The job market did not decide women’s pay. Job evaluation did

By Atle Høie, IndustriALL general secretary

Domestic cleaners, all of them women, wash floors over a 39-hour week and earn 30 per cent less than wall washers, all of them men, who work 37 hours.

These are concrete examples of a systemic malfunctin that we have to fix.

Ask an employer to explain either of the examples and you will usually get the same answer.

“That is what the market pays.”

It is the most effective sentences in collective bargaining. It sounds like a fact, but it is not. On International Equal Pay Day I want to set out why unions should challenge it and what we need to correct in agreements we negotiated ourselves.

A market is a history, not a measurement

The market defence assumes wage rates are something employers observe rather than something they help create. Every rate in every sector carries the accumulated weight of decisions about whose work was worth paying for.

The ILO found that workplaces where most workers are women pay almost 15 per cent less than workplaces that are just as productive but have a different mix of women and men.

The same work, in two similar workplaces, paid differently according to how many women do it. The market is not measuring the work. It is measuring who does it.

What happened to computer programming?

Software makes the point better than any statistic.

In the United States through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, programming was largely women’s work and was treated as routine and clerical, paid accordingly. As software became strategically valuable, programming was redefined as elite technical work. Recruitment, professionalisation and stereotype pushed it towards men and pay rose with the change.

When women’s work becomes men’s work, society often rediscovers its value.

The same pattern appears in our own sectors, where women are concentrated in the lower-paid parts of global supply chains. When buyers push costs down, it lands hardest on the people whose work was already undervalued.

The hardest shift in our thinking

What is sometimes hardest for us as trade unionists to understand is that the gender pay gap is not driven by market forces alone. Wage bargaining can still reproduce inequality if the jobs women do are undervalued from the start.

As unions, we often believe that because we have bargained a wage grid there is no gender pay gap and that women and men doing the same job will be paid the same. But that is not enough. It does not remove the causes of a gender pay gap, such as occupational segregation, the undervaluing of work that women are more likely to do and unequal access to bonuses and allowances. We need to bring the value of the work to the centre of negotiations.

Pay structures and job classification systems can and still often do, undervalue women’s work.

Job evaluation methods were designed around the requirements of male-dominated jobs. They count physical effort, hierarchy, budgets and headcount. They are poor at counting what women’s jobs demand.

Interpersonal and communication skills, emotional labour and fine manual dexterity get recorded as personal attributes a woman happens to possess, rather than as requirements the job imposes on her. Working conditions in administrative, service and care work are assumed not to be demanding, despite constant interruption, unpredictable demands, difficult clients and sustained psychological pressure.

Responsibility is the worst of it. Most systems equate responsibility with managing people or money. A job carrying responsibility for someone’s safety, wellbeing, learning or care is therefore recorded as carrying almost none. That is how you arrive at a nurse earning a third less than a craft supervisor and call it objective.

Four things unions can do

• Challenge the assumption. When an employer invokes the market, ask which market, shaped by whom, over how long. Market value is not a neutral external fact and should not be conceded as one.

• Build in a timetable. Where a market defence argument is used at recruitment, make sure strategies are built in to equalise male and female wages for jobs of equal value over time. Write that into the agreement.

• Judge the job, not the job holder. Pay should reflect what the job demands. A qualification the job does not require is not a reason to pay more for it. In one South African case an employer justified a man’s higher salary as an incentive to accept the offer, alongside his qualifications and experience. Unions there have contested that approach precisely because of where it leads.

• Demand gender-neutral job evaluation, then look at your own agreement. Objective criteria across skills, responsibility, effort and working conditions, applied so that the demands of feminized jobs are genuinely counted, including responsibility for people and not only budgets. Then apply the same test to your own collective agreement.

Equal pay is not paid for by other workers

One last point, because this is a risk and it may raise resistance to these claims inside our own organizations.

Any increase won for women workers must come from a separate budget. Not from a reduction in men’s pay and not traded against other members’ increases. Equal pay corrects something that was wrong. It is not a transfer between workers and it must never be bargained as one.

Our Pay Equity Toolkit sets out how to do this work in practice. IndustriALL has also joined the Equal Pay International Coalition, giving our affiliates access to a wider body of practice on equal pay for work of equal value.