It’s Equal Pay Day in the U.S.
Equal Pay Day is a National Committee on Pay Equity public awareness campaign to illustrate the gap between men’s and women’s wages. It symbolizes how far into the year a woman must work, on average, to earn as much as a man earned the previous year.
So congrats, if you’re an average woman you’ve finally caught up with your male colleagues wages from 2008.
It’s always held on a Tuesday, because Tuesday is the day women’s wages catch up to men’s wages from the previous week.
We don’t have Equal Pay Day in Canada, that’s not because we don’t have a serious wage gap problem too.
We have miles to go before we reach pay equity and we are actually losing ground.
“Canada’s economy has a problem – it pays women less than men. It pays women less even when we are just as skilled, just as educated and work just as long. It leaves us with less to live on when our working years are over and it rewards us less when we invest in higher education or put career ahead of family. The bottom line is women are still not equal, not even close, when it comes to the bottom line,” says Barbara Byers, Executive Vice-President of the Canadian Labour Congress.
Those who need to fight for pay equity are on their own after the Conservative government tied some changes to the 2009 budget.
Commission’s power to adjudicate gender-based wage discrimination and hands it to the
Public Service Labour Relations Board. Only individuals can apply for review (and
presumably pay the costs). Anyone who helps or encourages them to file an appeal faces
a fine of up to $50,000.
Equitable pay -- as opposed to equal pay for work of equal value -- for unionized workers will
be sorted out at the bargaining table and for non-union employees by employers’ “periodic
assessments.”"
So I’m borrowing the American Equal Pay Day as a reminder of how far we still haven’t come in Canada.
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