Just over seven years ago, there were great celebrations among an unlikely group of people at the Loaves and Fishes hall across the road from Parliament - the National Party and a bunch of unionists. They had just announced a $2 billion pay equity catch-up deal, the likes of which had never been seen before. Kristine Bartlett was there, at the time an aged care worker in a residential rest home, the figurehead of the claims and later to become New Zealander of the Year.
Others included the leaders of the E Tu union, the Public Service Association, the Nurses Organisation, the Council of Trade Unions, Health Minister Jonathan Coleman and his chief negotiator, Doug Martin. The deal would benefit 55,000 care and support workers in the aged care and disability sector whose work, like Bartlett’s, had been historically undervalued in the marketplace precisely because it was “women’s work”. But the amount of the settlement was so huge that some of the detail was largely overlooked, namely that it was a $2b deal that would last only five years before a new deal had to be agreed.
Given that the deal expired on June 30, 2022, it was reasonable to expect that a Labour majority Government would have been highly motivated to get a new deal done before the 2023 election on October 14. The day after the 2017 deal expired in 2022, the three unions, the Public Service Association, E tu, and the New Zealand Nurses Organisation, filed a new claim to 15 representative employers on behalf.
