Pay Equity

This is the report of a task force whose basic objective was to conduct a comprehensive review of the current equal pay provisions of the Canadian Human Rights Act, section 11, as well as the Equal Wages Guidelines of 1986. Work of the task force included consultations, public hearings, roundtables, private meetings, research, and a symposium to provide information about the wide range of issues relevant to a review of pay equity legislation. The first four chapters review wage inequalities in Canada & within designated groups in the labour market, the Canadian legislative response to wage inequality, the current pay equity model and its limitations, and proactive models & legislation in the public sectors of various provinces. Chapter 5 outlines a model that the task force recommends to replace the current legislation. Subsequent chapters address issues which arise in connection with this proposed model, including the scope of application, the elements of a pay equity plan, employee participation, predominance of certain groups in job classes, evaluating gender-predominant job classes, estimating & correcting wage gaps, allowable exemptions, maintenance of pay equity, enforcement, timelines & transition to new legislation, pay equity and collective bargaining, and the role of oversight agencies. Recommendations made throughout the report are also listed at the end. Appendices include excerpts from relevant legislation.

In this inspiring history of a union, labour historian Andy Hanson delves deep into the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) and how it evolved from two deeply divided unions to one of the province’s most united and powerful voices for educators. Today’s teacher is under constant pressure to raise students’ test scores, while the rise of neoliberalism in Canada has systematically stripped our education system of funding and support. But educators have been fighting back with decades of fierce labour action, from a landmark province-wide strike in the 1970s, to record-breaking front-line organizing against the Harris government and the Common Sense Revolution, to present-day picket lines and bargaining tables. Hanson follows the making of elementary teachers in Ontario as a distinct class of white-collar, public-sector workers who awoke in the last quarter of the twentieth century to the power of their collective strength.

With growing concern about the conditions facing low wage workers and new challenges to traditional forms of labor market protection, this book offers a timely analysis of the purpose and effectiveness of minimum wages in different European countries. Building on original industry case studies, the analysis goes beyond general debates about the relative merits of labor market regulation to reveal important national differences in the functioning of minimum wage systems and their integration within national models of industrial relations. There is no universal position on minimum wage policy followed by governments and social partners. Nor is it true that trade unions consistently support minimum wages and employers oppose them. The evidence in this book shows that interests and objectives change over time and differ across industries and countries. Investigating the pay bargaining strategies of unions and employers in cleaning, security, retail, and construction, this book’s industry case studies show how minimum wage policy interacts with collective bargaining to produce different types of pay equity effects. The analysis provides new findings of ‘ripple effects’ shaped by trade union strategies and identifies key components of an ‘egalitarian pay bargaining approach’ in social dialogue. The lessons for policy are to embrace an inter-disciplinary approach to minimum wage analysis, to be mindful of the interconnections with the changing national systems of industrial relations, and to interrogate the pay equity effects.

McCann explains how wage discrimination battles have raised public legal consciousness and helped reform activists mobilize working women in the pay equity movement over the past two decades. Rights at Work explores the political strategies in more than a dozen pay equity struggles since the late 1970s, including battles of state employees in Washington and Connecticut, as well as city employees in San Jose and Los Angeles. Relying on interviews with over 140 union and feminist activists, McCann shows that, even when the courts failed to correct wage discrimination, litigation and other forms of legal advocacy provided reformers with the legal discourse--the understanding of legal rights and their constraints--for defining and advancing their cause.