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Pepper Media SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT Thursday, April 14, 2016 THE GENDER WAGE GAP IS ABOUT MORE THAN WAGES A sponsored feature by Pepper Media Thirty years have passed since I first entered the workforce as a young educator – the first woman in my family with a college diploma – believing that my generation would be the one to tear down the barriers to women’s equality. It was this profound belief in fairness that motivated me to get involved with the women’s movement and the labour movement, and it guided me as a mother who wanted all of my children – one girl and two boys – to enter the workforce as equals. I wasn’t a lone idealist. In June of 1987, when I was in the midst of starting my family, Ontario became the second jurisdiction in Canada to pass historic pay equity legislation that confirmed a public and government commitment to “redress systemic gender discrimination” in workplace wages and benefits. We were certain that change was on the way. Today, my children are all grown up and they are in a workforce that is just as divided as it was when they were born. In Ontario, the average wage for women is 70 percent of what a man earns for the same work. If you are a woman of colour, it falls to 64 percent. If you are an Aboriginal woman it is only 46 percent. If you are a woman with a disability it is extremely difficult to even get a job, and those who do are often among the most precarious and poorly paid. How can we still be so far behind? The answer is more complicated than simply fixing and enforcing the pay equity legislation that has failed to deliver the progress it promised. What these past 30 years have taught us is that we have to go much further in raising the bar for all workers. After all, when the overwhelming majority of Ontarians are falling behind and most of the good jobs we lost during the recession have been replaced with precarious ones, it is women who are the most likely to fall back down to the bottom. That is why the best approach to closing the gendered wage gap is to tackle inequality from the bottom up. To start, Ontario must increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour. A movement is spreading across North America to demand “$15 and Fairness” and it is based on the basic notion that every job should be a pathway out of poverty. Raising the minimum wage to $15 and tying that rate to the cost of inflation would peg wages permanently at 10 percent above the poverty line and lift nearly a million women out of poverty. However, the most significant action that Ontario can make to improve the wages and working conditions for women is to make it easier to join a union. While labour unions were historically concentrated in male-dominated sectors, like manufacturing and resource extraction, unions see their biggest growth each year in female-dominated workplaces. That is because women know a good thing when they see it. Unionized women have been better able to negotiate good wages, benefits, and working conditions. The net result is an average pay boost for unionized women of $7.83 an hour more than non-unionized women. This was certainly my experience, as an educational assistant supporting elementary and high school students with special needs, when I got my first union job in a school board after years of precarious work in private childcare centers. However, current labour laws in Ontario make it hard to join a union and these laws have not been revamped in 25 years, which has worked strongly against the goals of pay equity legislation. This year, women workers have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to finally bring fairness to the workforce. That is because Ontario is currently reviewing the province’s employment laws. This is our chance to bring in sweeping changes that can close the gender wage gap, lift every worker up and help create the Ontario we want. While this change might be late in coming, it will make me proud to fight for it with my children at my side. Patty Coates Secretary-Treasurer of the Ontario Federation of Labour Continued from page 3 STEP 6 Promote access to collective bargaining Unionized women receive better pay than their non-unionized counterparts since unions negotiated pay equity plans with employers that led to pay adjustments. Unionization is a pathway to close the gender wage gap. The Labour Relations Act needs modernizing including expanding card-based certification. New sectoral certification and bargaining structures should also be implemented. STEP 7 Increase the minimum wage An effective and immediate step for low-wage women is for the Ontario government to bring in emergency legislation to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour immediately and maintain annual increases until the minimum wage is at the level of a living wage. STEP 8 Provide affordable and accessible child care The time for a program is now. Many women work part-time because of a lack of affordable child care. In 1988, the Government fully recognized that access to an affordable child care program was a cornerstone to ensure women’s equality. STEP 9 Mainstream equity compliance into government laws and policies All social and economic policies should be vetted by government Ministries for their impact on the gender wage gap. This includes litigation decisions and ensuring that scarce public resources are used to provide pay equity for women providing important public services and not used to fight pay claims. Cabinet policy submissions should include a sign off to ensure proposed laws and policies have been reviewed for their contribution to closing the pay gap. STEP 10 Mainstream equity compliance into workplaces and businesses Employers also need to mainstream equity compliances into their workplace practices, including analyzing the impact of recruitment and retention practices as well as pay and promotion structures and conditions of work have on vulnerable groups. STEP 11 End Violence and Harassment of Women The Ontario government’s targeted strategy to end Genderbased-violence needs to be expanded to address the fact that a woman who is the victim of assault or harassed out of a job is left with few economic resources. STEP 12 Secure Decent Work for Women Across the Economic Spectrum The precarious labour market means predominantly lower wages, less access to benefits, holiday pay, overtime pay, pensions, severance pay and employment insurance. In today’s labour market, there is little balance between the power of employers and the many precariously employed women. It is time for the Ontario government to commit to the Decent Work agenda to address this precarity. By Jennifer Quito and Jan Borowy, Ontario Equal Pay Coalition OFL ACTION REPORT 11