The value of indigenous perspectives in the re-valuing of work and labour

ABSTRACT

Debate concerning the value of work and labour has evolved across various dimensions and extended beyond economic considerations. Recent crises, especially in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic, have prompted what appeared to be an accelerated re-evaluation of the value of labour, incorporating a broader inclusive review. This article argues for a more substantive re-configuration that challenges the conventional economic framing of labour as a commodity. Borrowing from Ozkazanc-Pan and Pullen’s framing of value, it evaluates the worth, status and utility of essential, women’s and academic labour, emphasising the unequal impacts of the global crisis on each. It also explores indigenous perspectives that advocate for a more holistic understanding, integrating the worth, utility and status of labour. The article concludes with a call for a fundamental reassessment of the value of labour through an indigenous lens that transcends traditional economic views; one that envisions a broader conceptualisation of the value of work and labour to encompass well-being and historical considerations.

KEYWORDS:

• Value
• work
• labour
• indigenous
• essential
• women
• academic

This year marks 40 years since the Association of Industrial Relations of Australia and New Zealand (AIRAANZ) was officially constituted at the Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education in Victoria. In keeping with the 37^th AIRAANZ conference, which focused on Labour and Value, and based on the presidential address presented at that conference, this article reflects on the re-valuing of human work and labour in light of recent global crises. Across the past few decades, political, economic, social and technological developments have been met with the application of new perspectives to explore the ‘value of labour question’: from geopolitical perspectives relating to the impacts of globalisation (Arrowsmith 2018; Lansbury 2018); to social approaches and theories relating to women’s and migrant labour (Campbell et al. 2019; Peetz and Murray 2019); to technological considerations relating to impacts on economic markets and employment (Healy et al. 2017; Roos and Shroff 2017); and more recently, to environmental and sustainability concerns relating to growing climate and well-being crises (Dean and Rainnie 2021; Douglas and McGhee 2021). As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, political, economic, health and well-being, technological and environmental disruptions all came into play at once, forcing a re-evaluation of underlying assumptions of the value of labour. This article highlights how our understanding of the value of labour has broadened as the contexts in which we operate have changed, and reflects on how the valuing of labour is traditionally embedded in economic perspectives of labour as a commodity. It argues that this economic framing prevents a substantial re-valuing of labour, brought about by the pandemic context, from materialising.

Much has been written about the effects of the global pandemic on employment and work. Rather than rehearse those arguments, this article considers the unequal impacts of the global pandemic on i) the value of essential labour; ii) the value of women’s (and ethnic women’s) labour; and iii) the value of academic labour. Borrowing from Ozkazanc-Pan and Pullen’s (2021) examination of the unequal impacts of the COVID pandemic on ‘women’s work’, this article argues that value, in modern-industrial or post-industrial Western cultures, is linked to ‘worth’, where ‘worth’ relates to economic values, and to ‘utility’, which is primarily linked to economic perceptions of usefulness. To this framing, I add a third dimension – ‘status’, or worker’s standing, and the power associated with that positioning, which Ozkazanc-Pan and Pullen (2021) allude to. This article proposes that despite some fleeting positive changes inspired by our responses to COVID-19, in all three labour spheres – essential, women’s and ethnic women’s and academic labour – longer-term changes in valuing labour and work have been less forthcoming. And while the COVID-19 pandemic offers us an opportunity to reassess the value of labour, addressing the uneven impacts of the pandemic across different groups of workers is critical. Drawing on this assessment, the article concludes that one way forward, a way involving a substantive, material revaluing of labour, is to embrace and apply perspectives that challenge deep-set assumptions of what we take the worth of work, the utility of labour, and the status of workers to be.

