Advice that could be applied anywhere.
Why are nursing home workers paid so much less than prison guards? Both jobs are physically demanding. Both require dealing with people who can be unpredictable and aggressive. |
The answer, Anna Louie Sussman writes, is that disproportionately, women work in nursing homes and men in prisons. |
She argues that the only way to shrink the gender pay gap is to stop comparing people in identical jobs, and start comparing the difficulty and value of work across different fields. |
That’s exactly what New Zealand is doing. In July, its Parliament unanimously passed a “pay equity” bill to establish fair wages for jobs dominated by women. But how do you decide what’s fair? |
The process Anna describes is fascinating. In one case, to determine the appropriate raise for social workers, a group of workers, along with employers and union and government officials, got together to try to catalog the skills the job required. They then came up with a list of male-dominated jobs that they thought were comparable: “Detectives and family violence constables in the New Zealand police force, engineers employed by the Auckland City Council and air traffic controllers for Airways New Zealand.” In the end, the social workers’ pay was bumped up by almost a third. |
I love Anna’s piece because, first, we get to learn about New Zealand, which seems like a pretty awesome place to live right now. But second, because this is actually practical advice that could be applied anywhere. |
“The thing that so many of today’s most underpaid and essential workers have in common is simply that they are women,” Anna writes. She asks: “Are we willing to pay more, say, at the grocery store, or to the home health aides who look after our elderly? Are we willing to re-examine the assumptions embedded in what we have been told are ‘free markets’ for labor?” |
New Zealand will show us what happens, Anna adds, “when an entire society, led by a feminist prime minister, decides, in effect, to say yes.” |
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