Winning Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value in Ontario

Introduction: Women in Ontario alone lost three billion dollars annually in potential wage and salary income due to male-female wage inequalities. The figure for all of Canada was $7 billion.  Although there had been commitment to redress this situation in Canada, at least since the 1951 International Labour Office Convention and follow up legislation at the federal and provincial levels, unequal pay still prevailed.  Organizations such as the Equal Pay Coalition of Ontario led the way in fighting to obtain legislative change that would enforce not just equal pay for equal work but proactive equal pay for work of equal value.  Mary Cornish and Laurell Ritchie, two of the founders of the Equal Pay Coalition of Ontario spoke to Rise Up about the stages of this struggle and the importance of winning the passage of the Pay Equity Act in Ontario in June, 1987.

Sue: Welcome Mary and Laurell on behalf of Rise Up! Feminist Digital and Archive. I’ve invited you today to come and talk to us about the history of equal pay for equal value in Ontario and how we ended up with the Pay Equity Act. And perhaps you’d like to briefly introduce yourselves first.

Mary: OK. I’m Mary Cornish. I’m a pay equity and human rights lawyer, labour lawyer, and I helped co-found the Equal Pay Coalition in Ontario with Laurell Richie and was involved in doing legal cases around pay equity.

Sue: Thank you. Laurell.

Laurell: I am currently working as a volunteer with The Good Jobs for All Coalition. I’m a retired union representative and also a co-founder of the Equal Pay Coalition with Mary Cornish. 

Sue: Thank you. So, I know that we go back a long way with equal pay, the thing started as probably as early as 1917 if not before. Then we move into 1951 with the United Nations Convention. But I wonder if you could perhaps give us some background. Perhaps you’d like to start with this Laurell as to what was, what were, the beginnings of the movement in Canada and what did it look like?

Laurell: Well, as always we are speaking from personal experience, but there was an International Labour Organization Convention100 in the year 1951 where the concept of Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value was first raised in an international forum that was voted upon and agreed upon. And many people did not understand at the time that there was any difference between that and equal pay for equal work.

But it was reaffirmed later at the United Nations in the 1960s and then I think we would have to say the sort of formal way that this came forward in Canada was with the Royal Commission on the Status of Women which called for, actually endorsed, and called on the government to ratify ILO Convention 100 including equal remuneration for work of equal value which was quite critical to the variety of issues we took up.

So that happened. I think probably the next important event and really in the same year as the release of the Royal Commission Status of Women was the Strategies for Change Conference in Toronto which brought together women from across Canada where this was an issue. And then we had the formation of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women and also the Ontario Committee on the Status of Women. The National Action Committee took up the issue more or less at the federal level and the Ontario Committee on the Status of Women pursued the issue of Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value provincially. 

There was also, as things happen, there was also a strike that year − the Dare Cookie strike in South Western Ontario – mostly women on the picket line and a key issue there was that the employer wanted to give a larger pay increase to the women, sorry to the men, and a smaller pay increase for the women. That should be a no-brainer. And the women’s movement and the union movement, it was a small union actually, not one that I had been familiar with, was in the background. But a wide variety of people came together to take on the issues there. And in its time it was a quite famous strike for women in the labour movement.

And then we go on to the mid-70s. I’m not sure if you want me to stop or just carry on.

Sue: So, Mary, how exactly did the Coalition get founded. Did it get founded in the period that Laurell is talking about, or was it a bit later?

Laurell: It was founded in 1974 and it came out of the actions that were flowing from what Laurell has described, particularly from the Commission on the Status of Women and the movements to try and then, in 1972 the government actually ratified the ILO convention. And people started working at that period of time to start trying to figure out how to operationalize that through laws across the country.

And we were also in Ontario where there was a movement – particularly which Madeleine Parent and Laurell were working on – with respect to amending – efforts that were being made to amend the Employment Standards Act which had the very limited equal pay definition in it.