Evaluating the re-valuing of ‘essential’ labour and work

The COVID-19 pandemic unfolded at a time when increasing technological developments and the devaluing of certain forms of manual or human-to-human work had been widely prophesied for over a decade (ILO 2006; OECD 2016). At first, the global nature of the pandemic appeared as a potential circuit-breaker, sparking a substantial re-valuing of labour and throwing into sharp relief our reliance on work at ‘front lines’. When governments rolled out restrictions to stem the spread of the virus in 2020, it quickly became apparent that cleaners, checkout operators, couriers and bus drivers were as ‘essential’ to safety and survival, as doctors, nurses, police and emergency coordinators were to health responses. At the outset of the pandemic in Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, just over 25% (668,000) of the workforce worked in ‘essential services’ under the tightest lockdown restrictions (MBIE 2020). In keeping with other countries, the majority of these ‘essential workers’ were employed in healthcare, social assistance, retail, transportation or primary industries within New Zealand and Australia (ABS 2022a; MBIE 2020). It was at this time that Hodder and Martínez Lucio (2021) noted changes to political narratives on work and employment. Terms like the ‘value of work’ started to emerge in political discourses as the health and economic crisis revealed both the undervaluing and underpayment of work regarded as ‘essential’ in the context of COVID, elevating the utility value ascribed to essential work and essential workers (Martīnez Lucio and McBride 2020; Winton and Howcroft 2020). As the pandemic unfolded, it became increasingly apparent how crucial and irreplaceable essential workers were to the sustainability and functioning of society.

Essential labour was not only crucial for people’s survival, but unlike the majority who were able to work from home, many essential workers had to ‘burst their bubbles’ (to use the language of the time), and leave the safety of their homes to perform their work – placing additional demands on their ability to meet the educational and well-being needs of their families. As Winton and Howcroft (2020) and others have noted, for many essential workers working from their regular place of work brought disproportionate physical and mental risks to essential workers and their families, presenting many with a difficult choice between ensuring their own (and their families) safety and well-being and securing financial survival. The public responded in kind with weekly ‘clap because we care’ campaigns in recognition of the work and risks that health care, emergency service, supermarket and security workers were enduring.

For frontline workforces, the pandemic made visible their previously hidden labour, elevating their social status and providing greater social recognition or valorisation for their contributions (Gordon-Bouvier 2021; Ravenswood et al. 2023). A study exploring the occupational well-being of blue-collar workers in Finland found that cleaners reported significantly higher levels of pride and a greater sense of meaning to their work during the crisis, highlighting the positive impacts of social revaluing on worker’s well-being and status (Saari et al. 2022). And so, a ‘re-valuing’ seemed to be underway, moving many of these occupations from largely unseen reproductive labour to highly visible forms of social reproductive labour. The pandemic highlighted ‘the extent to which society depends upon frontline workers who are often employed in low-paid jobs whose quality matches neither the importance of the work nor the hazards involved’ (OECD 2022). In short, the re-valuing of essential work led to an increase in utility and status. However, as workforces divided according to their ‘essentialness’ or ‘utility,’ it also became clearer that the majority of these frontline worker heroes were engaged in traditional, lower-paid and less secure unskilled or semi-skilled jobs, and were disproportionately female, indigenous or migrant. Perhaps related to this, increases in perceived utility and status did not translate into increases in voice or political power for these groups. And, subsequently, the re-valuation that the pandemic brought about was not reflected in increased wages or employment protections.

This raises questions as to why the re-valuing of labour failed to bring about an increase in the worth of labour (Marino et al. 2021; Winton and Howcroft 2020). Research examining the impact of the pandemic on labour at the Institute of Work and Equities at the University of Manchester argues that during the early parts of the global crisis, the re-valuing of labour was not based on conventional market or economic measures but constructed by the social context (Marino et al. 2021). In essence, the pandemic demonstrated that a community’s social or emotional valuing of work is not necessarily matched by a material ‘levelling up’ of terms and conditions of employment for sectors with high representations of women (and indigenous or migrant) workers -prompting calls for a deeper re-thinking of the way that the value of labour is understood and measure and the use of classifications such as ‘essential/non-essential’ or ‘skilled/semi-skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ work. So, for essential workers, the ‘circuit-breaker’ that the COVID pandemic provided did not break the circuit completely - utility and status may have increased, but worth stayed the same – and if recent higher inflation rates are considered, in real terms, the worth of their labour stayed the same or, more likely, declined.

