Council pay gap: 45.5% pay rise for one employee

Saturday, 23 December 2023

Interim chief executive Mary Richardson was invited to speak at the PSA meeting on December 6.

Some unionised city council workers will earn tens of thousands more a year, now the council has raised wages to meet market rates.

A union organiser said a lack of transparency and external market forces meant pay inequity at the Christchurch City Council had been brewing for years.

However, the council’s current leadership made an impressive effort to come to an agreement with PSA members in time for Christmas, Adrian Mealing, organiser for the Public Service Association (PSA), said.

The relationship between the union and the council has improved so much that Mealing asked interim chief executive Mary Richardson to stay in the job permanently.

The union’s new collective agreement will catch its 722 members’ wages up to market rates and what their colleagues in equivalent positions get.

The Press understands multiple staff members will receive tens of thousands of dollars more a year.

According to Rachel Wells, the council’s acting head of people and culture, the highest increase to someone’s wage was 45.5%.

The minimum increase for PSA members was 8.4%. Some 82 got an increase of between 20% and 30%, and six got over 30%.

PSA organiser Adrian Mealing, left, says Richardson, right, has made such an effort to do right by workers that he openly asked her to consider staying in the council chief executive role permanently.

The previous three years of wage increases for PSA members had been 0%, 1.5% and 1.5%, in large due to the impact of Covid-19 on council services.

According to a document released to The Press under official information laws, the council’s remuneration band framework (which was tied to market rates and reviewed annually) has excluded unionised staff members since it was created in 2005.

Wells said contracts between individuals and unionised workers could not be compared, because union members got additional leave and other benefits.

She said the pay gap widened in the context of 18 months of significant increases to market rates and the living wage.

Mealing said union members did receive more benefits, but the pay equity issues had been substantial and needed to be addressed.

In one case, the council had listed a role that put the salary expectations for someone not in a union tens of thousands of dollars higher than someone who had joined the union, he said.

When asked why the union did not act sooner, Mealing said the council’s relationship with the union had been “a little bit obstructive and divisive” historically and it had taken a lot of work to find out what was going on.

However, the people who may have contributed to that tension were no longer there, and he was thankful they were ending the year with a new and improved relationship with the council, he said.

The PSA even invited the council’s interim chief executive, Mary Richardson, to speak at the meeting in which the union ratified the latest agreement.

Mealing said he openly asked Richardson — who has ruled out applying for the top council job permanently — to reconsider staying in the role.

He said council staff were working overtime to effectively cram three months of work into three weeks, to ensure PSA members were paid before Christmas.

The council is still negotiating a new agreement with employees who are members of E tū and the Amalgamated Workers Union NZ.

The council could not say how much it would cost to backpay staff to July 1, as payroll was yet to run.