FIVE RULINGS OVER 17 YEARS TO COLLECT PROPER SALARY

Council ignored repeated legal advice in bid to get out of Pay Equity Commission order

Five rulings. Seventeen years.

That’s what it took to get the city to pay its seasonal recreation staff — its lowest paid employees, mostly women — properly.

What a saga.

In 1991, when the city and Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 543 negotiated pay equity for predominantly female jobs, as required under Ontario’s Pay Equity Act, they left out part-time staff. Those employees weren’t entitled to equal pay for work of equal value, they decided.

For 13 years, these employees were overlooked.

Until the Pay Equity Commission ordered the city in 2003 to not only include them but pay their lost wages retroactively.

You’d think Windsor would have learned its lesson.

The bill totalled $6.8 million. A contingency fund was started to pay it.

And the hassle — the city didn’t have all the employment records. It didn’t know what jobs people had worked, how many hours they had worked or even how to find them. It had to mount an ad campaign asking them to contact the city.

Don’t appeal it, then-lawyer George King, an expert in pay equity, advised council. You’ll lose. Just pay it.

In 2012, its memory wiped, the city went back to these employees. It demanded a two-year pay cut — which of course contravened the Pay Equity Act, as they had learned scant nine years earlier — to help offset the cost of the new $78-million aquatic centre.

The city threatened to contract out 60 jobs.

It was as if the success of a $78-million project hinged on those who make $20,000 a year getting even less. If the city couldn’t afford the aquatic centre without bullying its lowest paid employees into taking a pay cut, it shouldn’t have built it.

But the union, skipping due diligence, rolled over and agreed.

A report to council praised the union for its “flexibility,” a euphemism for concessions.

Coun. Jo-anne Gignac thanked the union for “agreeing to participate,” as if there had been a choice, with jobs allegedly at risk.

One person didn’t agree. Shirley Moor was a part-time receptionist at the WFCU Centre. She made $20,000 a year. She was almost 60. The city probably thought people like Moor were an easy target. It was wrong. Moor wanted to work part time, “but I didn’t want to be walked all over,” she said.

She complained to the Pay Equity Commission. Not surprisingly, the commission ruled again, in 2015, that the city had violated the act and ordered it to pay Moor.

Two decisions. Two wins.

But that didn’t deter the city. It appealed to the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal. The tribunal upheld the commission’s order in 2017.

Three decisions. Three wins. Insisting on banging its head against a wall, the city sought a judicial review in divisional court.

“We had an agreement with the union,” Mayor Drew Dilkens said at the time. “We worked on that agreement in good faith.”

He was referring to the agreement that violated the law. The union had negotiated the new pay grid in 2004 in good faith, too. Until the city threatened its jobs.

The court upheld the tribunal’s ruling in 2018.

Four decisions. Four wins. Then the rest of the 300 employees rightly asked, “What about me?”

No one seemed to foresee this. “This decision applies only to this lady,” Dilkens said. “It doesn’t apply to anybody else.”

How can you pay one person but not the others?

So the commission had to spell it out in a fifth ruling last fall.

“The entire point of the Act is for individuals to continue to receive wage adjustments until

... pay equity is achieved and for pay equity, once achieved, to be maintained,” it stated, ordering the city to pay everyone.

Five decisions. Five wins.

Don’t fight it, council was reportedly advised at a closed meeting Dec. 2. Just like King advised 15 years ago. You’ll lose. Just pay it.

So council voted to pay it. Except for councillors Gignac, the only woman, and Fred Francis, whose brother was mayor when the city asked the union for the pay cut. They voted against it. Five rulings weren’t enough?

It’s disturbing to think it took five rulings over 17 years to protect the city’s lowest paid employees. How much did taxpayers spend for the city to try to circumvent the law?

Some councillors called the commission’s first ruling in 2003 “absurd” and “bizarre.” What’s absurd and bizarre is thinking that two people who do the same type of work should be paid differently.

But even if you think that, you can’t do it.

It’s the law.