Equal Wage Bid Pays Off in Canada

The fight for equal pay had already been going for four years when Rita Cantaloni joined the Canadian civil service in 1988, so she figured things would get better for women in the government soon. But last year, she discovered that a newly hired male receptionist was being paid almost $1,600 a year more than his female counterparts doing the same work.

“Just because he was a man!” the fiery secretary said last week. “I was livid. But I thought, this has been going on so long, what can we do?”

Cantaloni and her colleagues got their answer late last month when the Canadian government ended a 15-year battle over better pay for women workers. An unprecedented $2.5-billion settlement will grant civil servants in several sectors that are traditionally dominated by women an average of $1,400 for each year they worked for the government, plus interest. The payout will go to 230,000 employees and should begin within six months.

The ruling is significant because it goes beyond guaranteeing men and women equal pay for the same job. It enforces a principle that women should get equal pay for work of equal value, a complicated concept that took four years to define and even longer to prevail over repeated government challenges.

The battle began in 1984 when the public servants union filed a complaint on behalf of clerical workers, mostly women, who were paid far less than men who were classified as administrators but doing similar work. The suit bogged down in a four-year study while labor experts tried to come up with a system that determined the value of different jobs, comparing pay scales not just for male and female secretaries but also for secretaries and, say, railroad workers.

Courts ruled in favor of the union nine times, but the government appealed every verdict. Finally a federal court judge on Oct. 29 admonished the government to quit delaying and start paying. Members of Parliament who wanted to appeal again were shouted down. “It’s the cost of justice,” hollered one member on the floor.

No one expected the toll to be so high or take so long, least of all Ron Basford, the former justice minister and attorney general of Canada who originally added the “equal pay for equal value” concept to a federal human rights bill in 1978.

“We already had the concept of equal pay for equal work, but it didn’t deal with the labor ghettos in some sectors--nurses, secretaries, teachers--which were 99.9% women,” he said. “I find it very disturbing that it took 20 years for the law of the land to become effective. People shouldn’t have had to wait that long for their money.”

But not everyone was pleased with the verdict. John Williams, the Reform Party leader on the federal Treasury Board, is particularly critical of the new Universal Classification System, which he says will set government wages according to a formula instead of purely by market forces.

“How can you ever say how many janitors equals a deputy minister?” he said. He advocates legislation to simplify wage calculations, before the fight spreads in the private sector.

The decision has already emboldened others in a similar pay-equity dispute. On Friday, more than 20,000 former and current Bell Canada workers rejected the company’s offer of $42 million in back pay and will take their case back to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

“There’s no question that society is going through a change, and we should ensure that there is no more discrimination,” Williams said. “But should we have to compensate for past differences that were considered endemic? No one was complaining then. Now these people feel like they’ve won the lottery.”

Rita Cantaloni feels more like it’s the fulfillment of a long-overdue debt. She knows how she’ll spend her $15,500 share. A single mother for 11 years, she had to defer vacations and deny her son toys because of her meager salary, now about $22,000 a year. Now, she has promised him a trip to Florida, a computer and a new carpet to replace the gray one “that was cream-colored 25 years ago” and that aggravates his allergy to dust.

“It would have been nice to have that money when he was growing up,” she said. “But now we’re going to celebrate.”

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Farley was recently on assignment in Toronto.