So all of that kind of came together and actually Laurell and I joke about this, but we actually co-founded it in my sauna at 77 Gerrard Street West at the top of the building, which was really when we got together and said, you know, we really need to have a coalition of groups. And I think it was very important at this period of time to understand that the union movement and community groups did not often come together in coalitions to try and move forward a social justice issue. They tended to be in different silos. And so we were trying to bring them together into one group. And also to bring it together in a non-partisan way in the sense that we were prepared to work with political parties that would, you know, would subscribe to the position we were taking.

So when we founded the Coalition and they’d had a broad based group of unions. It had community groups, the YWCA, the Business and Professional Women’s Union/Clubs, which had been very active as well themselves in trying to bring forward Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value. 

And the other, I think, main part of it was also focusing on this notion of it being an international human right, a labour right, but also a human right that world governments had agreed to and that was why we needed to move forward with it; that women in Ontario needed to have that right.

Sue: I have to ask this. Laurell, what happened as a result of the Dare Cookie strike?

Laurell: Well, you know, in the end there were equal payments made to the men and to the women.  Actually many of us were arguing at the time for adjustments for women’s classifications which were often under paid. But a big problem at the time and it’s one we had to contend with in some of our own unions, was a tendency on the part of both labour and business to give percentage increases which over time always increased the gap that existed between men and women’s pay. 

So that was one of those pieces I think we don’t pay a lot of attention to right now, but at that time we thought of remuneration in fact very broadly and so it was a question of trying to close the gap as well as to make sure that it wasn’t through percentage or disproportionate increases to men; and equal benefits was also on our agenda.

Sue: So maybe this is a good point for you to explain, one of you, the differences in terminology.

Mary: So, in Ontario there was an Equal Pay for Equal Work Act that came in, in the 1950s, and essentially it meant that if a man and a woman were doing the identical job they had to be paid the same. And the difficulty with that of course was that the way the structure of the economy worked was that primarily men and women worked at different jobs and they were occupationally segregated – women were nurses, men were –  at that time. People were secretaries versus outside workers. So you basically infrequently had men and women in the same job although of course it did happen. And often in that sense they still were paid unequally.

But the issue of Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value and the importance of it was that it was to aim at the systemic discrimination, which actually created this occupational segregation of jobs, and then undervalue the work of women in those jobs. And it meant comparing dissimilar jobs. And I think when Laurell was talking earlier about when they passed this back in 1951, I’m not sure everybody actually understood the significance of actually fully implementing such a systemic remedy, which is really what it was; a systemic remedy to get at these problems. And it meant that women who were in a workplace – when the act was finally passed in Ontario – a secretary could compare herself to a dissimilar male job in her workplace. And as long as the skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions were substantially the same and of the equal value, then she should be paid the same amount as that male dominated job.

Sue: Thank you. So, maybe you could continue with talking about how you moved from the initial legislation that was limiting to the Pay Equity Act in 1987. What tactics, who were the allies, what kind of actions did you take.?

Laurell: Well, yeah we can share this one. One of the first major activities of the Equal Pay Coalition was a forum that was held in downtown Toronto at OISE and brought together a wide variety of people, some who would identify very clearly as feminist, although some were from the business and professional women’s clubs, some were political candidates for different parties, and some were more radical feminists, and certainly labour women were there in large numbers. And out of that we produced a little booklet with people writing on various aspects of the fight and I think it was really a keystone to some of the work that we did because it did represent this very broad approach to what we were trying to do – to improve women’s pay including minimum wage increases and so on – that sometimes get left out of the mix.

So, I mean, there was that kind of educational and organizing session that we would put on. But also we did a lot of work, we were very conscious, at the time there were, it would be fair I think to say, that we were thinking primarily of some of the newer immigrant groups in the community. It was probably less about racialized communities, and it was more about the large numbers of women who come from Italy and Greece and Portugal and China, and so on. And so we did a lot of sessions in the community pulling in people who did educational work and we had interpreters. We were very conscious of trying to do that outreach and to some extent materials in other languages. English was obviously our primary activity language, but we did do these other things.

