Thank you very much, Madam Chair. My thanks to the committee for inviting the New Brunswick Coalition for Pay Equity to appear today. My presentation will be in both official languages. I will start in French.
The New Brunswick Coalition for Pay Equity is a group of almost 800 people and 91 organizations that educates and advocates for the adoption of adequate legislation in order to achieve pay equity for all workers in both the public and private sectors.
Our organization was founded in 2001, but it is based on a process of reflection and advocacy that started in the 1980s.
In New Brunswick, the movement for pay equity has gathered momentum after wage parity, equal pay for equal work, was achieved. It soon became clear that equal pay was not enough. Most women held different jobs than most men, and those were often lower-paying jobs.
One example was the movement around the wages of registered female nurses in the 1980s. They had been campaigning aggressively since 1969, demonstrating that they were underpaid.
In 1980, a study by the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women showed that registered female nurses earned less for the value of their work than Liquor Commission clerks, who were predominantly male.
Thanks to the initiatives of the nurses and public support, in 1981, registered female nurses received an increase of 41% over two years. That still did not amount to pay equity, but it was a fine victory.
Still today, it is estimated that most women in New Brunswick hold female-dominated jobs. In 2009, New Brunswick passed pay equity legislation covering the entire public sector, but no legislation ensures pay equity in the private sector.
Although the New Brunswick Coalition for Pay Equity is a provincial organization and the majority of our interventions are at the provincial level, we have also been involved at the federal level from the outset, because we recognize that access to the right to pay equity for part of the New Brunswick population falls under federal jurisdiction.
We urge the government to take a leadership role and finally pass a proactive piece of legislation, reflecting the recommendations made in 2004 by the independent pay equity task force. Those recommendations continue to be a reference point both for us and the rest of Canada.
I assume that you have looked at all of them, but I would like to highlight a few: that the legislation be proactive and include clear standards and criteria to achieve pay equity; that independent specialized oversight agencies be established to ensure its application with sufficient financial and human resources; that the legislation provide for reporting mechanisms, the participation of unionized and non-unionized employees in the process, as well as measures to ensure pay equity is maintained.
Pay equity is a human right recognized internationally. We expect the federal government to respect this human right for all women and to adopt strong legislation to ensure it is respected by all employers. The current complaint-based legislative framework equates more or less to voluntary measures since few employees have the capacity to lodge a complaint. Even those who are unionized have faced a lot of hardship to get their rights respected, as many others before me have testified. This is unacceptable in 2016.
Now I would like to tell you a little bit about New Brunswick's experience with voluntary measures for pay equity. In 2005 the provincial government adopted a five-year action plan to reduce the wage gap, based on recommendations by a round table at which the majority of participants were from the most important employer associations. The 2005-2010 action plan promoted voluntary measures to ensure pay equity. However, no measurable results came out of the five-year action plan. Employers did not change their human resource practices, they did not implement job evaluations, and they did not compare the value of jobs that are done predominantly by females with those done predominantly by males.
All we know is that in 2008 a little fewer than 25% of employees had job evaluation systems, but we had no information about the number of employers that had implemented a pay equity system and whether that number changed over the course of the action plan. During that period the government also introduced pilot pay-equity projects for workers in four caregiving services provided in the private sector and receiving government funding to a certain extent. In the end the so-called fair pay the government came up with was $12 to $14 an hour.
We asked economist Ruth Rose to analyze the government's reports, and she found that fair wages would lie around $20 an hour. She came to the conclusion that the pay equity exercises in the four caregiving sectors were deliberately distorted to reduce the cost to the government.
The New Brunswick experience shows the need for clear parameters so that employers are not permitted to avoid doing pay equity exercises or to adjust the methodology to fit their interests. That's why we support proactive pay equity legislation both at the federal and the provincial levels. That is also why we support the 2004 pay equity task force report, “Pay Equity: A New Approach to a Fundamental Right”. There is no need for further studies.
We urge the committee to recommend a strong proactive pay equity act based on the 2004 pay equity task force report.
Now is the time to respect the fundamental right to pay equity and to take immediate action.
Thank you.