Wage law to cost colleges millions
Algonquin faces $29M-a-year tab for Fair Workplaces legislation
Algonquin College will have to pay as much as $29 million a year to comply with the province’s new Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs law, according to college documents.
That’s an estimate of the cost of meeting the equal-pay-for-equal-work provisions in Bill 148, the law that is better known for boosting the minimum wage.
Ontario’s 24 colleges are all in a similar predicament since they rely on an army of contract instructors who are paid substantially less than full-time professors. Precarious work by contract instructors was a key issue in the five-week faculty strike at Ontario colleges this fall.
The same issue is back at the forefront with the passage of Bill 148, which says employers in Ontario must pay workers who do the same job the same wage.
It’s difficult to know what the total cost to colleges will be across the province. But Algonquin’s “preliminary estimates” give an indication of how significant the sums could be.
The equal-pay provisions in Bill 148 could cost Algonquin between $20 million and $29 million a year, according to budget documents. That represents between 5.3 and 7.7 per cent of the college’s annual expenditures of $377 million. It comes at a time when Algonquin faces other budget challenges, from changing demographics to rising operating costs and the need to repair buildings and equipment, said the document.
Officials at Algonquin refused to elaborate on the impact of Bill 148 — “It is too soon to know what its effects might be, so we are not doing interviews on this subject right now,” according to a statement. Nor will they discuss the college’s financial situation, saying budget documents are posted online.
“We are not presently doing interviews on this topic.”
Bill 148 will have a “very dramatic potential impact” on colleges across the province, said Brian Desbiens, a former president at Sir Sandford Fleming College in Peterborough. He teaches a doctoral course on college management at the University of Toronto and provides advice to college presidents as a consultant.
The cost of equal pay to the Ontario college system will be as much as $300 million a year, said Desbiens in an interview. He said he got the estimate from an Ontario college president he declined to name for confidentiality reasons.
To foot the bill, colleges will have to lay off faculty, cut courses or programs, and increase class sizes, Desbiens predicted.
“The only thing that can modify that scenario in any significant way is if the province provides more funding,” said Desbiens.
Desbiens is critical of the government for passing legislation without costing it out. “If Bill 148 was fully funded, (colleges) would be cheering in the street. Do you see everybody cheering in the streets? I don’t see that, because they know what the net impact will
be. It’s not that they don’t want to pay people, it’s just that they don’t have the resources to do it.”
Ontario’s Advanced Education Minister Deb Matthews has said she is aware of concerns about the cost of Bill 148, but a statement from her ministry does not exactly promise a windfall of cash.
“Moving forward, we’re working with our partners in the postsecondary sector to understand the potential costs and impact of the new legislation,” said the statement. “The government will be an active partner in helping institutions manage the transition to the Act.” It’s up to the colleges to comply with the law, said the statement.
The equal-pay parts of Bill 148 go into effect in April. That date will be pushed back as far as January, 2020, for unionized employees.
The idea is that part-timers shouldn’t be paid less for doing the same job as full-time employees.
But how that will be interpreted is far from clear. Comparing jobs to determine whether they are equal is devilishly complicated. The law includes exemptions to allow seniority, credentials and other factors to be taken into account.
Jobs must be “substantially the same but not necessarily identical” to trigger the equal-pay provision. Everyone is scrambling to figure out what that means.
Some answers may be hammered out in negotiations next month between the College Employer Council representing Ontario’s 24 colleges and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. If they can’t agree on how to implement equal pay for unionized employees, the issue will go to arbitration.
OPSEU’s position is that contract instructors do the same job as fulltime professors and should receive the same hourly pay, said Nicole Zwiers, vice-chair of the faculty bargaining team.
Employers probably won’t share that view, she acknowledged. “What categories of workers fall within the category of doing the same work? It’s not like a gauntlet is thrown down, and suddenly, magically, everyone who is doing the same work will get the same pay.”
As with any new legislation, court rulings and arbitrations will eventually provide guidance on how to interpret the language, she said.
The College Employer Council did not respond to requests to comment on Bill 148.
In the meantime, part-time college instructors like Colleen Mayo-Pankhurst wait to see whether Bill 148 brings any changes to their lives.
Mayo-Pankhurst has taught communication part-time at Algonquin for 15 years. She loves her job. But she never knows from semester to semester how many courses she might teach and in which wage category. This term she earned $80 an hour for nine hours of teaching a week. She estimates she actually works two or three times that number of hours when preparing lectures, marking papers and talking to students is taken into account.
She has two university degrees, a college certificate and 20 years of experience running a business. But some of her students who work part-time as bartenders earn more an hour than she does, said Mayo-Pankhurst.
“It’s insulting.”