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The Pay Equity Scam © Peter Zohrab 2015

(Open Letter to the Minister of State Services & Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety)

Cc: BusinessNZ

Pay Equity Working Group

Dear Paula Bennett and Michael Woodhouse,

I am concerned that the Pay Equity process may have an inequitable outcome, which is why I am writing to you now.

I would like to make the following points:

1. The Terms of Reference mention “work of equal value (pay equity)” in Paragraph 3, but the Court of Appeal does not use those terms in its decision, as far as I can see. What the Court does is to endorse the Employment Court’s decision that:

   equal pay for women for work predominantly or exclusively performed by women, is to be determined by reference to what men would be paid to do the same work abstracting from skills, responsibility, conditions and degrees of effort as well as from any systemic undervaluation of the work derived from current or historical or structural gender discrimination.

This point is important, because focusing too narrowly on “work of equal value” or “pay equity” might cause the Working Party to miss significant issues.

2. One such issue is workplace safety. If the work that a majority-female workforce is doing is nice and safe, with a low workplace-accident rate and a non-existent workplace-related death rate, then what men would be paid to do that work might well be less than men are actually paid to do work in a less safe workplace. The Feminists might claim that the value of the work done in the two workplaces is the same, so that people in the two workplaces should have the same rates of pay. However, the safety of male workers and their risk of injury or death should also be taken into account by the Working Party – not just the apparent “value” of the work.

3. The good faith of the union movement should be put under the microscope here, since Paragraph 12 of the Terms of Reference stipulates that the parties should “work together in good faith”. It is remarkable that the Council of Trade Unions has mounted a big campaign about workplace safety recently – yet it has been careful not to mount any court cases which would either force male-dominated workplaces to be as safe as female-dominated ones, or force employers to compensate workers in dangerous industries financially for the risks that they run every working day! The most dangerous industries are male-dominated ones, as the page http://www.osh.dol.govt.nz/hazards/stats/fatals/fatals01-02.pdf used to show. However, the Feminists have been hard at work, deleting references to gender from the Government’s accident statistics, so that that page is no longer available.

In other words, the unions care only about women and only mounted a campaign about workplace safety so as to be able to ignore that issue in their pay equity campaign.

Courts, in my experience, will believe anything, but they don’t have much alternative to believing in so-called “current or historical or structural gender discrimination,” if that is the only narrative that they are presented with. We can be sure that the Feminist universities have been churning out pieces of research which make the case that such discrimination exists and has existed, but such research necessarily depends on biased interpretation of selective evidence. I do not believe that such research should be accepted uncritically. The Working Group should look for historical and contemporary archival evidence of alternative explanations to those of modern Feminist researchers in totalitarian-Feminist universities.

If universities allowed Anti-Feminist research to take place, they might have produced research that showed, for example, that there was current or historical or structural gender discrimination against relatively unskilled men which forced them to work outdoors in unsafe conditions, leaving the safer, indoors jobs to unskilled women. If lower-class men were not considered expendable (as in conscription, to take another example), more men would have been working in safe, indoor jobs, which would then not be female-dominated – whatever their pay-rates.

Yours sincerely,

Peter D. Zohrab

See also:

Non-Wage-Gap

Further to the Pay Equity Working Group

Sports Apartheid Matters !

Criminal Hypocrisy of Pay Equity Proposals

Rejection (in lieu of a Submission) of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs’ Discussion Document: "Next Steps towards Pay Equity"

Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap