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Results: 1 - 11 of 11
Nicole Fortin
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Nicole Fortin
2013-04-30 9:26
I'm glad to be here.
Today I will provide some highlights on a recent paper on Canadian wage inequality in Canada.
As others have said, it's important to note that the changes in income inequality in Canada have been different from changes in the United States, where the changes were larger, happened earlier, and resulted in greater gains at the top than in Canada.
Second, as already mentioned, the Canadian fiscal regime does somewhat lessen the blow of increasing inequality. In 2009, the inequality in the after-tax and transfer of family income was 28% lower than the before and after-tax transfer of family income inequality. Nevertheless, given the tension between redistribution and economic growth, it's important to consider the economic forces that are behind the changes and whether they can be addressed directly.
To understand how these forces work, we have to note that in the 2000s especially, the Canadian experience with wage inequality has been one of wage polarization. When we're talking about wage polarization, we're talking about situations where the wage of the median worker—and here I am talking mostly of the median male worker—is not improving as much as those at the bottom or at the top. In the 2000s, the real—meaning after inflation—hourly wages of the median male have increased by 5%, while the wages of the men at the top 90% have increased by 12% and those at the bottom by 9%.
That being said, in terms of the Canadian post-recession experience, from 2009 to 2012 we have seen decreasing wage inequality. This is in contrast with the U.S., where wage inequality has continued to increase.
So what are the driving forces behind the difficulties of the middle workers? They are usually attributed to two forces: declining unionization rates and technological change. In Canada, the decline in union coverage of males has been quite substantial; it dropped from 47% in 1980 to 25% in 2012. The reason that declining unionization rates do contribute to the polarization of male earnings is that the union premium is highest in the lower wage distribution of males.
Technological change is also thought to adversely affect mostly the routine, male-dominated jobs that are in the middle of the wage distribution, the wages on the plant floor.
Let's note that these forces apply less to women because they are more likely to work in the wider public sector, including the health and education sectors. So women fare generally better against these winds of change than men; however, there remains a gender gap.
In terms of some of the policy options that work with these forces, many of them come under provincial jurisdiction. They would include the support for public education. Most of the time we talk about higher education, but it's also important to have policy to foster high school completion. When we're talking about exclusion, we're usually talking about individuals who have not completed high school. Support for a minimum wage in an appropriate range is among the policy tools to be thought about, as is support for collective bargaining.
As I noted, Canada has performed relatively well in terms of generating new university degrees. However, it is important to note that not all carry the same prospect of high-paying jobs. In a changing environment, information relative to the prospects of the different degrees I think is quite important.
Raising the minimum wage is a tool that can help reduce inequality at the very bottom of the wage distribution. However, because there is limited spillover, it's not a very effective tool overall.
Moving in the direction of a policy environment that is more supportive of unions, especially in terms of the procedure governing union certification, is one option to be considered.
Let me conclude by saying, as many others have done before me, that while growth-oriented economic policies, such as encouraging trade and deepening investment in new technology, may provide the basis for economic success for future generations, these policies may also have the effect of exacerbating inequality. This should be kept in mind to continue to get public support for such policies.
This concludes my remarks.
Keenan Wellar
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Keenan Wellar
2013-04-16 12:20
Thank you very much.
I appreciate those comments. Ditto for much of that.
I will also echo the sentiment that we need to look at targeting those with the greatest barriers, recognizing that certain disability subgroups, such as people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, face more serious and severe attitudinal and systemic barriers. Those barriers are unlikely to be overcome in a significant way if we approach the employment of people with disabilities as though they are a homogenous group. They are not. They are very different individually, but also as groups, and sometimes the groups merge and are complicated.
My experience is as a local provider, not only of employment supports but of supporting people with intellectual disabilities to live, work, and play in the Ottawa community. Part of that is helping people find employment and helping employers welcome them to their workplaces. Through that experience, I've seen a lot of what works and what doesn't work, and that's what I'd like to talk about.
