Let’s break it down.
Last Friday, Labour announced that from next year, organisations with 250+ employees would be required report gender pay gaps annually to a regulator, who will publish the pay gap information centrally. Then after four years, this will be lowered to organisations with 100+ employees,
What you need to know:
🏭️ Set to impact 900 organisations initially, then 2,700 organisations after four years
🎯 Action plans will be voluntary at the start, and this will be reviewed after three years to determine whether it needs to be made mandatory
🏆️ Having been indicated that it will be introduced next year, it will only be introduced if Labour wins the October 14th NZ General Election, and as far as I’m aware no other political parties have made similar announcements
🔍️ Doesn’t appear to include ethnic pay gaps, however the Government has said investigating the potential to include ethnic pay gap reporting, and the role of a regulator will be considered during the next stage of work
📃 It was announced the core elements of the gender pay gap reporting system have been decided on, but the Government doesn’t intend to introduce legislation until further detailed aspects of the design have been finalised
🤝 The Government has said they engaged with the business sector to help inform this work
🤯 Along the same thread, but different again to the Equal Pay Amendment Act 2020, Pay Equity claims, Fair Pay Agreements, and Pay Parity initiatives
The current gender pay gap is 9.2% and 82 organisations already publicly publish their gender pay gaps voluntarily on the Mind the Gap Pay Gap Registry, and 18 have published their Māori and Pacific People’s pay gaps.
This also follows the 2017 Government expectations of pay introduced in the public service in 2017, where public service agencies were required to publish their pay gaps, analyse all employee salaries to determine whether gender was a factor in the decision and make corrections by the end of 2020, and create action plans to address any gaps. You can find the MBIE gender and ethnic pay gap action plan (which I worked on the 2021 one) here.
What can you do now?
⌛️ Do nothing and wait for the outcome of the election and rush when there’s potential legislative changes to be compliant with
✅ Be proactive and start measuring your pay gaps and publish them publicly on the Mind the Gap website. Pay gap reporting legislation has been introduced in 18 OECD countries, including the UK, Australia, and Canada so it was always going to be a matter of time before it was introduced in Aotearoa
📧 Get in touch if you’d like to know more as we offer Equal pay support to organisations as one of our areas of expertise
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