We also had, we tried to have fun as we went along, and one of the events that I recall vividly was when we were handing out coupons, I can’t remember what the differential was at the time but certainly at one point it was like − women were getting 60% percent of what men were getting – and we had a lunchtime demonstration at the Ministry of Labour, which is not a large space, but we had hot dogs, and set up and pop. And we had a petition, which we asked the civil servants and Ministry staff coming out to sign. And I recall one of the things we proudly showed them was that Flora McDonald, who at the time was a Federal Conservative Member of Parliament, had signed the petition; so kind of representing that broad base. And I remember even some of the guys who had to pay the full dollar for the hot dog took it all in good humour and supported us in their various ways.

So we did those sorts of things along the way to have a bit of fun. And pamphleteering has kind of gone out of style, but you know, we used to stand at subway and bus stops in downtown Toronto and hand out pamphlets explaining what we were up to in trying to get this law changed. 

Sue: Mary, do you want to go on from there?

Mary: Yeah, the other thing we did was we pretty regularly harassed the Ministers of Labour in Ontario and I think I counted them up, I think we went through five of them between the time we started and the time we actually got that Act; and they agreed in `85 to move forward with the Act. And so we would keep meeting with them and we would bring to the meeting kind of senior people from all of the Coalition organizations and we kept bringing them.  I’m sure they regarded us as a pest because we were constantly pursuing them to pursue Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value for women in Ontario. 

So I think we had the campaign operating at a number of different levels as Laurell was describing, but also at the level of trying to bring forward legislation. So we actually also had the NDP bring forward a private member’s bill in the early 80s and because we also had a policy of being non-partisan, we had gotten both the Liberals and the NDP to support us. It was a Conservative government at the time and actually that allowed us to get that private members bill into committee where it then died. 

But it was very important to have the two other parties supporting us because in the end what happened was the government, the Tory government, went into an election in 1985. The Liberals won in a minority government. When they went to look at the issues that they could agree upon with the NDP and the accord that came out, equal pay for work of equal value was on both political agendas. And that’s actually how we got the Pay Equity Act because it then became part of the Accord and we moved forward from there.

Laurell: I think that it’s important also to recognize that the whole concept of coalitions was still in its time a fairly new one. And in fact one of the things we had to do battle with, including the labour movement, was that everything political didn’t have to be partisan-political. And in fact we had arguments when we had rallies and when we had forums about whether we were going to let politicians of whatever stripe speak. And, generally, our policy was that nobody could appear as a politician from a particular party.

And I always think that one of the people who should historically be given a lot of credit on this is, former Member of Parliament in Ontario, MPP that is, Margaret Campbell because she was one of the first. There were a series of bills, various private members bills, calling for Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value, and mostly they failed. And the first one, or one of the first ones was in 1978, was Margaret Campbell’s bill.

Laurell: Yeah, and it failed. But a year later, roughly a year later, when the NDP brought forward a private members bill through Ted Bounsall, Margaret Campbell was able to set aside partisan politics in a way that is too rare. And she did, heaven knows what, behind the scenes, but made arrangements that when this bill, it was Bill 3 at the time – the NDP private members bill – was brought forward, that certain of her party, Liberal MPPs, would be absent for the vote if they were not comfortable voting in favour of it.

And what happened was that when the bill was brought forward between the diminished Liberal numbers and the NDP that were out in full force, the bill passed at second reading to Ted Bounsall’s great shock because he didn’t understand how the women were organizing behind the scenes. And I would say, you know, to our regret at the time, he chose to, when they were given a choice – do we go immediately to third reading, or do we send it to committee and I think he was so confused and shocked, he said, “send it to committee” and we were pulling our hair out because we would have had the votes that day!

But there were then many bills afterwards before we got to the point that Mary was making where we had an actual equal pay law in the Province of Ontario.

But I guess the point is that there was a very, very wide and broad support for what we were doing and across partisan political lines, and I think that that is at some point what really assisted all the other organizations that were working on this to bring this to fruition. 

Sue: Thank you. So why was this particular Ontario Pay Equity Act so important Mary? What were the pros of it that made it presumably palatable and even acceptable to the Equal Pay Coalition?

