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"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.
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