Demands for B.C. government to legislate pay equity

Less than a week before International Women’s Day, calls are growing louder for the B.C. government to do something about pay equity in the province.

A coalition of more than 125 organizations, made up of academics and advocates in B.C., have sent an open letter to Premier David Eby and some members of his cabinet, pushing for change.

West Coast LEAF, a group advocating for gender equality says in B.C. women earn 83.3 per cent of what men do and nationally, it’s not much better at just over 87 per cent.

“Statistically, we know women who are doing work of equal value in the same working conditions, same level of skill, responsibility, are earning 20 per cent less than their male counterparts,” says Humera Jabir, staff lawyer at West Coast LEAF. “And what we know also is that statistic is a lot worse for Indigenous, racialized, Black women and people who are marginalized by their gender, trans, non-binary, and other non-conforming people.”

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She says other provinces have dealt with this issue, but B.C. lags behind and it’s unclear why. “B.C. did consider it as early as 2001 but it was repealed.”

Last spring, the government began consultations to get information for, what it described as, pay transparency legislation. However, the coalition says that’s not good enough because it feels transparency doesn’t fix the actual issue of some salaries lagging behind that of men.

“This is a type of legislation that would require employers to report on pay in their organizations and might make the discrimination or the systemic differences apparent, but this doesn’t require employers to take action on it. So, what we want is not just transparency but accountability,” stresses Jabir. “It also relies on the individual worker having to go and advocate for themself by saying, ‘Hey, I’m not being paid at the equivalent salary or at the equivalent wage,’ and that’s a lot of pressure on a worker.”

Jabir says a lack of equal pay doesn’t just affect one person and the work they do, it can have a devastating trickle-down effect.

“Some of the organizations that have signed on represent poverty rights and women and people who are fleeing family violence. When you’re not economically secure and when you’re not being paid in an equal way then that impacts your economic security, child poverty… it also impacts the generations that come after because that impacts your pensions, it impacts what you’re able to leave your children,” adds Jabir, who feels people should be surprised pay equity is still a problem in 2023.

The coalition wants the pay gap legislation to include the following:

• A robust enforcement regime
• Transparency in all aspects of compensation
• Broad application across the economy
• A data system built to support pay equity
• A single interface for public access to pay data
• Disaggregation of data for deeper analysis
• Worker protections as well as transparency
• A new Pay Equity Office to lead implementation

B.C. is one of a handful of provinces without either pay transparency or pay equity legislation and the government confirms B.C. has one of the largest gender pay gaps in the country.

Last month, a bill was introduced in the Legislature to create a framework to give the public access to the gender pay gap of some employers by making them disclose the pay gap difference between men and women and, depending on how big a company is, it would have to be posted on their website as well.

“If an employer has more than the prescribed threshold of employees, gender pay gap information must be published on the website of the employer and the website designated by the registrar,” reads an explainer of the proposal.

The bill has only received its first reading, meaning it’s not close to becoming law anytime soon.