CKNW Editorial
for March 7, 2001

This "pay equity" issue is one of those issues where you have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s complicated as hell folks – just ask the federal government. And very expensive not because it gives equality to women – expense is no reason to deny that – but because it raises wages enormously, for men and women both, right across the board. I’ll get to that in a moment.

The NDP want to put it in simple terms so you will believe that anyone who opposes the idea is some sort of sexist throw-back to former times. Jim Sinclair of the BC Federation of Labour in saying that there is no bad time to give equality to women plays right into this game.

First off we have to ask this question – if this idea is so good and so simple, why didn’t the NDP bring in legislation long ago? And why did Ujjal Dosanjh, when Attorney-General speak against the idea? The reason the NDP didn’t bring it in is for the same reason the Liberals now express doubts.

What this has become, Mr Dosanjh hopes, is a motherhood one-liner to throw at the Liberals during the election campaign. It probably won’t work for two reasons. First he sprang the notion too soon and the Liberals have time to educate the public before the election battle smokescreens explanations. Second, the Liberals will find a way to agree with the Bill in principle thus taking all the wind from Dosanjh’s rather tattered sails.

What does equal pay for work of equal value mean?

It’s not a man and a woman doing the same job getting the same pay. That’s already on the books under Human Rights legislation. No, it’s infinitely more complicated than that because it not only doesn’t mean the same jobs, it means jobs that are completely different. Here’s how it works.

Actuaries look at all the jobs there are – all of them – thousands of them - and rates them. So many points per job based upon the value of the work, the skills and training needed, the difficulty of performance and things like that. They could find, for example, that an airline mechanic, a critical care nurse, a second officer on a ferry and a bus driver were all jobs of the same value. This is just a for instance, you understand. This process would have to be repeated thousands of times before you could get a proper job classification and even then as you can well imagine, the arguments would be endless. We could well have strikes because a union didn’t agree with the classifications given.

But there’s more to it than that. Let’s take the mechanic, the nurse, the sailor, and the bus driver and suppose that the bus driver gets 25$ an hour, the 2^nd officer $26, the nurse $27 and the mechanic $28. What then? Do you do an average so everyone gets the same? Not if the federal example holds true for the "principle" is that no one can lose. In my example, everyone gets 28$ and the bus company, the ferry corporation and the hospital all face a huge wage expense. But that’s not all … every employer in the province from big business down to the smallest will face an unscheduled and unbargained for wage increase. You might think that any investigation of this sort would mean that the lowest wage, or perhaps average wage of the group would apply – but that’s not how unions work, my friends. A drop in benefits is never on no matter how hard hit an employer is.

While it might turn out that more women advance than men that certainly won’t universally be true. As you can see there will be a huge wage bill to be paid based upon some artificial classification of jobs.

Now let’s go back to the beginning. The reason we must have pay equity, we’re told, is that women only make 73% of what men do. Really? If you haven’t done all the classifications I have spoken of, how do you know this?

The 73% figure is, I suspect, totaling up all the income paid to men and all the income paid to women then doing the math. And what that does is prove that figures may not lie but liars can sure as hell figure. For what that statistic speaks to is not pay equity, that is to say equal pay for work of equal value but quite another evil altogether, namely that women are disproportionately represented in the high paying jobs. There are fewer female doctors, lawyers and high paying executives than male. No doubt that’s true … though great strides have been made by women reaching the 50% level in high paying work, much remains to be done. But to take that statistic and use it to justify so-called "pay equity" is a gross mathematical distortion.

The entire issue has been raised by Premier Dosanjh to smoke out the Liberals and have it appear that they are against women. And so far, all due respect to Geoff Plant who was here yesterday to talk about the issue, they may be succeeding. But, the success should be short-lived. As soon as the Liberals find a way to agree with equal pay for work of equal value in principle – which they do – while underscoring how difficult that will be to achieve, they will not only blunt the NDP attack but show the entire exercise to be the cheap political trick it is.