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    Equal Employment Opportunities
    Update
    from The Jobs Letter No.40 / 10 June 1996

  • EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORUNITIES
    More on Equal Employment Opportunities . The EEO Trust received a potentially massive funding boost in the Budget, which lifted the annual Government funding from $95,000 to $445,000 (dependent on business employers matching this dollar-for-dollar). This follows a review of the Trust last year which reported that the Trust was doing excellent work, but was severely restricted by under-resourcing and under-staffing. Trust Chairperson David Patten says: "In offering a much higher level of funding support, the government has now accepted equal responsibility for making known the benefits to employers of hiring the best person for the job, regardless of culture, gender, race, disability, sexual orientation or family commitments ..."
    Source - fax to the Jobs Letter 24 May 1996 Press Release from EEO Trust Chairperson David Patten.

    We received several replies from subscribers to our question in the last issue of the Jobs Letter : Why do you think that measures for equal opportunities and equal pay for men and women in the workplace have basically stalled in NZ over the past five years?

    Jocelyn Gibson of the Centre for Labour and Trade Union Studies, at Waikato University, writes : " Equal pay legislation has only ever provided for equal pay for equal work, ie the same job. There are many ways employers can avoid paying men and women the same rate, such as defining their jobs differently. Also, equal pay legislation doesn't take account of the segregation of men and women into different jobs - so when the Equal Pay Act was introduced in 1972 those women employed in women only occupations made no gains, whereas women in occupations where a men's pay rate existed received a pay increase. The Employment Contracts Act also makes equal pay even more difficult to enforce as pay rates are individualised...."

    Gill Ellis, organisational consultant, and co-author of Woman Managers: Success on their Own terms, writes : " If EEO is designed to deal with inequity, then we are failing. The work we are doing in organisations is actually for the privileged few who have got jobs. That is not to say that we should stop doing what we are doing. But, in the long run, if it is equity issues we are concerned about, we should be addressing employment per se..."

    "I know that some of our push for flexible work, and the sharing of jobs is helping that. But, underlying all the problems is our own desire for material wealth, consumer goods, and a salary that gives us a lifestyle we want. In other words, we are not prepared to give up what we need for there to be enough jobs to go around."

    Ellis points out that one of the problems of EEO, as currently constructed, is that it operates only within organisations, and doesn't encompass key groups outside the mainstream ... such as the unemployed. Ellis: "The key target group that is suffering inequity in employment in our society at the moment is the unemployed. The other large disadvantaged group in the community are care-givers of the aged, disabled, and so on. You could probably add the employed poor to this shortlist those below the poverty line on low wages... I have to ask myself, `if I work in the equity field on issues of employment, what is it I do to help these groups, and the answer is not much."

    Perhaps one of the more hidden features of the current EEO debate is the male backlash against the 1970s and 80s movement for equal employment opportunities. In an article in the Independent, Chris Trotter remarks that many women have appeared to do better than men in the current economic stakes. Trotter believes that the current leadership struggles of Labour leader Helen Clark epitomise the struggle that many traditional men have in accepting women taking their place in leadership roles and in a tight economy.

    Trotter writes that while Clark provides a role model for young and politically literate women, she also epitomises to Labour working-class supporters the structural shift away from the `working man' and his traditional `rights' to a more alien intellectual `feminist' culture. Trotter: " The changes of the mid-1980s hit men hard especially in terms of employment. Vast swathes of the economy were ruthlessly `downsized' by the fourth Labour government during the process of `corporatisation', and again when the SOEs were privatised. In the forests, the Post Office and on the railways, tens of thousands of (mostly unskilled) males lost their jobs. And in the 90s, the same processes tore through the state and private sector bureaucracies."

    "Women, by contrast, appeared to make real advances. Equal opportunities policies saw the promotion of women to a number of key positions in the state sector and there was an explosion of women in small enterprises. The rise of Helen Clark came to symbolise this `girls can do anything' approach by taking control of NZ's oldest political party..."

    Source - The Independent 7 June 1996 "Labour must seize back political agenda" by Chris Trotter

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