Mary: Well, at its basic, it recognizes in its preamble that there is systemic gender discrimination against women’s work in Ontario, which was quite unusual for a bill to say this – and that’s how it started. So it started from that assumption that there was this systemic gender discrimination and that was based on a lot of research that we put forward to show that it was right in the law at the top. 

And then the purpose of the rest of the act was essentially to have a step-by-step way to actually determine in any particular workplace, what were the dynamics of that discrimination and how would we remedy it through identifying male and female job classes, doing a job evaluation; and then it required that if they were of comparable value you must adjust the pay.

So this was quite unusual law and it still is – the Ontario law is still considered in the international field to be quite a ground-breaking piece of legislation.

The other part to it is that it was very important to us that it gave the right of unions and unionized workplaces to in fact bargain the pay equity plan. And that it also had an obligation on the part of employers to maintain the plan. So once you’d done it, you then had to make sure that it continued to be maintained and the wage gap didn’t re-emerge. So those I think were some of the key aspects of it that made it important. 

Sue: And it was also proactive, wasn’t it? Employers actually had to go out and initiate the pay equity plans.

Mary: Yes, they had to go do it.

Sue: It wasn’t something that they might have to do if some employee went to the Human Rights Commission, but it was assumed that all employers would create plans. 

Mary: And that was the difference about it. I was just about to say that the proactive part made it different from the federal equal pay law which were complaints-based. You had to complain in order to get it to work. 

What were the negatives? Well, the negatives were, it was phased in over a fairly long period of time so even though discrimination was identified it wasn’t rectified right away. And when it was originally passed there were about a million women who were left out of it because it provided for an evaluation method called job-to-job which required you essentially to have in your workplace a male job that actually had the same points. And if they weren’t the same points then you weren’t covered and this meant that a lot of the predominantly female workplaces, which would be childcares, a lot of social service agencies, nursing homes, all of these areas were left out of the first Act.

And so, that meant the Coalition really from the time it was formed in `74 until this very day has continued to constantly have to go back to the government and make sure that we get better amendments. And so that’s what happened in `93 we got more amendments that brought in the rest of those women at least provided them with a method. And so it was really a constant struggle to keep trying to make sure it was having some effect.

Sue: So was this the proxy method? Maybe you should describe a little bit about what job evaluation is now and how it works, please.

Mary: OK. Well the job-to-job method means that once you’d evaluated the jobs  and you would use different factors like skill, effort, responsibility, once you evaluated them, if they were substantially the same in points even if it was different types of work, then you made the adjustment. When they brought in the new methods effective in `93, proportional value was another method which was introduced. It’s a bit complicated but it basically means that you could put the jobs on what’s essentially a wage line and you could proportionately pay them what they should have been.

So if there was an executive director who was male and let’s say there’s a receptionist and you did the points, you could figure out per point how much it was worth and therefore what proportionately that person should be paid. 

The proxy method though had to be used for the people who didn’t have male job classes at all, and that again was a large section of people. And that then provided for comparing to a female job class that was similar in the public sector that had already got a pay equity adjustment. So somebody in a nursing home might compare a similar job that got an adjustment in a hospital, because there were many male job classes in the hospital. So that was the proxy method.

And all of this at the time was considered quite, I don’t want to say revolutionary, but it was really making great steps in order to force employers to come up with an appropriate adjustment.

 Sue: And it applied to the private sector too, right, not just the public sector?

Mary: Yes, that was, I suppose the other thing I should have mentioned in the beginning was that the act applied to the private sector and  in some other jurisdictions it only applied to the public sector, but we’ve always had it applying to both.

Now Quebec also has a law, which applies to the public and the private sector and the federal law applies to both.

Sue: Right. So what’s happened since then? Obviously we don’t have Liberal or NDP governments anymore, we had some, you know, pretty Conservative governments in between. What would you say happened after that and wasn’t there a sunset clause or something, and did it actually sunset the Pay Equity Act?

