RESOURCES

PAY EQUITY

From the New Brunswick Coalition for Pay Equity:

The problem: “Female-dominated jobs are often undervalued and underpaid compared to male-dominated jobs of the same value. That is what we call pay inequity.”

According to Statistics Canada, NB women earned 91,6 cents per dollar earned by men for each hour they worked in 2019:

• Average hourly rate for MEN: $24.50

• Average hourly rate for WOMEN: $22.46”

What is pay equity? (1 minute 37 second video in French and English)

The proposed solutions: pay equity exercise and pay equity legislation.

• Provincial level: New Brunswick’s Pay Equity Act, 2009 applies only to public sector employees. We need to extend the Act to the private sector, where 65 to 70 % of women in the labour force are employed.

• Federal level: The Federal government adopted the Pay Equity Act in 2018 for the employers it regulates but the federal Act has not come into force yet.”