I'm also a volunteer with United Way Ottawa. I'm one of the first focus-area champions. I go out and speak about the advantages of hiring people with disabilities and promoting attitudinal change in that area.
With respect to employment, I just want to bring home some of the local context, because right now, within sight of this great building, down at the Westin, one of our LiveWorkPlay members is actually at work in the accounts department. To move a little bit west on O'Connor Street, we support an individual who runs a small business, where he works with Accenture. To go south on Bank Street to The Works Gourmet Burger Bistro, we have someone there right now helping out with the lunch rush. Just to give you some local perspective, that's what we do. They're real people right here in your local community.
We are a local organization with a local focus, but we try to inform our work by best practices from across the province, the country, and the world. Some of the gentlemen you had sitting here—in fact, right in this seat you had Mark Wafer, and you also had Cam Crawford—are people who I'm very familiar with. Again, I would echo many of their comments, so I'm grateful that I don't really need to bring that context. We need more Mark Wafers in Canada. Our country would be a much better place, and a better place for people with disabilities.
We also work with the Ontario Disability Employment Network. I know that Joe Dale testified here as well. We're quite aligned with those comments.
Locally, we're part of the Employment Accessibility Resource Network, hosted by United Way Ottawa. It's bringing together about 30 service providers and employers. I think it reflects well what the panel was saying in their report, not only about promoting the benefits of hiring people with disabilities but also about how to connect with people like ourselves who know these individuals, can connect with an employer, can help communicate the benefits, and can find the right job for the right person.
I see how fast time flies, so I'm going to skip ahead.
There's one thing I want to do. I know it's common to talk about best practices, but I want to talk a little bit about worst practices, because I think that's important. In these times when it's a constant dialogue of scarcity of resources, I think we can't only emphasize the positives. We have to look at where our resources are being used perhaps ineffectually or even in a regressive manner.
One of the things that certainly concerns us and our partner organizations is segregated and/or sub-minimum-wage work environments. In the field of developmental services, as it's labelled in Ontario, we see scarce government dollars continuing to flow to practices and activities that not only fail to support community inclusion but in fact create barriers and have regressive impacts. A lot of this is covered in the CACL report on achieving social and economic inclusion, where they note:
Although enrollments in sheltered workshops are slowly declining...segregated day programming and enclave based employment persist as a dominant model of support for this group in Canada. With below minimum wage compensation, they constitute a form of financial exploitation and social and economic exclusion with substantially lower quality of life outcomes....
This has certainly been our experience, having supported people who have been in these segregated situations and who perhaps have been told that it is because they do not have opportunities, a future, or a possibility in the real workforce. This has been proven wrong time and time again. The greatest barrier was in fact that message to them and to their family members that they would not have success with employment, so this segregated work-like arrangement was what's best for them.
I would note that in some ways the Government of Canada does support that practice by sometimes contracting with these agencies where basically you have a salaried staff member like myself who is supervising a bunch of people with disabilities who are being paid at a sub-minimum wage to perform a task. I would encourage looking internally at what goes on there and dealing with that, because it's wonderful that there's this talk about best practices, but I think leadership through demonstration is critically important.
Another worse practice—this is more of a fear I guess—is going forward again in a dialogue of scarcity. Sometimes there's a tendency toward one-size-fits-all. It sounds economically efficient. Let's send everybody with a disability who is looking for a job to the same place, and then we'll save on various costs.
The problem is that tends to incentivize the marginalization of those who are most difficult to serve because the metric by which performance of those career centres is usually measured is simply how many jobs. So it's not a one job equals one job situation. If you have a person with an intellectual disability who is in a group that is facing 75% or higher unemployment, and they get a job, that is a very different outcome from someone with a Ph.D. who sustained a workplace injury and has been supported to return to work. I'm not saying that is not important, just that it's very different. If you count those two things as the same outcome, then the most marginalized people are unlikely to benefit from that perspective.
Years ago a young man came to our office—actually his mother, but he was there too. She was in a rage because her son had been assessed by a career centre as having a 3 out of 100 score in employability. That is not a very good message to receive. Long story short, he has now been working for a TD bank locally here in Ottawa for more than a decade, has a full salary, pension, everything. That is obviously not the outcome nor the destination that had been determined for him through that initial assessment, so we need to be wary of that.
