Women’s work 'subsidising the economy’

Press, 9 February 1989, Page 10

Women’s work 'subsidising the economy’

Pay equity legislation was needed to prevent women’s work from subsidising the economy, said the chairwoman of the Government working group on pay equity, Ms Margaret Wilson, yesterday. The legislation was necessary to ensure that the gap between men and women’s pay was narrowed, she said. Ms Wilson was defending the group’s recommendation that there should be legislation providing for equal pay for work of equal value. While legislation was not the only answer to closing pay gaps, attitudes to the value of women’s work would not change without legislation, she said.

Ms Wilson said the Treasury’s comments that employers, if forced to pay the same to a man or a woman, would pay a man, only supported the argument that legislation was needed to prevent the market from discriminating against women. She said that in spite of the present equal pay legislation, women were still earning less than men and were largely concentrated in certain jobs which were poorly paid. Women were not paid less because of the market forces, but because

their work was undervalued. The fact they were low paid in such high numbers meant they were in effect subsidising the economy, Ms Wilson said.

The Prime Minister, Mr Lange, seemed to endorse this theory when he said on radio on Tuesday, that if pay equity cost the country S7SOM, as predicted by'the Treasury, it would be a damning indictment of New Zealand. Ms Wilson said that it was up to society in the end to decide what value it placed on different work and whether women’s work should continue to be undervalued. The director of the Canterbury Employers’ Association, Mr Colin Mclnnes, disagreed.

He said it was for the people doing the employing — the paying — to decide the values they placed on certain work, not society.

Employers were concerned that the notion of equal pay for work of equal value would encourage the rigid relativity that had already developed around the wage bargaining table, he said.

For New Zealand’s economy to recover, it needed a greater degree of flexibility for employers to meet their own circumstances.

“What is needed is a total reform of the wider industrial bargaining issues,” he said.