SFL marks IWD with campaign launch on wage gap

The Saskatchewan Federation of Labour embarked on a joint campaign today with the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) entitled “Equality…Once and For All”. The launch of the campaign is taking place across the country in conjunction with International Women’s Day.

The CLC released a new report on the gendered wage gap in Canada, entitled “Women in the Workforce: Still a Long Way from Equality”. Using the latest workforce statistics, the CLC concludes that the wage gap, where women earn 70.5 cents for every dollar earned by men, is persistent and even worsening for some women.

“One of the most disturbing findings is that for young, university-educated women, the wage gap has actually become worse in recent years,” says SFL Women’s Committee Chair, Shelley Johnson. “We told our daughters that the way to be economically independent was to get an education and what we are finding is that those skills are not being rewarded. Women are now more educated than men, and are putting off having families in order to get that education, yet they are falling behind their male counterparts.”

Some of the reasons the wage gap persists include: occupational segregation; lack of publicly-funded childcare; an employment insurance program that discriminates against part-time workers; concentration of women in low-paying and minimum wage jobs; and the restructuring of women’s work by privatization and contracting out.

“Too many women struggle to make a living. Too many women are working and retiring in poverty. At the same time, we have a federal government who claims that women have equality, but then promptly cancels publicly-funded daycare and women’s programming across the country. It’s a contradiction,” says Johnson.

One encouraging finding is that the wage gap for unionized women is significantly lower. “At the provincial level, we have a government who is about to make it far more difficult for women to join a union and to bargain collectively. The SFL will work hard on this campaign over the coming year to organize women to fight these political realities,” adds Johnson.

The SFL represents approximately 95,000 unionized workers from 37 affiliated unions in
Saskatchewan.

For more information, contact Shelley Johnson at 949-9893 (cel.)
or Cara Banks at 533-3423.