Seasonal workers getting back pay

City ordered to give retroactive sums to part-time employees for pay cut in ’13

Windsor has been ordered to pay retroactive wages plus interest to 300 seasonal recreation staff whose earnings were cut to help offset the cost of the aquatic centre.

In the fifth ruling on the issue since 2003, Ontario’s Pay Equity Commission has ordered the city to pay the employees to comply with the Pay Equity Act. Council voted at a closed meeting Dec. 2 to pay the money. Councillors Joanne Gignac and Fred Francis voted against it.

The back pay applies to female job classes, but council agreed to also pay those in male and gender neutral job classes “in the interest of internal equity,” Vincenza Mihalo, the city’s executive director of human resources, states in a Jan. 13 letter to those affected.

Those eligible will received the payout, plus a summary of the calculation used to determine the amount, by April 18, the letter states.

“It was money owed to the employees. They should have been paid properly,” said Jason Parent, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 543, which represents the workers.

The order affects 302 employees, Parent said. The average payout could be between $2,000 and $4,000, he estimated, bringing the total to more than $900,000.

Both Mayor Drew Dilkens and Mihalo refused to comment on the order or its impact.

The issue dates back to 1991 when the city and union negotiated a pay equity plan for female job classes, as required under the Act. They didn’t include seasonal employees, who were mostly women.

The commission ruled in 2003 that seasonal workers must be included. The city had to pay $6.8 million in back pay.

But in 2012, the city wanted to save money on the new $78-million aquatic centre. So it went back to the same employees, which include lifeguards and community centre instructors, and demanded a pay cut. It threatened to contract out part-time jobs at the aquatic centre.

The union agreed to a two-year pay cut beginning in 2013.

One employee, Shirley Moor, a part-time receptionist at the WFCU Centre whose wages dropped from $18.14 an hour to $16.48 an hour, complained to the commission.

A pay equity official ruled in 2015 that the city and the union had violated the Pay Equity Act and ordered the city to pay, again.

The city appealed the ruling to the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal. It upheld the decision in 2017.

The city then appealed to the divisional court for a judicial review. The court upheld the tribunal’s decision in 2018.

The city eventually paid Moor about $4,000.

Meanwhile, the Pay Equity Office in 2017 began monitoring pay equity for the remaining employees whose wages had been cut.

“The entire point of the Act is for individuals to continue to receive wage adjustments until such time as pay equity is achieved and for pay equity, once achieved, to be maintained thereafter,” review officer Bianca Rodriguez stated in the most recent order Oct. 21.

The city was given 180 days to calculate the amount each employee is owed, provide the calculations to the union and review officer, pay the employees and provide proof of payment to the review officer.

“Finally, they’ve actually come to the conclusion that they have to pay everybody,” said Moor, who still works for the city. “I think everybody deserves that. It was their money.

“What they did to us was so wrong,” said Moor, who urged her colleagues to pursue payouts. “They took a small segment of people, the part-time people. We’re all doing a job. Just because I choose to work part time, I don’t think I’m less. “

The union filed a grievance in 2017 on behalf of the rest of the employees.

“We were starting to get phone calls from other people — ‘If she got it why can’t I get it?’ ” Parent said.

The union held the grievance in abeyance, waiting for a final decision in Moor’s case. But last June, with no word on whether the remaining employees would get payouts, the union pursued the grievance.

Parent defended the union’s original decision to accept a pay cut.

“We were afraid we were going to lose jobs. We wanted to make sure the aquatic centre was staffed by our union,” he said. “We’d just gone through Local 82 having garbage pickup contracted out. Local 543 had daycare contracted out. We were on the verge of parking enforcement being contracted out. The union was gun shy. Council had the votes, and it was not afraid to contract out. We ensured 302 members stayed in the Local 543 bargaining unit.”

The union is no longer concerned about the jobs being contracted out, said Parent, who signed off on six retirements last week, part of a wave of expected retirements among aging city staff.

“I don’t think the appetite is there to contract out,” he said.

The orders and rulings mean yet another plank in the city’s business case for the aquatic centre has failed.

The city had also planned to close the pool at Adie Knox Herman Recreation Complex, among other measures, to help pay for the aquatic centre. That pool remains open.

Meanwhile, it costs the city about $3 million a year — far more than the $1.3 million a year originally estimated — to operate the aquatic centre.