Antipodean Aspirations and the Difficulties of Regulating for Decent Work Now and Then

Currently, the NZCTU is waging a number of campaigns for decent work. There is a view that the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration (IC and A) Act, instituted in 1894, achieved decent work before the 1991 Employment Contracts Act deregulated workplaces and industrial relations. In this paper, I give a more nuanced overview of the IC and A Acts implementation, questioning the extent to which most workers in New Zealand were regulated before 1936, and indicating the ways in which universal decent or fair wages were aspirational. For some time after 1936, too, regulation for women, for instance, meant being paid less than men for the same job and ranking female-dominated occupations as inferior in skill and, therefore, wages to male-dominated occupations. The story about decent work for marginal workers some women, Māori, Pacific, young, old and those working for small workplaces differs from the standard story for skilled, unionised male workers.