EAST SELKIRK, Manitoba -- As an afternoon autumn light slanted across a gray tableau of railroad tracks and power plant smokestacks, a new joy infused a weather-worn trailer planted here on the edge of a potato patch.
"This is a big win for us," said Bev Austen, a 51-year-old government filing clerk who has not seen a lot of big wins since her husband died from metal poisoning 23 years ago, leaving her with two small children to raise.In what may be the largest pay equity settlement in North American history, Canada's government agreed late in October to pay about $2.3 billion to 230,000 past and present federal workers, overwhelmingly women. It will pay them back salaries, with interest, to conform with a concept enshrined two decades ago in Canada's Human Rights Act: "equal pay for work of equal value."
Drafters of the law argued that women routinely end up working in "female ghettos" -- as clerks, librarians, nurses, secretaries and telephone operators. These jobs often pay less than "male" jobs that involve comparable education, responsibility, mental demands and working conditions.
Using these four criteria, committees made up of workers and management devised a numerically based system for rating and comparing "male" and "female" jobs.
"They compared us to painters, and most of us disagreed with that," said Austen, who has been a clerk here for Canada's immigration service for the last decade. She noted that the government requirement for a painter is a 10th-grade education, while clerks generally have high school diplomas, plus training in accounting and word processing. "Then we discovered that painters made a lot more than clerks."
Paired by numerical scores, "female" jobs routinely won less pay than "male" jobs. A chief librarian made $35,050, while a dairy herd improvement manager made $38,766. A computer operations supervisor made $20,193, while a forestry project supervisor made $26,947. A typist made $10,531, while a sailor made $14,097.
The comparison formulas -- the whole concept of equal pay for work of equal value -- has been bitterly criticized by free-market advocates.