Mary: Oh. There wasn’t any sunset clause. 

So it continues. And in fact, one of the things about the Pay Equity Act is it actually didn’t have a limitation period. So people could still be suing in relation to adjustments that should have been made a long time ago.

I think what I would say about it is that from the time period, let’s say from `95 onwards we had Conservative governments in Ontario. The Conservative government came into power and immediately repealed the proxy method and took away the funding. And that was the other part of the fight of the Coalition in the early 90’s – was particularly for the public sector – that unless you had funding for those pay equity adjustments, a lot of those social service community agencies couldn’t afford to pay the adjustments. And so it was an obligation of government, if they were going to implement this human right to actually provide the funding.

So we spent a lot of time trying to get the government to provide the funding; and the NDP came up with a bunch of funding and they were in power by the early 90s. When the Tories came into power they got rid of a lot of the funding, and they also got rid of the proxy method; and that led us to do a Charter challenge about the repeal of that method and that Charter challenge was successful in `97 and the law that was the proxy method came back into force.

First, then they wouldn’t bring back the money. So there was a constant set of struggles. We brought another Charter challenge in 2002 about the fact they weren’t funding. We ended up settling that challenge for about four hundred million dollars that was paid out but then the government again stopped funding.

So it’s one of the things about pay equity because it actually costs money that nearly every government doesn’t want to pay the money, and most employers don’t want to pay the money. So there’s a pretty constant stream of attack against effective pay equity.

Laurell, do you have any thoughts on that?

Laurell: Not on that specific question, no.

Sue: Laurell, are you familiar with one of the big struggles that went on around pay equity with Bell workers, right? Do you know anything about that?

Laurell: No, I wouldn’t, I’d have to refresh my memory on that one.  There were quite a number of high profile cases that involved better pay and equal pay for women. Bell Canada was in some senses the highest profile one if only because it took so many, many, many long years to bring around any kind of resolution. In the earlier years it was actually one similar fight with Air Canada, but many of these fights got resolved for good or for bad in quick order. The Bell Canada one is infamous again, not only because of the sheer number of women involved but the very, very many long years. And there were demonstrations on Parliament Hill as well as in local communities.

Sue: Can you think of other examples of organizations and employees having to demonstrate for equal pay?

Laurell: Well, there was on – some of these relate to maybe more of the work of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women and the Ontario Committee on the Status of Women in the earlier years. There was a strike that involved building cleaners, Modern Building Corporation mostly Portuguese women and that became a bit of a lightning rod and pulled together a lot of people in support. That was a time when heavy cleaners as a job classification were always men and light cleaners were always women. And certainly their pay scales were very, very different. 

A good example of the problem of job ghettoization and – but it was complicated by the fact that there was also sub-contracting – what we might call contract flipping now – that was taking place, still takes place in that industry today. And which was also going to set the stage for eliminating these women’s union rights. They had had a hard fought collective agreement that gave them some protections, which would go down the tube the minute a contract was retendered to another provider. And in that industry there were players in the industry who just literally flipped from one to the next every couple of years, and if Joe-Blow Company didn’t get it this year, they’d get it two years later, and this was the way they all kept wages down and unions out.

This is I guess, again, an example of where there’s a lot of interplay between different forms of exploitation that go on. I think we see it today with COVID-19.  I think sometimes that we should be identifying the fight to try and extend essential workers’ pay and make it permanent for long term care workers, equally for people in childcare and grocery stores, and so these are mostly women. And so today if we were tackling this issue afresh, we might characterize that as yet another fight to improve women’s pay in the labour market.

Sue: What role do you think race, class, ability and age played in contributing to wage inequality?

Mary: Well, the evidence is pretty clear that all of those groups have much wider pay gaps than able-bodied white women, that the pay gaps are markedly different. And certainly the Coalition particularly as we move forward, but also probably in the last ten or fifteen years, has focused a lot on that. 

