Moves on pay equity queried

Press, 18 March 1989, Page 6

Moves on pay equity queried

BY

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington

The Employers’ Federation rejects outright the belief that Government intervention through pay equity can ensure right pay relationships. The federation’s legal adviser, Mrs Barbara Burton, told the Wellington branch of the Institute of Personnel Management that those who were calling for legislation were doing so for a variety of reasons. „ ‘r One was a preference for centralised wage- , fixing, she said. The kind of imposed i pay increase proposed represented a move back to centralised wage-fixing and to a form of secondtier bargaining. While the Employers’ •’£ Federation accepted; that the place to 3 establish proper pay relationships was in the individual em- :' ploying organisation, it believed that this should be done through establishment bargaining, Mrs Burton said. Implementing equal pay in the 1970 s had seen the gap between men’s and women’s wages narrow but not close. The theory of comparable worth on which calls for pay equity were now based was a kind of conspiracy theory which considered women’s wages were low because women had tended to work in a narrow range of occupations, she said. It was argued that employers had kept women’s rates low because they under valued women’s skills and were, in fact, discriminating against women. It was not argued that discrimination accounted for the whole difference — only for part of it. Proponents of "comparable worth” for pay equity ignored the fact that there was nothing inherently discriminatory in different pay rates. Different pay rates were not evidence of discriminatory placement or of underpayment. It followed that the answer should not be pay equity but the encouragement of women into a wider range of occupations and industries — the equal opportunity solution, she said.