Mind the gap

>> Women's attempts for equal pay hit rough patch

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Laws promising equal pay for equal work are being subverted by secrecy, bad bureaucracy and government-corporate cooperation, according to experts. "Employers are dragging their feet," says Claudette Carbonneau, senior vice-president of the Quebec Federation of Labour (CSN). "We're pretty disturbed because they're still resisting the equity law."

The proactive law looks good on paper, as it takes the burden off plaintiffs to prove their cause and forces businesses to justify the salaries they pay for different tasks. The province has given employers four years to implement the equity law in their workplaces and the discrimination-free era is supposed to begin November 21.

In practice, however, many companies have circumvented their obligations by getting exemptions from the plan. To get around the law, companies had to submit documents to the government indicating they were working on gender compensation analyses. Eighty-three per cent of the 161 applications for exemption, which had to be submitted to the government by November 21, 1997, have been granted thus far by the provincial Pay Equity Commission, according to Carbonneau.

Corporate loophole

"We realized that businesses being granted the exemptions weren't even studying salary equity, they were just submitting standard analyses commonly done by companies anyway," says Carbonneau. Among the employers benefiting from the loophole are the Quebec public sector, which employs approximately 20 per cent of women in the workplace, as well as Groupe Desjardins, the Bay, Zellers and many food chains. The CSN will head to Superior Court on April 17 to try to have the exemptions reversed.

Opponents also feel that the commission has been run under a veil of secrecy. Women's groups and unions are irked over the commission's refusal to grant them status as interested parties. "To consider us uninterested parties is nonsense, it's odious," says Carbonneau.

Jeannine David-McNeil, a retired Université de Montréal prof and expert on pay equity, agrees. "Although everything in our courts are public, everything [at the Pay Equity Commission] is secret. It's very, very strange," says David-McNeil. "The commission's decision is typically two pages. We can't find out why one business was accepted for exemption and another not. There is no justification of their decisions."

She notes that the Quebec government enacted the law but made sure that even their own workers wouldn't get raises from it. "I constantly wonder what the commission's mandate is supposed to be," says David-McNeil.

Communication undervalued

The CSU has obtained documents of commission proceedings through access to information laws and is none too happy with the findings. The Pay Equity Commission has also undervalued onerous chores often provided by women, complains Carbonneau. "Jobs that involve communicating with the public are one of the main jobs performed by women, but they don't take that very seriously. They've been undervaluing the contributions of women."

In one instance, the commission compared the pay of traditionally women-held jobs, such as secretary, which often max out only after eight years, to a male-dominated job such as electrician, which hits its top scale right away. Rather than recommend a similar fast peak for the secretary, the commission recommended a reduction in the the electrician's pay. Carbonneau notes that the pay equity legislation rules out salary reductions. Representatives of the Pay Equity Commission failed to return calls made by the Mirror to respond to the charges.

Further dampening the hopes of the fading promise of pay equity is a recent study that shows that during the decade following Ontario's 1987 proactive pay equity law, women's wages rose in Ontario no faster than those in Quebec where no such law existed. The problem in Quebec, as in Ontario, is that two-thirds of working women toil in companies with fewer than 100 workers and "small firms don't comply with the law," according to study co-author Michael Baker, an economist from the University of Toronto.

The study found that the majority of such companies regularly miss government-set deadlines for pay equity implementation. And in spite of the disappointing results, Ontario's pay equity effort is also better staffed and funded than that in Quebec.

Unlike McNeil-David, who predicts that the real benefactors of the law will be administrative consultants, Baker sees lawyers cashing in. "So often these issues lead to the courts: how do we define a female job, a male job? These sorts of things often end up in litigation," says Baker.