And the other issue to think about was that back in the early 1990s we actually had an Employment Equity Act in Ontario which was also supposed to be trying to address – because compensation would have been part of what you could deal with in relation to an Employment Equity Plan – was looking at the salary structures within a workplace and addressing whether or not those salary structures were in fact racialized, whether or not Indigenous workers didn’t even get in the workplace. You know, so there’s a variety of different ways in which it can get impacted, which leads to unemployment and a series of other things.

And so the Employment Equity Act was quite an important step forward and that was the thing that was immediately repealed by the Tory government in 1995; and the Employment Equity Act department. And recently people have been trying to use the human rights laws themselves to try and address various of these things. But we haven’t yet had what would be a really important human rights case, which addressed the extent to which occupations are racialized, and what that means for the devaluation of their work. I think some of the same dynamics, which led to the Pay Equity Act, where academic research showed that the greater the degree to which a job was associated with women, the more likely it was underpaid and that it was the association with women that devalued it. And certainly I think that was also true with the association of jobs with racialized workers; it meant you could pay them less, you could give them worse working conditions and a variety of things like that.

Sue: Yeah. Was the Equal Pay Coalition involved in the Employment Equity Coalition?

Mary: Yes, we were supportive of it and one of the other things was that a variety of the cases that were being brought. For example, the case that was brought with respect to the Charter challenge around the elimination of proxy, was brought by the Service Employees International Union and the long term care homes for example actually have highly racialized workforces in them. And so the elimination of their, you know, right to pay equity was a serious problem and it had a serious impact on those workers. 

Sue: Right. So, I’m going to ask you both to muse about in hindsight whether you would have done things any differently, or would you do it all over again. Or, what are the lessons do you think for present day young people.?

Mary: OK, Laurell, you go first.

Laurell: Well, I would do it all over again. Mary had this staying power too. I moved onto some other issues but in some of those opening years some of us spent every non-paid working hour at work with the Equal Pay Coalition, Ontario Committee on the Status of Women, or NAC, and Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value, and all the related issues were quite central. And I think most people who worked on those various campaigns and efforts would similarly say that it was time and energy well spent.

Of course we made some mistakes. That is inevitable but it, I have to say that from myself, I don’t see anything as a big regret and, you know, I can see that there are some things that we might have kept on the front burner more. Again, things like minimum wage could have been more a part of what we were struggling to secure. And pay equity and the particular form that we ended up with in Ontario was a big win, but it was not the only thing, and, you know, we’re still struggling to get that legislation elsewhere in some form or other.

So the fight is far from over. I think that there are lessons though also about how we organized. One of them was reaching out as far and wide as we could and not wearing partisan hats. And I don’t just mean political party partisan hats but I mean labour union partisan hats, and political organizational hats, you know. To get anything done that’s worthwhile, you really, really need to reach out and if the organizations don’t exist that allow you to do that then you’ve got to create new ones, which is essentially what we did when we set up the Equal Pay Coalition.

Sue: Right. Do you want to say more about that Mary?

Mary: Well it’s interesting because I remember that at the time of the Pay Equity Act, we were criticized by some people out West for example. In BC there was not a pay equity struggle in the same sense of getting a pay equity law. They did work around collective bargaining and important work. And so there was a sense there that we were spending too much time on trying to get these complicated legal rights of job evaluation and that this was kind of a technical thing and we should just use labour’s power to get the money. And it used to be called, I think it was a book called, or an article called Just Give Us the Money, right. And I mean I always thought, sure that would be good if you could just give us the money, but I never found anybody was just giving us the money and I think I supposed if we had been able to mobilize millions of workers on the streets, maybe, you know, capitalism might have given us more money. But that wasn’t really what we were able to do. 

What we got was a legal right, and the only way we actually were able to enforce the legal right was constant lobbying and struggle to even get the legal right enforced. And I actually recall at one point when in BC – I can’t remember what was happening – somebody was going out of power – and they wanted me to draft a pay equity law like almost overnight that could be passed because now they thought maybe they should have a law and then the law was immediately repealed by the Liberal government that came into power.

So, and there still is no pay equity act law in BC to this day. And so in my experience laws are important, legal approaches are important, the Charter challenges were important, but you don’t get any of those things without the struggle of people to get them. And you don’t get to keep them or try and prevent more of it being taken away without a powerful struggle. 

And I think this goes back to the role of the union movement which was also very important in the struggle for pay equity in Ontario and the role of the unions in actually financing the litigation that established the jurisprudence, and they did this federally as well. 

So with the Bell workers, Bell was taking them back and forth to Court. I can’t even remember how many times that went back and forth to Court. And, you know, the unions paid for that to be done, and so it was very important that you had those structures. And I remember we used to say, Laurell, remember you used to talk about that the quickest way – when we were lobbying – that the quickest way to get a pay equity adjustment was actually to join a union, because if you had a unionized wage, you were way better than if you were a non-unionized worker. So that was kind of like your pay equity down payment was getting a unionized job. And from there you actually would work to try and get actual pay equity. 

But it was a very important role, and at the same time the community groups – I recall the YWCA – which faithfully had its Executive Director, Heather McGregor, come with me to meetings and it was always very important that we had those groups involved. The government was never able to actually divide us up, right, which I think they would try with some other issues. They would try to get people to say, “We don’t believe that, you know, we think you only have to do this much and the Equal Pay Coalition is trying to be too radical”. We managed to get everybody into the tent in order, and yet still come out with a pretty effective platform.

Laurell: Yeah, I would want to add a note that it was also primarily the feminists in the labour unions that drove a lot of this support ranging from Canadian public employees, and postal workers and in Quebec, some of the unions there. And also organizations like the former Federation of Women Teachers Associations of Ontario who as a largely feminist union helped fund a lot of the campaigning work and were up front in supporting us. So I think, I give some credit to the unions, I come out of the unions, and we fought hard for a lot of improvements in women’s pay. But I give particular credit to feminists in the labour movement.

Sue: You mean that the business and professional women didn’t cough up?

Mary: No, they were great.

Laurell: No, we can have a conversation about that, no, I didn’t mean that actually. No, actually the business and professional women’s clubs, and again here it took a particular, I would say, understanding of class. And so you had people like Elsie Gregory-McGill who was seen as, you know, the ultimate leader of a club like this – a professional women’s club – but she had an underlying sympathy for working women and lower paid working women that went deep and she’s the one who got us into the business and professional women’s clubs to talk to them and to explain the concept. A lot of those organizations at the beginning thought that the employers argument that this was just a semantic difference and that we were playing word games, by saying Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value  as opposed to simply talking about equal pay for equal work. They got us into a lot of places to educate the people and hopefully to find some new allies.

Sue: And Mary, the midwives issue is still outstanding isn’t it?

Mary: It is. It is. 

Sue: I don’t know whether you want to say a bit about that.

Mary: Sure. Well, we, this was actually a new way – we were trying to use the Human Rights Code.  So, the midwives are actually paid as independent contractors by the government to provide midwifery services. So we brought a complaint of pay discrimination against the government and we used the comparison of family physicians and positioning the midwife between the nurse practitioner, who was female-dominated, and the CHC family physician associated with the male-dominated medical profession. So that complaint was brought in 2013, and in 2018 the Human Rights Tribunal ruled in our favour. And then subsequent to that it took until 2019 to get an order which gave them back pay back to 2011 and we’re currently engaged in a joint compensation study to discuss and evaluate the work moving from 2014 onwards. And in addition the government though, then appealed to the Divisional Court. The Divisional Court, in June, unanimously, a three-judge panel, rejected all of the government’s grounds of appeal, and now the government is appealing again. We got their motion for appeal yesterday. At the same time they [the government] are saying they’re going to implement it, but interestingly this has such major implications that they would have a proactive responsibility to prevent and remedy systemic gender discrimination that they have to appeal. 

And basically the Divisional Court said, well of course you have that responsibility, right; this is a responsibility you’ve had for many years. Anyway, it’s moving on but it’s hopeful it will also establish remedies for people who don’t fall under the Pay Equity Act and who can move forward under the Human Rights Code.