The faltering re-valuation of women’s and ethnic women’s labour

The pandemic led to a reassessment of the value of ‘women’s work’, prompting fears that decades of gender equality progress might be derailed or diminished (Azcona et al. 2020). Global reports demonstrate the economic fallout of the pandemic had a harsher impact on women globally with reports of women in formal employment losing 64 million jobs at a cost of $8,000 billion US dollars in wages in 2020 (Oxfam 2021). And for the 740 million women working in the informal economy, their income fell by 60% in the first month of the pandemic (UN Women 2020). In Aotearoa New Zealand, 90% of reported pandemic-related redundancies in 2020 were jobs held by women (StatsNZ 2020). Like women in Australia, those in New Zealand were more likely to lose their jobs than have their hours reduced and less likely to find another job (Ministry for Women MfW 2020). Factors contributing to the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic on women include: the significant loss of women’s employment was mainly due to their prominence in frontline roles (Blumenfeld 2021; Foley and Williamson 2021); their over-representation in sectors most affected by lockdowns (Lee et al. 2022); and in casual, low-paid and insecure work (MfW 2020); and their additional burden of unpaid domestic care and educational responsibilities (Constantin et al. 2022; Foley and Cooper 2021).

Recent reports also demonstrate that the impact had a more severe effect on indigenous and ethnic women (Masselot and Hayes 2020; UN Women 2020). In Aotearoa New Zealand, Wāhine Māori (Māori women) were impacted more severely than others by employment loss – due to their over-representation in industries that were more negatively affected by lockdowns and border closures. Pasifika women, who make up a significant proportion of the ‘essential’ caregivers and cleaning workers in Aotearoa, faced greater health risks than any other ethnic group due to inequitable access to healthcare for themselves and their families (MfW 2020). Additionally, Wāhine Māori and Pasifika women generally have greater caring responsibilities for extended family, work in lower-paid sectors with a narrower range of jobs, and are highly engaged in unpaid and voluntary roles, which compounds these inequities (Parker and Donnelly 2022). Similarly, research conducted in Australia indicates that indigenous women have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. In a recent article, van Barneveld et al (2020) outline how the pandemic has worsened pre-existing economic and social inequality and dispossession faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people during the pandemic, especially in the indigenous arts and tourism sector and the informal economy which were decimated as a result of the crisis.

Gender and ethnic pay gaps are a clear indicator of women’s relative worth at work. In New Zealand, gains have been made in addressing women’s pay equity, as government efforts to tackle inequity through legislative reforms have paved the way for compensating for the historical undervaluation of women’s work. This has resulted in increased pay levels in some female-dominated occupations through pay equity claims (Parker and Donnelly 2020). To further promote gender equality, various workplace initiatives have been implemented, and women’s progression across the public sector is regularly monitored. As a result, the share of women in senior roles in the public sector reached 55.8% in 2022 (PSC 2023). Similarly, in Australia the Albanese Labor government’s recent commitment to make gender equality a central part of their policy agenda, and their promotion of childcare and parental leave schemes, pay equity, women’s safety health and gender-responsive budgeting holds the promise of significant advances in gender equality.

Despite these efforts, gender differences in worth remain entrenched in New Zealand. The latest data reveals that men on average still earn 10% more than women in New Zealand, a position that has largely remained unchanged in the last decade – a wage gap that costs New Zealand women an estimated $8 billion a year (StatsNZ 2021). Again, the deepening undervaluing of the worth of women’s work is even more pronounced along indigenous and ethnic lines. A recent inquiry by the NZ Human Rights Commission (NZ Human Rights) into Pasifika pay gaps found the gap between Pasifika and Pākeha (NZ European) men stood at 18.8% as compared to 25% for Pasifika women (NZ Human Rights 2022). The economic undervaluation of gender and ethnic work is an estimated NZ$18 billion a year (Marē 2022). Many organisations, both public and private, are striving to improve their gender and ethnic diversity while also incorporating frontline services that align with their cultural values, beliefs, and languages. This is primarily in line with their Treaty (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) obligations in New Zealand and, to use the language often deployed by these organisations, ‘to better serve their increasingly diverse customer base’. However, workers who possess the necessary cultural knowledge and skills often feel undervalued and ignored, despite being the very people these organisations claim to want to empower. For example, research shows that Pasifika workers feel their cultural skills and contributions in their workplaces are not fully recognised and efforts to share this cultural capital are not compensated (Parker and Donnelly 2022), with other research showing similar for many Māori workers (Haar and Martin 2022).

