"From the Left"

The 1998 Guelph Tribune columns

August 12, 1998

Contrary to popular opinion, money is not the cause of all evil. The inequitable distribution of money is. Those who don't have any do what they can to get some. Those who have too much use every means available to keep it. That's where the conflicts begin. Of course, wealth has been distributed unfairly since long before any of us in Guelph have been alive, and it continues to be concentrated in the bank accounts of an easily identifiable group. For the most part, this does not include women, visible minorities, native Canadians or people with disabilities. These people tend to be stuck in low paying jobs, or in no job at all.

A Statistics Canada report released last June revealed that almost one-third of men who had earnings below the poverty line in 1993 moved to better paying jobs by 1995. Only 17 per cent of women, and just 12 per cent of single mothers, managed to move above the poverty line. Although the study doesn't mention them, people in the other disadvantaged groups had no better luck escaping poverty. Interestingly, it found that 32 per cent of the people who escaped poverty did so as a result of joining a union.

No government in Canada has ever confronted the cause of this disparity in wealth, but some have attempted to offset its effects through pay equity legislation. Under these laws, jobs are analyzed and compared. Those which require relatively equal skills, or which are of similar value to an employer must be paid at the same level. Not surprisingly, this analysis usually uncovers jobs performed by women that are undervalued and under compensated when compared to jobs performed by men. Such was the situation within the federal public service. Thirteen years ago, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the union representing federal workers, launched a court action to force the federal government to abide by its own pay equity law. A couple of weeks ago, a Human Rights Tribunal ruled that 190,000 women were entitled to back pay estimated at being anywhere from one to seven billion dollars. At its high end, this averages out to about $2800 per year for each woman.

Early in the game, the Mulroney government tried to derail the Tribunal's work by throwing up repeated court challenges. In 1993, when he was opposition leader, Jean Chretien condemned these legal delays, and promised "a Liberal government would abide by the Tribunal's decision." Now that he is Prime Minister, he is searching around for reasons to appeal the decision and further delay its implementation. The Reform Party, needless to say, is urging the government to appeal. One of their MPs, John Williams, said pay equity "is a bureaucratic notion that fails to take market forces into account." Libby Davis, an NPD MP, welcomed the decision and urged the government to pay up. The few Tories in the House, probably remembering who got the government into this mess in the first place, are staying quiet.

This is a fundamental issue of justice. Had these jobs been fairly valued all along, the women workers would have been taking that money home in their weekly pay cheques. They could have paid off some debts, maybe saved a bit, and certainly paid out less in loan or credit card interest. It is clearly their money, and the Liberals should stop their shameful attempts to weasel out of paying it.