A fair wage for a fair day's work; Pay equity is a much-misunderstood concept that is being taken seriously only in Quebec
Vancouver Sun / The Montreal Gazette
Nov 18 2009 
By: Janet Bagnall

Pay equity is a relatively cheap, reasonably easy-to-apply mechanism to rid the workplace of historic, systemic wage discrimination against women.

Because women were forced to crowd into the few fields deemed suitable for their sex -- teaching, nursing and clerking, for the most part -- the "market value" assigned to these fields started off low and stayed low.

It might seem unlikely that this historic inequity persists in the marketplace in 2009, but it does.

Take this example in which a job done mainly by women -- daycare worker -- is paid, which is to say valued, substantially less than the traditionally male job of auto mechanic.

In Canada, daycare workers with between five and nine years' experience are paid between $10 and $16 an hour. An auto mechanic with the same level of experience will be paid between $15 and $24 an hour. His lowest pay rate is just $1 short of her highest.

Do Canadians value their cars more than their children? If asked, they'd more than likely say no. But the "market," far from taking its cue from the value consumers place on a given service, instead is keeping alive the spirit of discrimination that has for so long worked against women. This is true not only in Canada, but in the United States as well….

The marketplace will not self-correct. The market is perfectly happy to have a group of people who are systematically underpaid. Why would employers volunteer to pay women more when social consensus held for decades that they were not worth as much as men?

Suggesting women shift along to other, better-paid jobs is not the solution. How many auto mechanics do we need? Compared with daycare workers?

It remains uphill work, however, to convince employers that underpaying typically "female" jobs amounts to discrimination and must be stopped, says Louise Marchand, head of Quebec's wage equity commission.

Recently Marchand held a press conference to warn Quebec employers that they have a little more than a year to conform to the province's pay-equity law, which is already 13 years old.

If they miss the Dec. 31, 2010, deadline, they'll be in trouble. Penalties will start to pile up, along with any money they are found to owe their female employees, and interest from 2001, the original deadline.

To date, a little more than half of Quebec's employers have gone through the comparative pay exercise and made the corrections that were needed.

A major problem, Marchand said, is that employers confuse the idea of equal pay -- paying men and women the same for doing exactly the same job -- with the concept of pay equity, which requires a cross-job comparison of skills, working conditions, etc. to determine a fair salary….

"Wage equity is a question of justice," Marchand said. "As a society, we believe in the equality of men and women.

"Wage equity is a debt that is owed to women who were the victims of discrimination in the workplace.

"This is not a debt that will be written off. It is owed to those women."