Public Service Alliance of Canada BC

OTTAWA – While the Harper government is in denial about women’s inequality, income gaps between men and women persist and are growing, according to the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC).

“It’s unacceptable that four years after a federal Pay Equity Task Force released its report recommending a new proactive federal pay equity law, women still face wage discrimination,” says PSAC Regional Executive Vice-President Robyn Benson.

• More at national website: Put pay equity back on the agenda!

In the mid ‘90s women working full-time earned on average 72 cents for every dollar earned by a man. By 2005, that proportion had dropped to 70.5 cents. And the pay gap for immigrant women, many of whom are racialized, is much worse.

“Women know where the Prime Minister and his government stand”, says Benson. “As head of the National Citizens Coalition in 1998 he declared that pay equity was a rip-off and that ‘the federal government should scrap its ridiculous pay equity law’.”

According to Benson, “what’s ridiculous is that women are denied their right to pay equity because their complaints take decades to resolve under the current law. What’s ridiculous is that there is nothing in the current law to force employers to review their pay practices and correct discriminatory wages.”

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Source: The Ottawa CitizenThe federal government has been discriminating against a group of federal nurses on the basis of their gender for more than three decades, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has ruled.

The ruling could potentially expose the government to hundreds of millions of dollars of liability for back wages and compensation, according to the lawyer for most of the nurses.

And the principles it endorses could apply to other employee groups as well, said Philippe Dufresne, senior counsel for the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

The human rights tribunal found that the nurses, who determine the eligibility of applicants for CPP disability benefits, perform essentially the same core functions as government doctors who are paid about twice as much.

The group of nurses, called medical adjudicators, is 95-percent female, while the doctors’ group, known as medical advisers, is 80-per-cent male.

Under the Canadian Human Rights Act, it is illegal to treat a female-dominated group differently from a male-dominated group when both perform the same or substantially similar work.

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OTTAWA - The Harper government has once again shown that it has little interest in women’s equality in the workforce, says the Public Service Alliance of Canada.

“In a response to the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women, the Conservatives have said there will be no new, proactive pay equity legislation, ignoring the recommendations of a Federal Pay Equity Task Force,” says PSAC National Executive Vice-President Patty Ducharme.

• Information about the Pay Equity Network at the CLC website.

The Task Force spent three years consulting with employers and employer organizations, unions, women’s groups and individuals, as well as commissioning research on the issue of pay equity. In May 2004, the Task Force issued its report calling for a complete overhaul of the current complaint-based federal pay equity law. Instead of a new law, the government is proposing increased education, specialized mediation assistance and compliance monitoring.

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