As several critiques have noted, the pandemic created a systemic crisis of social reproduction before developing into a crisis of production, prompting re-evaluations of the centrality of women’s role in ‘making the life of the people’ (Mezzadri 2021; Ozkazanc-Pan and Pullen 2021). With the decline in women’s productive labour utility, disparities in worth have plateaued or worsened, and their relative status rose as attention shifted towards a revaluing of their social reproductive labour within the home. One of the first waves of research from the pandemic confirmed women’s disproportionate burden in providing for their families and community’s educational, caring and well-being needs, at times of increased risks to their own and their families’ safety. At the same time, the contradictions of working from home were also becoming more visible (Pennington and Stanford 2020). While the home provided a sense of safety for most, it was a vulnerable space for an alarmingly high number of women (Ozkazanc-Pan and Pullen 2021). In her recent article, Summers (2022) reports that nearly half a million women in Australia who live with abusive partners face the stark choice of continuing in a violent relationship or leaving to face precarious financial situations, and with little government support. Despite the initial financial support offered by the Australian government in 2021, we now know that women with children who leave abusive relationships are financially worse off and live within a system that creates and perpetuates poverty and undervalues their reproductive labour – a situation Summers (2022, 357) terms ‘policy-induced poverty’. So, while gender and ethnic pay gaps are an increasing focus of national and workplace policies, at least in New Zealand, they rarely take account of sociocultural contextual features that run deep and can shape real equity outcomes (Parker et al. 2022), or consider whether equity measures or indexes fully capture the situation (Parker et al. 2024). While pay transparency is a crucial component of future efforts towards greater fairness in terms of worth, it is only when we fully appreciate how deeply women’s work status and utility are undervalued, that we can better measure and eliminate gaps in worth. Essentially, we need to regard the labour of women, indigenous and ethnic women as a fundamental element of how we all work together to make communities and societies better for all.

The de-valuing of academic labour

Finally, what of the value of academic labour? In his presidential address, Andrew Stewart (2022) mapped out broad shifts taking place in the academic landscape at that time and pointed to initial financial and employment losses, that were accompanied by rising rates of casualisation and work intensification. Two years on, that picture of re-structuring and re-valuing has become clearer and more challenging. At a time in which academics played a critical role in developing life-saving vaccines, and better healthcare systems, and are promoted as the ‘stars’ of government communication strategies (Universities Australia 2021), we might assume that the worth, usefulness, and status of academic labour would increase. However, it seems that this is not the case. In what the UN termed the ‘largest disruption to education in history’, the pandemic affected 94% of the global student population (UN 2020). The impacts were destructive for Australian and New Zealand universities: by the end of 2021 international students’ revenues had fallen by 40% in New Zealand and halved in Australia (Arthur 2022; Gerritsen 2022; Hurley 2021). While there are signs that international students are now returning, their numbers are reported to be about 43.6% lower than pre-COVID numbers in Australia (ABS 2022b) and even lower in New Zealand (Gerritsen 2022).

In response to what initially appeared to be short-term declines in revenue, universities have engaged in permanent labour cuts, resulting in the reduction of fixed-term, part-time and casual contracts, in addition to multiple rounds of voluntary and mandatory redundancies and enhanced retirement offers across some institutions. Early evidence of the transformations taking place provided by Littleton and Stanford’s (Littleton and Stanford 2021) report for the NTEU revealed nearly one in five university staff lost their jobs by May 2021, with Early Career Researchers (ECRs) and women bearing a disproportionate share of that decline (and who also received little government wage support). Littleton and Stanford (2021) go on to note that the ongoing curbs caused a resurgence in casualisation across Australian universities. A similar report commissioned by the Tertiary Education Union (TEU) in New Zealand revealed government underfunding of the sector since 2008. As a result, the responsibility to meet the increasing costs of tertiary education has effectively shifted to academics to generate research and student revenues, with the message that employment security is increasingly linked to academic ability to generate revenues. At the same time, New Zealand universities’ operating expenses have centred on buildings, properties, administration, marketing and technology (TEU 2022). As elsewhere, New Zealand universities continue to mitigate declining enrolments by seeking to replace established academics with less costly options.

