(no subject)

[labellementeuse]

Gah, I haven't talked about this because I'm not capable of being coherent about anything political at the moment, but: tomorrow the Hand Mirror is running a Pay Equity Faxathon. You can read all about it there, but the gist of it is that you and your co-workers fax Tony Ryall's office tomorrow to protest the recent scrapping of pay equity investigations. Pay equity is not something that we should invest in only when it's convenient for us: it's something that we have to invest in all the time. New Zealand women are currently earning $8.70 for every $10 men earn: it's not good enough, gang.

Comments

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

...I realise I'm risking ghettoing myself as the guy who always has trivial questions about broad social movements, but... fax?

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I think the idea is that it has all the convenience of email while still being dead-tree enough to take up physical space in an office, i.e., get attention. Also, because people tend not to use a fax from home, it's a good way to get people you're working with and around talking about it - it makes it collective rather than individual the way email usually is.

That would be my take, anyway.

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

I guess that makes sense.

It is worth noting that anybody who worked for the government and faxed this from their work would be breaching the civil service code of conduct and in danger of losing their job. Well, it would depend on their manager, but if a manager did want to fire somebody over this, they'd be on fairly solid ground.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I tend to assume that people on my flist in those jobs - which is, OK, the two people who commented in this post*, but really does not represent that much of my flist - will know what they can and can't do better than I do. Right?

*I know you're not currently in that position, but formerly

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

You're from Wellington and you only know one person who works for the government? Blimey. I must be in more of a bubble than I thought.

[maudlinrose.livejournal.com]

I was on the committee for my office when we did this review—and we did find demonstrable pay inequities between some of the more junior drafters. It was,though, mainly a tick-the-box sort of thing; our timeframe was very short (2 months, from memory) and we would have spent a lot longer on it (and actually considered the issues in much greater depth) if we'd been given the time.

The people running it did come in with the view that we would find pay and other inequities—a conclusion before we started looking at the evidence—and generally the whole thing had a weird kind of vibe about it: it did come from Upon High, though, so that could be it.

However: none of this means I think it was not worthwhile. We discovered a lot about attitudes in the office around a whole range of issues, not just gender inequities but also seniority problems, problems in operational management, attitudes towards senior management, which teams felt powerless, and so forth. We would never have found a lot of this out without the review.

Which is all to say: a lot of things about the new Govt have pissed me off, and this is right up there.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting! The details about what the reviews entailed aren't readily available (or they don't seem to be) so it's good to know about them - the good and the bad.

I seriously can't believe how little media fuss there's been about this - it's kind of a massive thing to do IMO, not because of the $$ involved - but actually, in a way, because I can't imagine that the sum involved is really that large in any relative sense. So to me what this demonstrates is not fiscal responsibility, but a commitment to *not* prioritising equal pay for equal work. Which I had thought was a kind of fundamental issue.

[aleph-naught.livejournal.com]

Fooey. Wish I had access to a fax machine.