Thank you very much for the opportunity to present Oxfam's recommendations on women's economic security.
Just yesterday we launched our feminist scorecard tracking government action to advance women's rights and gender equality. While the government has taken some significant steps in realizing its feminist agenda, the area that is most lagging behind is women's economic security. As you can see, this study is timely and important.
In January, Oxfam revealed that two billionaires own more wealth than the bottom 30% of the Canadian population. Growing inequality undermines progress in tackling inequality and is particularly negative for women, who continue to make up the majority of the world's poor. Around the world, as in Canada, women are the lowest-paid workers, with minimal security and physical safety.
Our current economic model relies on women's cheap labour to maximize shareholders' profits, which explains why economic growth does not necessarily reduce inequality or even provide hope of escaping poverty. While economic growth increases when men and women participate equally in the economy, growth on its own is not efficient to move the needle on gender equality.
We therefore call for progress in the following five areas in order for growth to be truly inclusive. Number one, the government should ensure that workers make living wages. Women make up 60% of the minimum-wage earners in Canada. Women are often forced into low-paid and insecure jobs because they have less of a safety net, in part because of difficulties accessing employment insurance; and if they receive benefits, these are too low for them to make ends meet. But nowhere in Canada does the minimum wage constitute a living wage. Without a living wage, women do not stand a chance of working their way out of poverty or achieving economic equality.
Women's rights to organize must be protected. Many sectors dominated by women are not unionized, which contributes to low wages. In Malawi, Oxfam has worked with partners to bring together a broad coalition to raise wages for women working in the tea sector. Through collective organizing and action, the coalition was able to raise minimum wages.
We are calling on the government to commit to being a living wage employer and to ensure that federal government contracts are only given to living wage employers. The provinces and private sector must follow suit. We also ask the government to support women's organizing here at home by increasing the budget of Status of Women Canada to $100 million a year; and abroad, by allocating $100 million a year to women's rights organizations, networks, and movements.
Number two, the government should make pay equity a priority. Women in Ontario would need to work until the age of 79 to reach the life-long earnings of men who retire at the age of 65. That's 14 more years of work. Women are paid less than men in 469 out of 500 occupations monitored by Statistics Canada. The wage gap is even more accentuated for racialized, indigenous, and immigrant women. Also, as women face the added challenge of moving in and out of employment to take on care responsibilities for children, elderly, and the sick, often without employment insurance, their earning potential is much reduced.
Senior single women are among Canada's poorest. We are calling on the government to speed up the introduction of pay equity legislation. The government should use every tool available to ensure that all provinces enact pay equity legislation. In addition, the government should lower the threshold of employment insurance and tie it to need rather than earnings, and improve the Canada pension plan and guaranteed income supplement benefits.
Number three, the government must comprehensively address violence against women. The rates of domestic and sexual violence remain persistently high in Canada. On any given night, 3,491 women and their 2,724 children sleep in shelters to escape abuse. Indigenous women are three times more likely to be violently victimized than non-indigenous women. Gender-based violence has a significant impact on women's security, and women's economic insecurity can make them more vulnerable to violence. Also, absenteeism and poor work performance as a result of violence can leave victims vulnerable to discipline and job loss.
We are calling on the government to develop and implement a national action plan on violence against women. While the federal strategy on gender-based violence is a good first step, a comprehensive national action plan is needed to ensure women everywhere have the same levels of services and protection. We are also calling for legislation that gives victims of violence the right to time away from work without losing their job, as enacted in Manitoba.
Number four, the government must invest in the care economy. In rich and poor countries alike, the responsibility for unpaid care work falls disproportionately to women. In Canada, women undertake 3.9 hours of unpaid care work every day, compared to 2.4 hours undertaken by men. Part of the challenge of shifting care responsibility between men and women is social norms.
Oxfam runs a program called We-Care in 12 countries, which aims to shift attitudes toward domestic work by raising awareness and engaging communities in dialogue and training. As a result of the program, women were able to make better choices on how they spend their time, but also saw a decrease in violence as a result of the shift in attitude toward women's status in the family. This kind of shift in attitude also needs to happen in the gender bias of work here in Canada. We cannot continue to see investments in male-dominated sectors such as construction at the expense of the care economy.
We are calling on the government to sustain and increase funding for child care so that quality care is accessible to all by 2020. This needs to be complemented by initiatives to ensure living wages and pay equity for child care workers, and supplemented with equitable family leave support and flexible work arrangements. We are also calling for an increase in services for first nations and seniors.
Number five, addressing women's economic insecurity requires domestic and global leadership. In a globalized world, women's economic insecurity in Canada is caused by the same factors driving economic insecurity for women around the world. The global economy is built on the backs of women as corporations engage in a race to the bottom in wages and labour standards. No matter in which country, the government has to take responsibility and hold Canadian corporations to account for their footprint in the world.
We are calling on the government to seriously consider corporate accountability as part of its feminist agenda and to commission a study to look at specific ways in which it can move forward in this area. We are also calling on the Government of Canada to gradually increase its international assistance—