This revaluing of academic labour through the marketisation of higher education has reshaped academic values and priorities, placed a greater reliance on the earned income of academics, workforce flexibility, and non-standard forms of employment, resulting in wage compression, especially for those on non-standard contracts (Littleton and Stanford 2021; OECD 2020). And, in an environment where all New Zealand universities reported surpluses in 2022 (Office of the Auditor-General 2022), universities have continued to push back against wage increases at a time of high inflation. In real terms, the academics who retained their jobs are regarded as worth less. Ironically, this undermining comes at a time when academics have been highly productive. For instance, Universities Australia (2021) reported that academics provided commentary for 67,000 media stories relating to the pandemic (Universities Australia 2021). In other words, the intrinsic value of academic expertise rose as a counter to misinformation in politically changed contexts, while their valuation deteriorated. Added to this, the pandemic provided ideal ‘laboratory conditions’ for universities to accelerate their digitalisation drive and migration into online domains (OECD 2020; Watermeyer et al. 2021). Despite concerns over the ceding of IP control and surveillance and audit cultures that challenge long-valued principles of academic freedom and autonomy, many academics, especially female academics, took on increased workloads to facilitate the change (Johnston et al. 2022; Peetz et al. 2022). That this particular digitalisation drive now appears to have become embedded into the fabric of many institutions poses some significant challenges for the future valuing of academic labour.

As universities face the challenge of responding to AI-based programmes like ChatGPT, they have done little to protect the values and the goodwill necessary to counter such threats. All of this is happening at a time when the sector commentary notes a ‘crisis in student engagement’, marked by students disconnecting, or becoming disengaged, from university communities. To address this problem, academics are tasked with building ‘authentic human connections’ with their students, industry and government. In short, the impact of the pandemic on academic labour has transformed from a ‘passing’ to a ‘perfect’ storm, where workers who were once highly valued and deemed essential are now regarded as potential opportunities for cost-cutting measures. The consequences of this loss of status, utility and worth will extend beyond the pandemic and will be challenging to overcome. Academic trust and goodwill will be difficult to rebuild.

Conclusion

Tangible changes in the actual worth, utility and status of essential workers, women and ethnic women workers, and academics, have either been fleeting, inconsequential or non-existent. Or they have reinforced traditional tropes that are grounded in conventional neo-liberal and industrial-Western economic views of what progress means. The experiences of the three broad groups of workers explored in this article highlight general issues. As the pandemic has transitioned to a health, economic and social crisis, rather than being a game-changer, it has embedded pre-existing disparities. Therefore, it is important to consider where real progress might come from or, where a significant revaluation of labour might occur. To achieve lasting change that promotes fair and sustainable growth, we must address embedded assumptions and encourage diverse views on what it means to have worth, to be useful and to obtain status in our societies. This may require a closer examination of perspectives that question notions of value not linked to unfettered economic growth. When viewed in this light, labour becomes a commodity whose utility is defined by its categorisation of skill level in the market, whose worth is determined by the level of importance in the process of production within imperfect labour markets, and whose status is inextricably linked to a worker’s standing as a commodity. However, this is -at best – a partial perspective.

There are several ways to approach this issue. For instance, ideas of de-growth and anti-capitalism are increasingly discussed in the northern hemisphere, as are concepts that relate growth to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Others might point to feminist perspectives that argue that women’s work, including unpaid reproductive labour, has been undervalued and ignored in the assessment of labour’s value, calling for recognition of their contribution. As Ozkazanc-Pan and Pullen (2021, 5) note, a feminist perspective calls us to attend to a ‘crisis of social production before the crisis of production by assigning worth to labour’s “life-giving roles”, rejecting economic views of worth assigned to labour productivity’. This emphasises the rejection of contemporary capitalist notions that productivity is purely related to paid work – that value derives from the reproduction of life itself. Taken seriously, feminist lenses could lead us to reconfigure assumptions about worth and utility and enable us to question why essential workers, women workers (indigenous or migrant), and academic workers are not afforded greater status given the crucial roles they play in creating and promoting healthy, functioning societies.

