Library work is important for the flourishing and resourcing of our communities. Libraries are places of learning, refuge, study, inspiration, fun, and personal growth. In universities, the library provides every reading for class, reference for an essay, and research material for an academic. Libraries make our society a better place by supporting our communities. Despite this, library professionals have struggled to receive adequate and fair compensation for decades in New Zealand, compared with professions with similar expectations for education, skills, training, and knowledge. Pay equity legislation was introduced to combat this inequity.

Both of us have been on the frontlines of organising for the tertiary library workers’ pay equity claim for the past three years, since it was raised in September 2022. This claim aimed to address the historic undervaluation of the lowest-paid library workers in the tertiary sector, including library assistants and advisors. We have both seen the incredible range of work that is done by library assistants and also experienced misplaced understandings of library work.

The starting rate for library assistants in New Zealand is still often below the living wage, and most pay scales offer limited salary progression. This does not compensate library workers who dedicate years of their lives to their role. Low pay impacts not just workers’ quality of life but also employers, who face increasing staff turnover. In the first four years of Hannah’s library career, she had six different contracts, sometimes working multiple roles at once to make enough to cover basic living expenses. Precarity and low pay dissuade early-career librarians from staying in the profession.

Low pay undermines the professionalism of the sector as a whole and does not align with the level of education and training we are often expected to pay for and earn. Library assistants can struggle to feel respected, even within their own work environments. All this negatively impacts the quality of the library services we can provide to our communities.

We want people to know what library assistants do in their jobs and to realise that we are highly skilled and educated professionals. We work with complex systems and technologies and provide expert support to hundreds of students, staff, and alumni library users. We do it with patience, kindness and empathy. 

Madi’s library assistant role involves resource sharing and document delivery. This includes sourcing hard-to-find resources from around New Zealand and internationally, and sharing our own resources with libraries and domestic and international institutions. Many of the politicians who created and passed the recent pay equity changes rely on people like Madi to operate the library systems that provide them and their staff with crucial resources that inform policy decisions. The Collection Access team also oversees the operation of the distance mail delivery service, enabling students studying across the country to access physical library resources.

Other of our library assistants are responsible for large-budget purchases, high-level research support, investigation of IT glitches and issues, and the provision of face-to-face care in emotionally charged situations involving stressed students and staff. The technical nature of library work has also increased dramatically in the last couple of decades with technological development. Library assistants are now expected to have complex digital systems and technology skills. 

It is no coincidence that the other professions that also seek pay equity: nurses, teachers, care and support workers, to name a few, also require excellent but undervalued ‘soft’ skills such as communication, adaptability, cultural awareness, active listening and emotional intelligence. We really care about the people we look after and help. But this doesn’t mean that care and compassion always come naturally either — we work hard to practice and foster these attributes alongside the technical ‘hard’ skills we possess. We deserve more.

THE STATE OF PAY EQUITY IN NEW ZEALAND

All 33 pay equity claims have been scrapped in New Zealand. This includes TEU’s 2022 claim for tertiary library workers and PSA’s 2019 claim for public library workers. There is now also a 10-year limit on reviewing settled claims, which affects the maintenance of NZEI’s school librarians' claim, settled in 2023.

The retrospective cutting of our claim undermines the work and resources already committed to this process, as well as the collaborative negotiating environment established between the parties. Any retroactive pay increases from the date our claims were raised have also been cut for those covered, amounting to mass wage theft.

The most significant impacts of the Pay Equity Amendment Bill (2025) for us:

• Multi-employer claims are no longer viable under the new pay equity legislation, as any employer can opt out without reason. This is a direct attack on claims such as ours that encompass the various university employers in New Zealand. We can likely no longer continue with our claims in their pre-existing state - our union would need to raise 16 claims instead of 2 to have the same coverage in future pay equity litigation.
  
  
• Raising the threshold for raising pay equity claims from ‘is arguable’ to ‘has merit’ makes it more difficult to raise a claim. Now, claimants need to show not just that a female-dominated role could be undervalued to begin the claims investigation process, but that it is already known to be undervalued relative to relevant male-dominated roles, with supporting evidence. Claimants need to gather proof twice over, making the whole process redundant, ineffective and an unnecessary barrier to litigation.
  
  
• Our claim is not eligible for resubmission as we do not meet the new gender threshold requirement. Claims can now only be lodged on behalf of workforces where 70% of employees are female, for at least 10 consecutive years before lodgement. The Bill’s binary approach to gender excludes non-binary staff from these calculations. We estimate that the current female percentage among library assistants and advisors at Victoria University Library is 68%. The new threshold does not align with the core concept of pay equity, which aims to address modern-day undervaluation of workforces as a result of these workforces being female-dominated historically.
  
  
• The Bill introduces a hierarchy of comparators that severely limits the scope of professions we can use as comparators. The only options for comparators we can now utilise are also undervalued and underpaid workers from the same sector, many of whom also had pay equity claims in motion. The Manatū Wāhine  Ministry for Women states that “pay equity is the same pay for different work which has the same or similar level of skill, responsibility, and effort”. The new legislation does not operate under this definition and is essentially a pay parity bill instead of a pay equity bill, as it does not allow for comparison to ‘different work’.
  
  

So, what does this mean for our tertiary library claim? At this stage, the claim can’t be raised any time soon. Some university library sites do not meet the new gender percentage criteria, despite libraries being a female-dominated profession. Negotiating 16 separate claims, in a process that previously took five years on average, would require an enormous amount of resourcing by unions. There are also concerns that universities could now dispute claims, arguing that market factors, such as a drop in university funding and projected student enrolments, are the contributing reason for low rates of pay for library staff, rather than historical sex-based discrimination. Advocating in the workplace and upskilling librarians can only go so far. We need strong legislation to litigate adequate pay changes.

What we can do is fight back, be active in our unions, lobby our local MPs, vote in elections next year and push for professional recognition of our skills in the workplace. Have conversations with your colleagues about pay and skills, awhi each other, celebrate accomplishments and if you climb the career ladder, always advocate for lower-paid staff who do work that is important and skilled. Without library assistants, our libraries would cease to exist.