This election, we’re asking everyone to be part of the campaign for pay equity.
What is pay equity?
It’s a way to get people in female-dominated professions paid what they are worth. These are people working with families and communities in education and health.
Equal pay, men and women being paid the same for doing the same job, has existed in New Zealand law since 1972.
The concept of pay equity was won in New Zealand after Kristine Bartlett and the Service and Food Workers Union (now known as E tū) brought a claim against TerraNova Homes and Care, arguing that care work was undervalued because it was predominantly women’s work.
The argument was not that she was paid less than a man doing the same job, but that the entire occupation was underpaid because of systemic undervaluation of women’s work.
This was an historic win.
Experts all over the world looked to our pay equity system as an innovative tool for closing the gender pay gap. Just like when women won the right to vote in 1893, we were world-leading in the fight for gender equality.
But the National-led Government has ripped that progress away.What’s happened?
In 2025, the governing coalition of National, ACT, and New Zealand First made significant changes to the Equal Pay Act 1972 under urgency.
They pushed through these changes in a single day with no public consultation or select committee scrutiny.
They cancelled 34 live pay equity claims instantly with no consultation and the ability to take new claims was restricted, in effect, taking money that had been budgeted for wage increases for thousands of workers in female-dominated roles and locking them out of making pay equity claims.
These are early childhood, primary and secondary teachers, care and support workers, nurses, essential medical staff – the people that hold our communities together and that we rely on for essential services.
