprised it’s so incredibly expensive because Nicola Willis doesn’t want to have to bother to find the money.

“Once we had made the decision that we would amend the act, we were aware that there were significant risks that if that information entered the public domain, then that could affect bargaining behaviour and legal behaviour,” Willis said. “So we wanted to make sure that we progressed it rapidly.

“For a number of months it was becoming clear to me that the way the pay equity scheme had developed had departed from its original, I think, very important intent, which was to correct for gender-based discrimination.

“That is a very important goal. But it had become clear that other market-based factors had entered bargaining, that the incentives on some of the parties in those claims weren’t fully aligned, that the costs had escalated well beyond what people had originally envisaged, and it was clear that those issues would require addressing in some way.”

Because of this, no regulatory impact statement was ever produced.

I just love the way this government always have such crystal clarity on what exactly previous governments (that they are often not even part of) meant when they passed legislation that is now costing more money than they can afford with their tax cuts, or when something is ideologically opposed by the far right, to whom National are but puppets. Don’t you?

An intelligent person might conclude that if the figure is so very high, that is only because of how extreme gendered underpay has been for decades. Those billions of dollars that the government doesn’t want to pay represent so many more billions that the New Zealand government didn’t pay to women, and therefore benefitted from unfairly because they didn’t want to pay workers what they were worth — only what society thought they were worth. And that worth was of course a fraction of the value of a man.

Willis also expressed surprise that she would have to find the money for a clause that was always included in the Act, with costings that were always clearly indicated: the rectification not just of public servants paid directly by the public purse, but other workers funded by the government as well.

“Our view was that the taxpayer has an obligation where the government employs someone that if they have discriminated against them, then yes, the government should pay for the settlement of that claim, but where it came to providers in the private sector, we believed the issues were more nuanced, and we were also concerned that, of course, the Government wasn’t at that bargaining table, so we weren’t in a position to test the claims.”

That change to the regulatory framework occurred all the way back in April last year.

“I was advised that one of the factors that had led to an escalation in those costs was a decision by the previous Cabinet that they would indicate that they would fully meet the costs of claims made by non-government employers, where those employers were government-funded.

“And the impact of that was that it affected the bargaining approach of those employers, because essentially, they knew the Government was paying the cheque,” Willis said.

So Willis expects private employers to meet the costs of historic government underpay through collective bargaining around future contracts — and has shifted this expectation onto them at a time when the government will be providing few funding increases due to the tight austerity budget Willie has implemented.

So where is this magic money appearing from?

It seems unlikely private employers will be unable to pay the increased costs of women’s-industry wages without the government coming to the table. This gives these employers a different sort of bargaining power, one of accidental obfuscation, and it also necessarily brings the government into the conversation at every step of the process, just as Willis wanted, even though they’ve already decided they’ll be wriggling out of paying any of these costs if at all possible.

Now the government are sat at the table, and now they’ve raised the test for claims, they can much more easily stamp out accusations of historic underpay that they might have to foot the bill for.

I wonder if the government or their private funded employers have been bargaining with these industry sectors in bad faith while this planned legislation was being secretly shepherded through Parliament. It seems likely.

Quite apart from the wasted months, wages, and legal costs various groups have spent fighting for a dead deal, the damage this will do to the bargaining position of employee collectives cannot be understated.

But of course, that was always the goal.

It’s a very cost-efficient decision for the government. Finally David Seymour’s suggestion we slash the minor ministries we have makes sense — we’re not going to need a Minister for Women once it’s revealed to them just how hard this government is working against them! Nicola Grigg probably won’t be able to get much done after this. And the protests scheduled outside her office are a bit unseemly.

Better do away with it, quick sharp! And while they’re there, they can probably get rid of the rest of the ministries now made up mostly of angry people who’ve been cut off from previously-guaranteed government support: the disabled, Maori, the Arts community, children in poverty… really, the possibilities are limitless.

Their cuts are only constrained by how obviously evil they’re willing to appear.

No wonder we pay these guys so well. They’re just so damned good at their jobs.