The Main Character in Pay Equity
Working people are a main character in politics. Not just a group stuff happens to, but people capable of making things happen.
My 3-year-old daughter’s early childhood teacher knows each child by name. She greets everyone, big and small, at the entrance each morning. Even the tone and volume of her voice somehow meets every child exactly as they are. Gentler for the ones who find drop-offs hard. Energetic and robust for my girl. She wears handmade silver jewelry and a wide smile.
This particular Friday, she approaches me, brows furrowed. She knows I work a union. She’s fuming, and my line of work is the ramp that allows her to launch right in. She heard Brooke Van Velden on the radio, peddling outrage about the word cunt. The whole spectacle around the C-word seems, in its pure cynicism, to hit the precise nerve that makes swearing irresistible.
Our government just surgically butchered the Equal Pay Act by removing every single last tooth from pay equity. She tells me this corroborated something she’s felt throughout her decades of teaching: a sense of not being valued. Something about the “urgency” of these changes brought it into sharp focus—like a magnifying glass held over tinder, catching the sun’s rays at just the right angle.
Over six years, I’ve listened to thousands in early childhood talk about their jobs: “I love teaching; I’ve been doing this for 25 years and my 18-year-old son earns more; I wish I had eight arms so I could hold them all; I want to do what I’m qualified to do, not just crowd control; The children deserve better; Politicians should come and do what we do for a day; They wouldn’t; They couldn’t; If only they cared how important it was to get it right for children in their first 1,000 days.”
Organisers can uncover anger with the right questions, but contrary to what the National Party claims, unions can't manufacture it out of nothing. The kind of people working in jobs covered by pay equity claims don’t all follow politics, but they’ve got political acumen—bullshit detectors and a healthy cynicism about men in suits. No amount of spin about how pay equity is “still here” will disorient them.
The people—mainly women—impacted by the 33 pay equity claims extinguished overnight have, at their fingertips, a unique power to instigate a political reckoning. I know because I know them. I’ve worked alongside some of the women, men, and non-binary people who got involved in their claims.
There’s something the process does. Some of my colleagues argue it’s unique to pay equity. I’ve seen people changed by other processes of struggle too. But pay equity seems to combine a bunch of ingredients that transform people—taking those who were already leaders in their jobs and uncovering a confidence to be ambitious, not for themselves, but for others.
The ingredients are the things that give unions a heartbeat. It’s not complicated stuff. Opportunities for regular people to come together and work on a shared mission. Time and space is a luxury to many of these women—between kids, grandkids, ailing parents, and relentless economic pressure. Any time we get to be with people who share our values and challenges, we are able, through the mirror of close others, to reflect on the value of what we contribute. We raise our expectations.
Equally important, in a world where the collective changes most working people experience are losses—natural disasters, restructures, and redundancies—pay equity was a rare place where the change working people got was good. They won. They returned to workplaces acknowledged as the people who slogged for years to get everyone life-changing bumps in pay and recognition.
For every pay equity leader involved in a claim, there are thousands more doing their jobs with the knowledge they belonged to a group who’d recently won claims or had them well underway. All these people know how to get shit done without enough time or resources. Right now, there’s a rural midwife somewhere who’s been awake all night guiding a mum and baby through the life-and-death dance of childbirth. She did this after driving out into the wops armed with a satellite phone. Birth is undeterred by cyclones and power cuts.
These are the people we trust with our beloved babies and nans. They run our schools, hospitals, and libraries. They are everywhere we still get to congregate together. National’s PR professionals can’t outsmart them. And no amount of sponsored reels of a shiny-headed Luxon “going for growth” can compete with their intimate reach into our lives. Thousands of aunties embedded in communities are the OG viral marketing. Unlike politicians, our communities actually believe them.
Saving money is the explicit bit of the pay equity changes. The government isn’t cheap with everyone though. They freely give our money to private schools or shitty multinational school lunch providers who skim profit off hungry kids. They aren’t cheap with the publicly funded early childhood companies David Seymour conspired with to remove “expensive” safety measures and pay protections for relief teachers.
Brooke Van Velden once said something like, “a human life came to be valued too much during Covid.” She justified the recent changes to pay equity by saying claims were getting “distorted” and being used so that sectors could collectively bargain. They were lifting conditions for large groups of workers, and people were thinking about what they had in common with their colleagues. Why prefer workers divided, weak and competing amongst themselves?
We have a government who’d rather unions went away. More for workers equals less for their ultra-wealthy donors. The axe they took to pay equity was more than a budget cut—it was an axe to a mechanism that promoted solidarity between workers across their claims. But we have a saying: sometimes, if it’s too brazen, a bosses’ attack can organise workers better than the union.
The government just set in motion the biggest round of collective bargaining the country has ever seen. Only an out-of-touch leader—one that doesn’t actually move in circles with these workers—would gamble their power on a wilful underestimation of what 350,000 of them are capable of. In a country where that’s nearly 1 in 10 voters, and a record-low number of women voted National in the last election, you’d think twice.
Last month, pay equity leaders’ interests lay across 33 distinct claims, each on a journey around their very particular work. Today, nearly 10% of voters share a common material interest. At the Budget Pay Equity rally I ask a woman why she’s there: “My dad is in a hospice. I see what care workers do. Most of my mates are care and support workers too.” Unprompted, she adds, “I’m a security guard and this government fucked us out of fair pay too. They have to go.”
I look around at the crowd. There are women of all ages. Plenty of men too. A group of nurses are off back to work in the midst of a healthcare crisis we all know they are not the cause of, but the cure to. You’d be foolish to underestimate any one group of these skilled claimants and what they’re capable of. But together—with time to strategise and some tools to move others—you’d be a real egg to take on every single one of those groups in one swoop.
The sheer numbers and sway of those impacted—joined up with everyone else this government has shafted—is something there’s no blue billboard big enough to cover up. Next election, hundreds of thousands will vote on a bad-faith pay offer. It’s easy for a CEO-type in public office to forget who ultimately employs them. A government, and every single one of its ministers, can be replaced. Reviewing the evidence, there are a few people we’re sure are paid more than they’re worth. And it’s not the librarians.
Working people are a main character in politics. Not just a group stuff happens to, but people capable of making things happen. An obvious fact, really—although one you’ll seldom recognise the clues of unless you train yourself to. Perhaps next year, pay equity leaders will train us all to recognise not only their work, but their power– as it really is.
