Pay gap bill too ‘timid’: Critics
Advocates want all employers to report salary information
Ontario’s proposed new transparency legislation aimed at eliminating the gender pay gap is too weak and fails to address fundamental issues surrounding wage discrimination, according to the province’s Equal Pay Coalition.
Hailed by Premier Kathleen Wynne as a “first-of-its-kind strategy,” the bill introduced Tuesday would require all publicly advertised job postings to include a salary rate or range, bar employers from asking about past compensation and prohibit reprisal against employees who do discuss or disclose compensation. The bill would also make large employers track and disclose compensation gaps to government.
Fay Faraday, co-chair of the Equal Pay Coalition formed in 1976, welcomed the first three measures but said the reporting requirements fall short of other jurisdictions — and don’t even match legal obligations already imposed on Ontario employers.
“Pay transparency is tremendously important but if the government is going to do it, they have to do it right to make sure its effective,” Faraday said.
The reporting requirements contained in the proposed reforms will be applied to specific sectors. First, they will be rolled out for the Ontario Public Service. They will subsequently be introduced for private sector workplaces with more than 500 employees, and then those with more than 250.
Small businesses represent 95 per cent of all employers in Ontario, and employ 28 per cent of Ontario’s workers, according to the Ministry of Labour.
“One hundred per cent of employers have an obligation to provide equal pay,” said Faraday. “The human rights code doesn’t carve out anybody. So there is no principle justification for restricting pay transparency.”
Civil service workers’ pay structures are already transparent because they are unionized employees with publicly available collective agreements that lay out pay rates, she added. Employees who make over $100,000 are also named on the Sunshine List.
Faraday said pay transparency is about “shifting the onus” of responsibility away from individual employees, who must file complaints about wage discrimination to get action, and onto employers to prove they are complying with the law. “Every single employer should have this information at their finger tips,” Faraday told the Star. “What they’re proposing has some good elements but it doesn’t actually address that fundamental issue.”
The gender pay gap in Ontario is 30 per cent, according to the Equal Pay Coalition's calculation — a gap that narrowed by just 6 per cent since the late 1980s. To put the figure in perspective: if a man were to retire today at 65, a woman would have to keep working until she was 79 to quit with the same earnings. Women also make up the majority of minimum-wage earners and part-time workers.
The government’s pay transparency legislation is part of a broader, $50 million three-year plan for women’s economic empowerment. Provincial Pay Equity Commissioner Emanuela Heyninck told the Star the strategy as a whole “addresses many of the barriers to women’s full participation in the workforce.”
“The goal of any transparency legislation is to remove opportunities for pay inequalities, help shift expectations around salary and put women in a better position to negotiate a fairer wage, ” she said.
While recently-passed Bill 148 introduced reforms for those in precarious jobs such as a $2.60 minimum wage bump, Jan Borowy — a lawyer with labour law firm Cavalluzzo and who co-chairs the Equal Pay Coalition with Faraday — called the government’s latest wage discrimination proposals “timid.”
“They are doing a disservice to women and their fundamental human rights.”
Last year, the coalition drafted a model pay transparency law and urged its adoption. It set out employees’ right to know their workplace’s pay structure and required all employers to file transparency reports to the Ministry of Labour and their shareholders every year.