Are we too quick to pull the racism card? – Stuff

OPINION: The unattractive do not earn as much as those blessed with pleasant features. I reflect on this as I look at the ageing, wrinkled and aesthetically challenged face that stares blankly back at me in the mirror while giving my yellowing teeth a perfunctory scrub.

It is a face that only a puppy could love; and then merely because I secretly feed her treats.

Life isnt fair but it is no longer solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. When the challenge for a society moves from starvation to combating obesity we are moving up the hierarchy of needs.

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To live in New Zealand today is to live in one of the wealthiest countries in all of human history; where even a plain fellow like myself can earn a pleasant living despite my self-evident physical deficiencies.

Should the divergence in my opportunities relative to the comelier in appearance be something that the state should focus its attention?

Perhaps not; but the wandering eye of those whose salaries depend on finding and solving the great social problems of our age have identified something that they believe warrants investigation. Those with a Pacific heritage earn less than their Pakeha co-workers and neighbours.

Why? The Human Rights Commission, as fine as any government agency you will find, took it upon itself to study this very issue. They paid for a report. It was as awful as youd expect it to be.

To give the report its due, there was an analysis that found Pacific workers didnt obtain the same degree of education as Pakeha and worked in lower-paid industries. Once this was controlled for, only around a third of the pay discrepancy could be explained.

However, a degree in education was considered the equivalent to a degree in dentistry and the fact that someone who pursues a career as a teacher earns less than a dentist is considered to be unexplained.

Four reasons were provided; unobserved differences, ethnic preferences in the non-pecuniary elements of jobs, discrimination and unconscious bias. It is a consistent theme of such research that the reason for some perceived negative outcome is racism, greed or Roger Douglas.

This research provides further evidence about what weve long suspected the bulk of the Pacific Pay Gap cant be explained and is at least partly due to invisible barriers like racism, unconscious bias and workplace discriminatory practices declares Saunoamaalii Karanina Sumeo, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner.

CHRIS SKELTON/STUFF

Alice Olynsma, a healthcare assistant at Ballarat Rest Home, says care and support workers deserve fair pay. (First published May 23, 2022)

It is astounding, but unsurprising, that researchers assume that those who employ staff are racist when there is no evidence from which to form this view. The gaps in their data are, literally, unexplained. Racism is an unambiguous moral wrong. It is a crime. To ascribe this sin to an entire class of New Zealanders because your analysis is deficient is, if I am being polite, disappointing.

It is also easy to disprove. You can be solvent, or you can be racist, but in business it is very difficult to be both. If the assumption behind these sorts of reports is valid; that Pacific people are being paid less than Pakeha while producing the same level of output, then I could make more profit by hiring Pacifica candidates and paying them less than I pay non-Pacific workers.

My racism would need to be intense to leave that profit on the table and if I was such a terrible person, the business owner down the road would out-compete me and I would be forced to rely on my writing to pay the bills.

A grim prospect for all concerned.

Society is complex. People make different decisions and pursue differing lifestyles. The fact that I am spending time writing this column rather than engaging in more productive and better paid work is a decision that will lead me receiving a lower income.

If your priority is community and family rather than wealth accumulation your lifes achievements will differ. Some prefer to die with seven children rather than seven houses and that isnt a bad thing and nor is it a problem that needs addressing.

The analysis of the pay gap between different population groups isnt something that is being done for academic curiosity. The Human Rights Commission is conducting the Pacific Pay Gap Inquiry to better understand why the Pacific Pay Gap exists and how it can be closed.

One of the ideas floated is mandated pay transparency; forcing firms to publish salaries by gender and race. The law of unintended consequences will ensure this will reduce employment opportunities for low qualified women and minorities and increase them for inadequate white men.

More intervention will be introduced to correct for these failures in a never-ending cycle of regression.

Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth century philosopher, popularised the idea that the legitimacy of the sovereign rests on the willingness of individuals to surrender some of their freedoms in order to avoid a war of all against all; a collective social contract.

It is an elegant solution to the question of legitimacy of the states monopoly on the use of force; but where is the philosophical foundation that permits the sovereign to use that power to manufacture a utopia?

We have accepted as given that the Crown has not only the right but an obligation to embark on social engineering programmes to produce a society that confirms to the preferences of the cultural elite even if it defies the wishes and customs of the population.

Cultural change on the level envisioned cannot be achieved without Draconian intervention into the minutia of our economy and society and an unwavering certainty by those in power that the escalating costs are a necessary price to achieve their Arcadia.

Their ignorance is only matched by their determination and the lack of any willingness to confront these cultural commissars means their ambitions will be translated into policy with the inevitable, and now unavoidable, perverse outcomes.

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Are we too quick to pull the racism card? - Stuff