Stuff: An heiress's birthday and a support worker's meagre lot

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For most people, a 30th birthday party might be a celebration at a community hall, or at best a long weekend away with friends. But not if you’re a Rich List heiress.

According to recent media reports, Aucklander Ali Andrews, whose family built the $500 million Bay Audiology fortune, marked her anniversary by renting a €100,000-a-week villa in the French resort town of St Tropez.

She and her friends, many of them also the children of multimillionaires, availed themselves of the villa’s helipad and outdoor cinema, and danced the evening away “amid thousands of rose petals and a string band”.

It’s a far cry from the lives of women like Tamara Baddeley, a Napier community support worker whose job it is to visit the elderly and the vulnerable in their homes and get them through the day with dignity.

From lifting clients out of bed and helping them to shower, through to fitting catheters and colostomy bags, the work requires an extraordinary combination of mental, physical and emotional ability.

Yet she earns just $26.50 an hour. This leaves her feeling “taken for granted, underappreciated, overworked and underpaid”, she told me earlier this week.

Strange to say, Baddeley is not living it up on the French Riviera. Indeed, her only foreign trip in the last two decades, aside from an Australian holiday, was a European visit for which she saved for eight years.

Such contrasts underline the immense unfairness of modern New Zealand life.

As the daughter of Rich Listers, Andrews will have had countless unearned advantages; and if she is well paid, it won’t, in my opinion, be because her work – doing PR for luxury resorts and botox practitioners – has any great social value. (Indeed I dare say the world would cope just fine without it.) Andrews will be well paid because she caters to the desires of the rich.

Baddeley, by contrast, does some of the most important work imaginable, for some of our most vulnerable citizens, in some extremely complex and demanding situations. (People who think it’s easy work should give it a go, and see if they last even a day.) Yet she earns little more than the minimum wage.

Baddeley belongs to a class of workers, spanning community support, rest-home care, and mental health and disability assistance, whose complaints were supposedly settled after the celebrated Kristine Bartlett case.

In 2012, Bartlett, backed by her union, launched a court action alleging that rest home care and the like was grossly underpaid because it was seen as women’s work.

She won, forcing the National government to agree a $2b settlement that began in 2017 and expired the June just gone. Lifting rates by up to $7 an hour for more than 55,000 workers, the settlement was a triumph of fairness, and other pay-equity deals soon followed. The problem is everything after.

Many of the sector’s employers – the usual mix of private contractors and NGOs – undid the settlement’s impact by cutting hours or forcing staff to take on more tasks. (Such difficulties in controlling private providers are, incidentally, another argument for Health New Zealand to bring the services back in-house.)

For all the talk of pay equity, carers’ wages have never caught up with those of equivalently skilled but male-dominated jobs: prison officers, for instance, earn closer to $35 an hour. Baddeley’s compensation for time spent travelling between clients’ homes is painfully inadequate.

And although Labour deserves credit for making pay-equity settlements easier, and signing billions of dollars’ worth of further deals, its response this year to the community support workers’ plight was a 70c-an-hour pay offer – a 3% increase when inflation is at 7.3%.

“I felt insulted,” Baddeley says. “If I didn’t care about the clients, I’d consider leaving. But we have lost so many carers already, to burnout and other things.”

Her union, E tū, has since joined others in lodging a new claim, aiming to create a genuine pay-equity successor to the Bartlett deal.

But until pay rates for care workers are somehow formally linked to those of their male equivalents, the unions will always be in catch-up mode, climbing a mountain that grows ever-higher under their feet.

This pay discrimination is a national disgrace.

People like Baddeley – whose work answers our shared desire to ensure the old and vulnerable can live well – are serving the public good, and the public should ensure they are properly paid.

Labour’s big problem is finding the money to lift their wages, when New Zealand’s tax take is around $20b-$30b less than a comparable European country would raise.

Many of those countries, of course, levy taxes on the very largest estates, arguing that those lucky enough to inherit vast sums should compensate those less fortunate.

Maybe we should do the same here. I, for one, would rather live in a world where Ali Andrews contributes more, and Tamara Baddeley is better paid.