Thank you.
The New Brunswick Coalition for Pay Equity is a non-profit organization. We're advocating for pay equity legislation in the public and private sectors. We are working mostly at the provincial level, but we are a member of the Pay Equity Network, which is a national organization. We represent over 600 New Brunswick individuals and 74 organizations.
First of all, I want to thank you for the opportunity to present our perspective on poverty issues. In this presentation, we want to make the connection between poverty reduction and the introduction of strong pay equity legislation for the public and private sectors, legislation that is proactive and rights-based.
Long-term solutions to poverty require a gender-based analysis and the removal of systemic barriers to women's equality. Pay equity legislation addresses one systemic barrier, and that's what I want to talk about. Pay equity is equal pay for work of equal value, and it's about recognizing the value of predominantly female work.
Now, a gender-based analysis of poverty would show that women are more likely to be poor. If they raise a family alone, their risk jumps. Other groups of women are disproportionately likely to experience poverty—unattached women under age 65, women with disabilities, and racialized and aboriginal women. In 2008, Canadian women earned 83.8% of men's hourly wages. For every dollar earned by an aboriginal woman, a non-aboriginal man earns about $2.34. So a key reason why women are more likely to be living in poverty is that they are overrepresented in lower-wage areas that have been traditionally considered women's work.
The Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, CRIAW, has estimated that 70% of women in paid employment are concentrated in a few female-dominated sectors, such as health, teaching, clerical, sales, and services. Pay equity would allow for an evaluation of predominantly female work in terms of skills, responsibilities, working conditions, and efforts. This would allow for a fair and objective process of comparison with jobs traditionally done by men, in order to adjust compensation rates equitably.
Studies have shown that pay equity tends to have its strongest impact on lower-paid work. As such, it's a policy initiative that plays an important role not just in eliminating discrimination but in reducing poverty, for if you put money into the pockets of working poor, they will spend it on their families.
A number of researchers have pointed out that moving out of income assistance into paid work is often not a route out of poverty for women because of the low pay that is attached to traditionally female occupations, which they typically enter. Pay equity would act like a magnet to attract single mothers and other women on income assistance who want to enter or re-enter the workforce.
Clearly, pay equity contributes to poverty reduction. But, people might ask, what about the cost of implementing pay equity?
It was estimated in a 2004 study that removing the discrimination component of the gender wage gap in New Brunswick would result in an 11% increase in personal income tax collection, amounting to $609 million for this province alone. Importantly, the federal Pay Equity Task Force, in 2004, drawing on available evidence from Ontario and Quebec, which have the equity legislation, concluded that most employers judge the effects of pay equity to be positive, providing them with an opportunity to strengthen their pay systems while also improving labour relations.
Canada is a signatory of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, but we've been sharply criticized lately. Whereas Canada was ranked fourteenth in the world for equality between the sexes in 2004, the World Economic Forum dropped us to thirty-first place in its 2007 ranking of 130 countries.
So now we urge the federal government to remove one of the major systemic barriers to poverty reduction: wage discrimination.
That's the five minutes, is it? Okay.
Federal pay equity legislation would help to remove that systemic barrier. We totally support the task force that presented a report in 2004 on pay equity. They had a number of recommendations that I would like to highlight quickly.
We need to adopt a new pay equity law to extend the coverage to aboriginal people, people with disabilities, and visible minorities. We need to protect all employees, involve employees in pay equity plans, develop non-sexist evaluation methods, ensure that pay equity is not negotiable, sustain pay equity, and create a pay equity commission as well as a tribunal.
In conclusion, Canadian women represent about half of the paid labour force and receive 38% of the national income. The federal government can contribute to poverty reduction by using gender-based analysis and by reducing the systemic barriers to women's equality. One such way would be to adopt proactive pay equity legislation.
In closing, I want to say thanks to two of our volunteers who prepared these notes for the coalition, Gail Taylor and Lee Chalmers. They would have liked to be here, but they had engagements. They live outside Moncton, and I wanted to acknowledge their contribution.