In 1972, Labour MP Norman Douglas stood in Parliament during the equal pay debate and declared “women will no longer be considered a reservoir of cheap labour”.
It is one of those parliamentary lines that sounds impossibly old-fashioned until you realise it is describing modern New Zealand with uncomfortable accuracy. If there is one place where the reservoir still exists, it is in the care and disability sector.
This modern reality sits at the heart of Shortchanged: The Pay Equity Investigation, a new podcast from Project Gender. Across four episodes, the podcast examines the politics, motivations and consequences behind New Zealand’s 2025 changes to pay equity legislation.
When the Government passed urgent changes to the Equal Pay Act in 2025, much of the discussion focused on workers whose claims were halted or reset. Less attention was paid to disabled people, who often experience the consequences of undervalued care work most directly.
The D*List, a disability-led social change movement, argued that pay equity is not simply about wages. It affects workforce stability, service quality and the ability of disabled people to access the support they need to participate fully in society.
Disabled people already face a significant income gap of 7.6 percent compared with non-disabled New Zealanders. The consequences of undervaluing care work are therefore felt from multiple directions.
Disability Rights Commissioner, Prudence Walker, says “the changes to pay equity claims do little to attract new workers into the care and support sector, which already faces a shortage of staff.”
What pervades these changes is an assumption that work becomes less valuable when women do it. Caring comes naturally and therefore requires less recognition, less status and less pay.
In 2018, Careerforce reported New Zealand would need 16,000 additional carers and support workers within three years across healthcare, aged care and disability. In the face of such a deficit, any barrier to retaining the knowledge and skill of carers becomes a critical risk.
At the time of the Peoples Select Committee hearing in 2025, CCS Disability Action warned staff that two pay equity claims affecting its workforce would be discontinued under the new legislation and that the changes “risked the wellbeing of both disabled people and the workforce that supports them”.
These are not abstract concerns. Care work has long occupied a strange place in our economy. Everyone agrees it is essential. Yet historically we have paid for it as though it were somehow less skilled, less demanding or less valuable than other forms of work.
A highly experienced care and support worker can expect to earn around $28 an hour. Meanwhile, a corrections officer, another frontline role involving responsibility, risk, judgment and emotional labour, typically earns the equivalent of approximately $39 to $53 an hour.
This contradiction was pointed out by Lori Mackness of Pay Equity Coalition Aotearoa. Both roles require complex decision-making, de-escalation skills, relationship management and responsibility for vulnerable people. Only one is routinely described as “care”. “The same skills are recognised and paid as professional expertise when deployed elsewhere”.
What pervades these changes is an assumption that work becomes less valuable when women do it. Caring comes naturally and therefore requires less recognition, less status and less pay.
We have spent decades dressing that assumption up in economic language. Affordability. Sustainability. Fiscal constraints.
But the true cost of undervaluing care does not appear neatly in a Budget line. It shows up in workforce shortages, exhausted families, inconsistent services and disabled people struggling to access the support they need.
More than half a century ago, Norman Douglas believed New Zealand had accepted a simple principle. Work should be valued according to its worth, not according to whether it is predominantly performed by women.
The real mystery at the centre of Shortchanged is not why three women decided to launch a pay equity investigation. It is why, after 54 years, there is still an investigation to conduct.
Listen to all episodes Shortchanged here.