If we do have people going through the same door, we have to make sure through the other side that there are people who understand the particular needs of different disability groups and subpopulations because those are very specialized skills. What we do in terms of the work we do with employers and developing those relationships is not the same as helping someone prepare a resumé and look through job postings. That's one type of job support.
View Rodger Cuzner Profile
Lib. (NS)
My thanks to all of you for being here today.
My first question is to Mr. Wellar and then I'm going to Ms. Hutchison.
Mr. Wellar, you talked about the segregated wage subsidy programs and the sub-minimum wage jobs. Could you talk about the work being done by those workers now? What should we be doing differently? Could you talk a little bit about that?
Ms. Hutchison, I'll throw the question to you as well. Sometimes when governments make bad decisions, it's not uncommon for one segment of the population to bear a disproportionate amount of the pain, the hurt. When the OAS requirement went from age 65 to 67, I would think you, who represent a group whose unemployment rate usually hovers around 75%, would be at the epicentre of hurt on a change like that. I'd like to know what ran through your mind when you first heard of that, and also what you've heard from the people you network with across the country.
I'll go to Mr. Wellar first.
Keenan Wellar
View Keenan Wellar Profile
Keenan Wellar
2013-04-16 12:58
I think this points to why we need a somewhat disability-specific lens, because there isn't any other population that is working in a sub-minimum wage situation. With Ph.D.s who use a wheelchair, there is a law against them working for less than minimum wage, but we've somehow found a way to make this acceptable for certain people.
Where's that happening? Well, here in Ottawa some of the jobs are involved with the recycling of paper. Also, there's a program for watering plants in government buildings. I found most people employed in the federal government were unaware that those individuals are working for a dollar an hour or whatever the current wage is. I would encourage some internal exploration of what's going on there.
The best practice would be to find out how we can directly employ those people as federal government workers, as opposed to this current arrangement. If they need support, that's what an employment support provider is for—to help them get to where they need to be to do the job competently. The “Obstacles” report in 1981 talked about these arrangements, but now it's 30 years later and it's still going on. I realize there are wonderful things happening, but we need to—
View Kellie Leitch Profile
CPC (ON)
I have a point of order. I may have misheard you, and please correct me if this is the case. But I thought I heard the witness say that the federal government was setting wages of, like, a dollar or $1.25. Just so we're clear, the provinces set minimum wages. It is not the responsibility of the federal government to set minimum wages. They're set by the provinces. So I don't appreciate—and maybe I misinterpreted you—the innuendo that the Government of Canada was paying individuals a dollar or $1.25.
View Don Davies Profile
NDP (BC)
Pierre Bouchard
View Pierre Bouchard Profile
Pierre Bouchard
2012-09-25 16:03
The minimum wage would be just under $200 per month, and it can go up to $400. It depends on the sector. There are various minimum wages, but that's broadly the range—between $200 and $400 a month.
Coline Camier
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Coline Camier
2012-05-14 15:33
Good afternoon, everyone. I am Coline Camier, Assistant Coordinator. With me is Marilyn Ouellet, who is responsible for equal access services. Thank you for inviting us to speak to you today. Let me start right away.
Action travail des femmes, or ATF, is an independent, not-for-profit organization working to support underprivileged women of all ages and of all origins in their desire to obtain decent employment, especially in non-traditional areas. Our expertise lies in helping women to enter the labour market with complete equality of rights and opportunities, not only between men and women, but also between all women. We can in fact see that all women are not equal in access to employment and that some are confronted with more obstacles. That is why we operate on two levels: we help individual women to obtain access to work and we seek to eliminate discrimination in the workplace.
For more than 30 years, ATF has been helping to establish equality programs in Quebec, the latest of which is the precedent-setting Gaz Métro case before the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal. Our remarks today will deal with improving economic prosperity for girls and women, because, as you know, those women are in the poorest segments of the population. They often find themselves in very difficult positions because of systemic discrimination, by which we mean a number of elements that accumulate in life and interact correspondingly.
