Equal pay for work of equal value: making human rights and employment rights laws work together

Summary

Linda Hill's 2004 paper, "Equal pay for work of equal value: making human rights and employment rights laws work together," critically backgrounds the policy challenges surrounding the implementation of "equal pay for work of equal value," with a specific focus on the New Zealand context. The central objective of the paper is to explore how existing human rights and employment rights laws can be integrated and leveraged more effectively to achieve genuine pay equity. The paper highlights that despite New Zealand's commitment through the ratification of international conventions on employment equity for women, it has consistently faced criticism for its insufficient compliance with the "equal pay for work of equal value" principle. The methodology implicitly adopted in the paper involves an analytical review of the current legislative landscape and an assessment of its practical outcomes in addressing gender pay disparities. Hill argues that while New Zealand legislation prohibits gender discrimination and mandates equal pay for "the same job," this framework falls short in addressing the broader issue of "equal pay for work of equal value". This principle is crucial because it directly confronts occupational segregation, where jobs predominantly performed by women are systemically undervalued and therefore rewarded at a lower average rate compared to male-dominated occupations, even if the work requires comparable skills, responsibilities, and effort. A key critique is directed at the current enforcement mechanism, which largely relies on individuals lodging complaints. This reactive, individualistic approach has proven largely ineffective, with very few formal cases of gender-based pay discrimination being pursued under the Equal Pay Act, Employment Relations Act, or Human Rights Act. Furthermore, a historical policy shift in bargaining frameworks from collective rights to individual rights is identified as having negatively impacted the ability of unions to advocate for women's employment issues effectively. The paper's findings underscore the inadequacy of a "formal equality model" that simply ensures equal pay for identical work but fails to tackle the root causes of the pay gap, such as deeply ingrained social attitudes and the ubiquitous undervaluation of women's work. Hill advocates for a "substantive equality model" that would necessitate a more proactive and comprehensive approach to pay equity. This model would involve a thorough, gender-neutral evaluation of job components like skills, responsibilities, and effort to ensure that pay differentials are objectively justifiable and not based on social assumptions. The implication is a call for legislative and policy reforms that move beyond addressing individual instances of discrimination to establishing positive duties on employers to actively promote and implement equality in their workplaces, thereby creating a more robust framework where human rights and employment rights laws genuinely work together to dismantle structural pay inequalities.