Category Archives: Guest Post

Guest Post: Equal pay a step closer

This post was submitted to me via Fleur Fitzsimmons at the end of June, but via email.  We agreed that I’d post the article on my blog as a guest post. 

Fleur Fitzsimmons is a lawyer at the New Zealand Public Service Association.

Equal pay for women-dominated occupations is a step closer with the high-powered group led by the next Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy and including  Phil O’Reilly, unions and Government Negotiators, tasked with developing equal pay principles under the Equal Pay Act 1972 reporting agreed principles and an agreed process to implement equal pay to the Government.  The group has developed and agreed comprehensive principles for the implementation of equal pay in female-dominated work in New Zealand. The agreed principles are here.

The group has established a process by which women doing work that is predominantly performed by women can make a claim for equal pay, and have outlined the assessment process as well as stating how a claim will be settled.

The process suggested provides that any employee or group of employees can raise a claim and contains a list of factors that must be considered when determining the merit of a claim.

These factors are not overly legalistic or technocratic.  They include consideration of whether the work has been historically undervalued because of the origins or history of the work, or whether there is some characterisation or labelling of the work as “women’s work” or a social, cultural or historical phenomena whereby women are considered to have “natural” or “inherent” qualities that may have led to historical undervaluation of the work.

The assessment will consider whether the remuneration paid has properly accounted for the nature of the work, the levels of responsibility associated with the work, the conditions under which the work is performed, and the degree of effort required to perform the work.

The claim will then be thoroughly assessed by looking at the skills, responsibilities, conditions of the work and the degrees of effort of the work done by the women.

One important aspect of the assessment is that it must fully recognise the importance of skills, responsibilities, effort and conditions that are commonly over-looked or undervalued in female-dominated work such as social skills, responsibility for the wellbeing of others, emotional effort, cultural knowledge and sensitivity.

The assessment of the claim can also include an examination of the work being performed and that of appropriate comparators. These may include male comparators performing work which is the same as or similar, or aspects of which are the same or substantially similar, to the work being considered.

It has been quite a journey to get these principles agreed by employers, unions and the Government Negotiators, and comes after a landmark decision by the Employment Court in the Kristine Bartlett case – an aged care worker who is paid barely above the minimum wage for work which is physically, and emotionally exhausting and which is overwhelmingly performed by women.

Working women in New Zealand have been undervalued for too long and implementation of this new approach to equal pay would be an historic break-through.

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Guest post: No special rights for lifestyle choices

This is a guest post from James Dominguez.

Right now in this country, and around the world, huge numbers of wicked, self-entitled people are demanding that the government grant them special rights based on their lifestyle. That’s right! We’re not talking about in-born traits here (no matter what these sickos claim) but a conscious lifestyle choice.

For some reason, these people think they can demand special treatment from government, special exceptions from our traditional laws, and special human rights that aren’t granted to anyone else outside of their sordid little club. How on earth could this be constitutional?

People can’t help who they are, or where they were born, or the circumstances of their birth. Disallowing discrimination based on these inherent traits, such as race or disability, makes sense of course. The problem is that these shrill, demanding people want us to believe that even though they have chosen this deviant lifestyle long after birth (some of them not even acting on these impulses until very late in life!) they are entitled to all kinds of legal protections and special rights.

No reasonable person could possibly agree with this. If you make a choice to join a minority group based on weird behaviours, then you know that you are buying into any negative consequences that go along with that. Don’t want people to treat you badly? Don’t choose to join in with this destructive lifestyle! It’s so simple!

Hopefully I’ve convinced you by now that these people should be denied any kind of special rights and protections. Please join me in spreading the word about this widespread injustice:

People who choose to join religious groups should not be granted any legal protection against discrimination.

I mean honestly, it’s not like it’s something they’re BORN with, like sexual orientation!

Disclaimer: No, I don’t really think religious groups deserve no protections: everyone should have the legal right to live their lives in peace. But seriously, why is the religious right still using such an easily reversed argument?

