Employed people have not always had a year of notable achievements to celebrate on Labour Day but this year they do. The injustice of zero-hour contracts has been recognised by the Government and the long-campaigned-for "pay equity" for women has made progress in the courts. There is still some way to go on both fronts before labour unions can proclaim victory but the will is there.
Zero-hour contracts - which can see full-time employees sent away without pay on slow days - are to be tackled with legislation stipulating that when a person is hired to be available for a set number of hours, the hours must be stated in the contract. It will then be illegal for the employer to cancel a shift, or part of a shift, without reasonable notice or reasonable compensation for late notice.
If the fine point of the legislation lives up to that intention, it will remove the iniquity of people having to be available for a 40-hour, five-day week with no certainty they will get that many paid hours every week. The union movement believes all employment agreements should specify the hours to be paid but the Government proposes to leave room in the law for people to be hired on a casual basis. At least it will be clear at the outset whether the worker can bank on a full week's pay and whether the employer can bank on the worker being available when needed.
Pay equity will be harder to resolve. In a historic decision last year, the Court of Appeal ruled in favour of a rest-home worker that the Equal Pay Act of 1972 did not just mean women had to be paid the same as men for the same work; it also meant that work performed predominantly by women should be paid at the same rate as comparable work. This year, the College of Midwives has filed a similar claim under the Human Rights Act, arguing its members' earnings are too low when compared with male-dominant occupations. But comparing different work is easier said than done. The Court of Appeal ruling did not say how rest-home work was to be compared to other occupations or even which occupations might be comparable. Those details, it decided, were for the Employment Court to consider. But with the Service and Food Workers Union preparing for the next stage of the test case, and the rest home in question on the back foot, the Government has intervened.
Last week, it announced that unions and employers have agreed to its proposal for a joint working group to develop principles for applying pay equity in all sectors of the economy. If they can agree on some practical ways to compare the value of different occupations, this exercise might be better than leaving the issues to the Employment Court. But no more progress on pay equity will be made until all sides stop talking in worthy but abstract principles and start trying to evaluate different jobs.