However, there are other perspectives. Indigenous perspectives, for example, provide a different way of thinking about utility, worth and status. Te ao Māori, a Māori worldview, allows for a broader conceptualisation of values that focus on collective well-being and take account of relationships with the environment (Pirini and Cummings 2022). Such approaches view the past, present and future as interconnected. Accordingly, utility incorporates social and cultural reproductive work, and all labour is essential (and interconnected). Mika et al (2022) argue that the Māori approach to value, which they label manahau, combines mana (power, authority, and dignity) and hau (vitality of people, places, and objects). Everything is interdependent, which is understood and can be shared as wisdom by those who have experience. In keeping, ‘elders’ generally have higher status in the indigenous world and a premium is placed on intergenerational connection and continuity. Indigenous perspectives necessitate the dismantling of inequity and the acknowledgement of (and opening up to) different approaches to what we see as valuable. Worth, it follows, is about maximising positive outcomes for all while ensuring the returns are fairly and evenly distributed (Mika et al. 2022). And this means not merely seeing people’s present and potential worth, but also their past worth. So a central part of the re-valuing of worth, therefore, is also about acknowledging historical inequities (Jackson 2022).

So, what would applying indigenous perspectives mean to the re-valuing of labour in the three arenas outlined above? For essential workers, a te ao Māori approach would focus on the utility of labour beyond its function in economic terms, and greater recognition of their contribution to collective societal wellbeing (Brougham et al. 2020). This would raise questions about the relevance of current skill classifications and greater consideration of worker’s cultural and collective roles in workplaces, as others have noted (Brougham et al. 2020; Parker et al. 2022). And redefining essential work, however poorly paid or unregulated, provides a window of opportunity for unions and social movements to bargain and seek greater protection for these ‘systemically valuable’ workers (Koepp 2020). Moreover, an indigenous perspective would not just value worth and status in the present, but remember and honour past sacrifices made by those whose labour was deemed essential during the pandemic, and factor past inequities into present settlements.

And for women, what might an indigenous perspective provide? In a critique of extant value indices, Parker et al. (2024) show that institutional-level gender indices rarely take account of socio-cultural contextual features that can shape equity outcomes. Their research argues that including indicators of intersectional inequality, co-designed with indigenous and ethnic women offers a more meaningful and useful assessment of women’s worth, utility and status. An example of this kind of re-valuing in action is the Mana Wāhine Kaupapa Inquiry established by the New Zealand government (MfW 2022). It provides a framework for looking differently at the value of Māori women’s work, acknowledging the impacts of colonisation on their labour and examining the effects of policies and legislation on the ability of Wāhine Māori to access leadership roles, all with a focus on their experiences of discrimination and inequity in employment contexts, as evident with pay gaps. The inquiry which is due to report later this year will examine the collected experiences of Wāhine Māori before colonisation – many of whom were leaders whose role it was to ensure intergenerational transmission of knowledge. This kind of thinking can advance a gender-and ethnicity-focused approach to economic recovery, where indigenous and feminist perspectives can combine for positive social change (MfW 2022).

And finally, what would an indigenous perspective offer the re-valuing of academic labour? In response to their Treaty obligations, New Zealand universities have incorporated several Māori values into institutional practices. While many have been quick to seek to apply these to students, they fall short of doing so in relation to academic staff. If applied as Haar and Delaney (2009) suggest, Māori cultural values would emphasise relational work. Such an approach might increase the value ascribed to the often undermined traditional roles of pastoral care. Moreover, the status of academic work might increase because we would value imparting wisdom across generations, and trust experienced academics to know the best way to share that knowledge. Also, we might revalue worth by placing greater emphasis on people development and less on capital development, and we would value experienced staff not in terms of their declining potential economic or replacement value, but in terms of their continuing contribution. While this may appear a bit radical for some, it is an approach connected to global trends and increased localisation. And it is not a new approach, 40 years ago in the first presidential AIRAANZ address, Bill Ford (1983) argued that ‘academics down under still transfer ideas and theories developed in the UK and US as if they were fossilized colonies’. His hope and call was for the decolonisation of industrial relations and it is a call that I would like to reinforce today by arguing for greater attention to indigenous (and local) perspectives in future industrial relations scholarship across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Jane Parker and Stephen Cummings for their generous feedback in draft revisions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Noelle Donnelly

Noelle Donnelly is an Associate Professor of Employment Relations and Human Resource Management in the School of Management at Victoria University of Wellington, Te Herenga Waka and President of AIRAANZ (2022-2023). Noelle’s research focuses on gender equity, flexible work and employee voice in employment.