Redressing gendered undervaluation in New Zealand aged care: Institutions, activism and coalitions

Abstract

This article explores the apparent conundrum of how, with minimal employment standards and limited equal pay laws, New Zealand managed to significantly redress the gendered undervaluation of low-paid aged care work. To draw out the pathways to these reforms, we focus on the long-term strategic coalitions that underpinned them. We examine, in particular, the activism of a diverse range of policy actors – unions, employers, industrial and human rights bodies and civil society groups, which together have worked to ‘undo’ the limitations of equal pay and employment regulation. Our findings point to the benefits of strategic collaboration between policy actors in New Zealand and an approach which recognises the intersection of unequal pay with other gendered dimensions of disadvantage in aged care work. Different strategies used over time by diverse actors helped them overcome inadequate industrial and equal pay infrastructure to realise meaningful increases in hourly rates of pay, buttressed by improved working time arrangements and provision for career progression. We conclude by highlighting some lessons for institutional and policy actors in other national settings drawn from the New Zealand collaborative approach to equal pay in care work.

Gender Inequality, Bargaining, and Pay in Care Services in the United States

“…Moving more women into business services would reduce the gender pay gap but not necessarily reduce care services wage penalties, which affect men as well as women. In New Zealand, strategic community-union coalitions focused on issues of pay equity won significant, publicly funded wage increases for frontline elder care workers in 2017 (Charlesworth and Heap 2020). In the United States, the Biden administration proposed administrative wage increases for many childcare and eldercare employees in its Build Back Better plan.…”

Aged care employment and the productivity commission: Fixing the data gaps may be the most useful thing it can do

“…While casual employment has often been used as a proxy measure for precarious or insecure employment, permanent part‐time work has generally been regarded as less prone to the concerns of earnings insecurity and working time that characterise casual work. 17 , 19 , 20 In Australia, there is little national evidence on the precarity of permanent part‐time work in residential aged care, although there are indications from the community care sector, 21 and Charlesworth and Heap 22 have argued that casualised work practices may emerge within permanent part‐time work. As Campbell and colleagues have argued 23 : Neglect of minimum‐hour arrangements within permanent work is particularly unfortunate, since such work, despite the ‘permanent’ label, is also precarious and is often associated with the same sort of negative consequences as on‐demand casual work (p. 68).…”

Running to stand still? Two decades of trade union activity in the Irish long-term care sector

“…The extent to which unions have achieved effective outcomes on terms of employment has depended on the type of employer, in turn reflecting union organising strength. With regard to the home care campaign, incremental improvements in pay, travel time and minimum working hours are valuable, particularly in relation to minimum working hours, which is a necessary companion to pay rates for achieving decent income and gender equality (Charlesworth and Heap, 2020). These advances have been primarily confined to publicly employed home care workers, however, among whom union organising has been led by large unions with a strong public sector presence, although there has been some spillover into non-profit organisations, some of which align employee terms of employment with those of HSE staff.…”