Oh, and thanks for letting me guest-post, Rebecca! 🙂

 – James “DexX” Dominguez

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Guest post: The genesis of my atheism

Hello everyone, my name is James. My wife Rebecca has kindly allowed me to write a guest post on her blog, discussing the end of my Catholic faith and the birth of my atheism. My usual writing topic is video games (here and here) so when I wrote a long email about atheism and Rebecca suggested I put it online, I did not have an appropriate channel through which to share it. This is why she gave me permission to put it on this blog as her first ever guest post. Thanks Rebecca!

– = –

As I showered this morning, I was thinking about the genesis of my atheism.

The process of losing my faith completely was a long, gradual one. At 21 I was a devout Catholic – anti-abortion, homophobic, and everything else that goes along with it. A couple of years ago, around the age of 34, I was surprised by my sudden realisation that a mostly unnoticed process of transition was complete and I was indeed an atheist.

I don’t remember the specific circumstances, but I will filling in some kind of survey or a form (the last census, perhaps?) and I was asked for my religion. Without even thinking about it, I ticked the box marked “atheist”. I then stared at the choice I had made, a little stunned. “I’m an atheist now!” I thought, shocked by the undeniable truth of it. “When did that happen?”

In my reminiscences this morning, I realised that there had been a little termite in the timber of my religious faith for almost two decades, nibbling away invisibly, until one day I found that the once solid structure had been replaced with a hollow shell. That termite was a single powerful idea that I never put into words until this morning.

In essence, that idea is this: God is omnipotent, omniscient, omni-everything-else, and he exists outside our human perception of time. All times are now to God, and all places are in his presence. This means that when he was a spirit floating over the water before the world began (if you subscribe to biblical literalism) he was aware of everything that was to come.

God made humanity and the world and everything in it, already knowing that Adam and Eve would sin, the human race would fall into damnation, that he would have to sacrifice his own son (technically himself!) to save humanity from a punishment of his own devising, and that this salvation would be scattershot at best, saving only a fraction of the people of the world.

God made humanity and the world and everything in it already knowing that the future would hold the Crusades, the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, the Black Death, two World Wars, the Jonestown massacre, and countless everyday atrocities and horrors.

God made humanity and the world and everything in it already knowing that human beings would suffer a multitude of cancers, blindness, brain tumours, strokes, heart attacks, and birth defects ranging from crippling to fatal.

God made humanity and the world and everything in it already knowing that human beings would persecute each other based on features outside their control, that in fact God himself had built into them – the colour of their skin, the place where they were born, the religion of their parents, the sex or gender of their bodies, the sexual orientation built into their brains, and any of the other multitudes of ways in which we make our sisters and brothers into “the other”.

This supposedly supreme being, with the power to make every whim become truth and the ability to foresee every consequence of every action before he has even begun to perform it, could literally have made any world at all. Physics, chemistry, biology, and even logic and causality are subject to the will of the Judeo-Christian God, and any world we can imagine would be within his ability to create.

Yet this is the world he made, with its wars and diseases and injustices without end.

Frankly, any God that believes that this world is the best of all possible worlds is must incompetent, evil, or (and this seems to be the most likely option) simply non-existent.

Without even realising I had been debating silently with myself, I had reached the conclusion that the cruelty of the world we live in is a reflection of its chaotic, unguided development, and the occasional horrific behaviour of my own species is psychological residue of its evolution in a brutal, uncompromising, and competitive environment.

I quote Marcus Cole from the great SF show Babylon 5:

“I used to think that it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”

How terrible a place would the world be if all of this horror was planned? If some invisible deity were wilfully causing murder and death and famine and drought because it aided in the completion of some opaque plan that would only reach fruition in some unhinted future?

No, like Marcus I find randomness far more plausible and comforting that a murderous and vengeful man in the sky who blames me for the very faults he built into me, like Geppetto casting Pinnochio into a bonfire as punishment for his own flawed workmanship.

The wonderful folk musician Penelope Swales said well in her song Monkey Comfort:

Can you see, my friends, why I don’t find my insignificance frightening? Oh, no! I find it comforting. It steadies me. /
When I’m hounded by fear, grief or loss, frightened by my death or yours it grants me some serenity. /
Coz I’m knowing that I will die and take my place in eternity. Ah, just one more monkey that lived on a rock where 10 trillion monkeys lived. /
No more important, nor less essential, than any other snake, bear, insect, or monosteria /
And when I go, it’ll be a compliment to me if some other monkeys grieve.

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