A misleading intro

Stuff reports:

The primary teachers’ union has launched legal action over female support workers’ being paid $8 per hour less than males.

If this was true, it would be an outrage. But female support workers are not paid $8 per hour less than male support workers.

NZEI national secretary Paul Goulter said it had been more than six years since an independent job evaluation report by the Pay and Employment Equity Unit showed that support workers employed by the Ministry of Education were paid as much as $8 an hour less than a comparable male-dominated job.

That is quite a different thing. This is what unions do. They say nurses should be paid the same as police and as nurses are mainly female and police mainly male, it is gender discrimination.

I don’t want a centrally planned economy where the courts decide how this industry is equivalent to this industry and they must be paid the same. That’s what the Soviet Union used to have. At the end of the day, wage rates will reflect the level needed to recruit and retain staff.