Equal Pay Coalition steps up campaign for revitalized pay equity system

As Ontario moves towards the 20th Anniversary of the Pay Equity Act, the Equal Pay Coalition is mounting an Ontario-wide campaign to bring public and electoral attention to the need for Ontario’s pay equity system to be revitalized, strengthened, and adequately resourced and enforced. The Coalition, with its broad-based membership of trade unions, community and social justice organizations and business and professional women’s organizations represents over one million Ontarians.

Pay equity is equal pay for work of equal value. Pay equity is the fundamental human right of women workers to be paid wages that are free of the systemic gender-based discrimination that values and pays women's work less than men's work of comparable value.

Pay equity is the legal remedy to sex-based wage discrimination. Pay equity requires that women's and men's jobs be evaluated in a non-discriminatory way by accurately identifying and valuing the skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions of the job. Pay equity requires that female jobs be paid the same as male jobs of similar value. If a female job is paid less than a male job of similar value, pay equity requires that pay to the female job be raised to the match the male job.

In summary, pay equity means:

• paying jobs usually done by women at least the same as jobs usually done by men

• even though they are different jobs

• as long as the jobs are of equal or comparable value.

Why Do We Need Pay Equity? 

Historically, men and women tended to work in different jobs. Even today, in Canada 70% of women with paid employment are concentrated in a few female-dominated sectors included health, teaching, clerical, sales and service. This sex segregation of work has been and continues to be linked with wage discrimination and low pay.

In general, work traditionally or predominantly done by women is paid less than work traditionally or predominantly done by men regardless of the value of the work to the employer or the consumer. The more heavily women are concentrated in a job, the less it pays.

This has created a significant wage gap between men and women.

Pay equity legislation works to eliminate that discrimination and close the wage gap. In 1987, the year before Ontario's Pay Equity Act came into force, comparing average yearly full time salaries, women earned only 64% of what men earned. After almost twenty years of pay equity laws, women now earn 71% of what men earn.

Pay equity works. But the Pay Equity Commission has expressed concern that one broader public sector and private sectors are substantially not complying with the law. The Act must continue to to be enforced and wage discrimination must be eliminated.

Facts About Pay Equity

Equal pay is a priority for women. Discrimination in pay is not limited to one career or demographic. Pay discrimination affects women of all ages, races, and education levels - regardless of their family decisions.

The Wage Gap:

According to Statistics Canada, women, on average earn 29% less than men. This wage gap was even larger for racial minority women, aboriginal women and women with disabilities. Racial minority women, on average, earn 36% less than men. Aboriginal women, on average, earn 54% less than men. Women with disabilities earn significantly less than women and men without disabilities.

Discriminatory wages affect women throughout their lives from their first jobs and continuing into retirement.

For more information, please see the Equal Pay Coalition’s site at:

http://www.equalpaycoalition.org 

We have prepared and sent to the Leaders yesterday afternoon our attached letter which includes a Questionnaire which seven commitments for them to answer yes or no and return to the Coalition by Monday, September 17, 2007. This letter is a very good summary of the Coalition’s election requests, the need for pay equity and includes a list of the Coalition’s members and the new revised Chart - Pay Equity Denied to Ontario Women updated to September 2007 which sets out the money owing to women in the proxy sector. The emails attaching the letters to the candidates are being sent to the candidates today with a request that they be returned by email to mcornish@equalpaycoalition.org.