Thank you. Thank you for inviting me to speak. I just want to note that I spoke a number of years ago against PSECA, particularly against section 36, which banned people from seeking the help of either employers or unions in addressing pay equity concerns. I thought that legislation stunk, if I could put it in so many words.
My greatest value today though will be to raise ideas and thoughts that might not have been presented before and to suggest some labour market matters about which the House of Commons ought to care. I come to you as an industrial relations researcher, and for the past six years I have been dean of a vibrant business school in a U15 research university in a province that's doing very well. My thoughts have been shaped by many sources and provoked by continued contact with multiple generations. I see thousands of young people every decade and I'm always spotting and watching trends.
Although it remains very relevant, pay equity has virtually vanished from research. I searched all articles in Google Scholar on pay equity in Canada and elsewhere. It took seven computer screens of articles before I found a single post-2004 publication. Almost all of the work that you have been relying on and all the work that we talk about was done between about 1988 and 1992, the heyday of studies on pay equity.
It's quietly slipped out of vogue, but there have been major achievements that have been documented. For decades, I would submit, almost as much money has been paid to consultants who have tried to provide the data during very sophisticated eras of policy capturing, regression lines, comparators, and so on, and I've been guilty of that myself. Almost as much money was spent on consultants as went into the pockets of the ladies who most needed the adjustments.
Companies and employers were quick to study and very slow to act. As the courts got involved, the creation of an adversarial tone came to pay equity like never before. Perhaps there's more work to be done or there's more policy research to be done or there's more acting to be done, but the window seems to have been closed on research about it. I just wanted to point that out. It's quite perplexing to me.
The final push for perfection and justice, which we're engaged in right now, is the hardest to achieve. I want to raise some other issues that we're in early days on, and I suspect we're actually in fairly late days on the pay adjustments. With pay equity we have the legislation largely in place. We should extend it to other groups.
In my own university two years ago, all women on faculty received a 2% adjustment to wage, plus additional increments based on years of service. This was done quietly without fanfare and without push-back particularly from males or unions on campus wanting to allocate differently. This is a victory for pay equity, a victory when employers simply and quietly acknowledge that there is a gap and address it without consultants and without major studies. They looked at their statistics, and they said let's just fix it and let's fix it permanently and let's monitor it.
Some of the best studies ever done on wage gaps within academic life showed that there's a mysterious 5% gap, even after every possible variable is controlled. What I really enjoy is that my university simply eliminated that mystery gap.
For all its difficulties in measuring and implementing, I submit to you that pay equity is one of the more simple applications of human rights thinking, because pay is fairly easily measured. It's easily recorded. Whereas other issues like hours of work, having to work overtime to avoid paying benefit-rich new employees.... There are a lot of pressures on existing employees to put in unsociable hours of work. There are problems with access to dental plans and orthodontics for children. Seeking access to medical care for aging parents and dependent children during normal working hours is a horrific problem, as doctors rightly have reduced their hours of work to have more humane lives. It's pushed a problem on to all people who are working.
People are perplexed by how to have babies and also show the type of loyalty to employers that's required to progress through the ranks during those very important high income-earning years.
There are an extraordinary number of workplace issues that involve things other than pay. Pay equity between men and women is important, but so is pay equity for immigrants with non-British accents, visible minorities, first nations, and others in need of your attention.
One of the most disturbing wage gaps in Canada is between white men and Canadian-born visible minority men, with a gap of 17% in 2005. Black men, as compared to white men, fare worst of all, with a gap of 24.3% in the public sector and 35.5% in the private sector. When all variables are controlled for in studies, using the most rigorous possible techniques, the mystery gap remains over 11%. They found little difference in the within-women data. It was the within-men data where there was a huge gap, and comparing first nations females against males, there are more huge gaps. The within-female gap was not as alarming as the within-male gap. It's a very interesting study.
Here's what I'm curious about. For women like me, women who have achieved full equity in all aspects of work and life, do we retire earlier than comparable men, and are we just that much more tired, having birthed and raised children while reaching for that golden ring of equality? We know from many studies that when we are paid the same, we are subjected to higher performance standards. We work very hard for the same pay when we get it. I don't know many women my age—and I'm almost 60—who are lawyers, doctors, and other professionals, who work the same long and hard hours as their male counterparts. We are an exception.
I see women like me either retiring or going to part time, what I would consider, quite prematurely. What are the implications of different retirement practices of men and women, and how do they carry through to issues affecting seniors? We know women live much longer lives than men, but if they commence retirement earlier because of the pressures on them we have not solved, are we stretching out their pensions and savings, and leaving them in rather dire straits? Are they also more likely—