Let us begin with education. We no longer have to make the case for the feminization of poverty today; it is the result of a number of factors, including the school dropout rate for girls. The statistics for boys may still be higher, but, in the light of the socio-economic inequalities that continue to be obstacles in girls' lives, it is important that we do not conceal the same phenomenon that affects them.
Let me give you some figures. In 2008, women without a high-school diploma earned an average of $16,414 per year, while men without a high-school diploma earned $24,434. The difference between men and women is clear. Complex dynamics in gender relationships continue to influence the lives of boys and girls and bring with them still more situations of inequality. The government must guarantee access to education.
To further illustrate our point, let us not forget the current tuition fee debate in Quebec. Today, we would like to stress the fact that tuition fees often have a more adverse effect on women. That is why the issue deserves even more detailed attention. For example, immigrant women, single mothers, women with disabilities and aboriginal women often experience this kind of situation to a significantly greater extent. Education remains the key that gives women access to interesting jobs in areas other than the service industry and the decent incomes and economic autonomy that will get them out of poverty.
Finally, I am going to talk about the gender divisions in labour. In the labour market, atypical jobs, that is, those that are temporary and have no job security, are largely taken by women, especially young women. Most of the people who are paid minimum wage are women. In Quebec, the figure is almost 60%. On May 1, the minimum wage in Quebec was increased to $9.90 from its previous level of $9.60. But it is still not enough to allow a life above the poverty line. Our recommendation is to raise it to $11.20, and we have already made the Quebec department of labour aware of that as part of the Front de défense des non-syndiqué-e-s, of which we are a member.
In terms of pay equity, women receive an average of 75% of the salary of men because the lowest salary levels in our society are mostly found in the employment sectors occupied by women. Traditionally female occupations are mostly in health care, education and services, where more than 80% are women. A brief analysis shows that, historically, all these occupations are an extension of domestic work. They are valued and paid at a lower level than traditionally male sectors.
To reach actual equality, it is important to give new value to womens' work as caregivers, which continues to form the basis of social, family and intergenerational ties.
The promotion of so-called non-traditional sectors remains a priority for us at Action travail des femmes, a response to the inequality between men and women in the workplace. Those predominantly male sectors represent an overlooked and undervalued opportunity for women.
Of the 520 occupations listed in the National Occupational Classification, 269 are those in which women are in a significant minority. Those jobs provide very favourable compensation situations and the rate of employment is high. So it is essential to promote more diverse educational and career paths for girls.
In that regard, Status of Women Canada has given us the responsibility for a pilot project in the Montreal region. The objective is to promote and facilitate women's access to training and employment in traditionally male sectors and other sectors in which they are underrepresented.
Hiring women in non-traditional sectors has a number of advantages. I am not sure if you are aware of this, but, as well as providing a better economic situation for women, it also helps to address the labour shortage that the major growth sectors in Quebec now have to deal with.
In workplace safety too, women are known to bring better conditions for all employees, men and women alike. The mix also creates dynamic teams. Businesses see productivity increasing and employee commitment becoming stronger.
Promoting equality implies a change in the organizational culture of these environments. Establishing a concerted strategy for the various players is essential. The Government of Canada's leadership and desire to see the Employment Equity Act enforced are crucial. This therefore implies federal contracting and access to employment programs in Quebec specifically.
For Action travail des femmes, defending rights is essential and it is critical to fight against all forms of discrimination against women in the workforce, especially in so-called non-traditional sectors, where psychological and discriminatory harassment based on gender is a huge obstacle to women becoming and staying employed.
I will now turn things over to my colleague Marilyn.
View Robert Goguen Profile
CPC (NB)
Even based on a minimum wage, given the province, there is no way you could establish some sort of a gauge, even a topped-off amount? Has it been done in any other country, do we know?
Laurel Rothman
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Laurel Rothman
2012-04-25 17:01
Thank you.
Thanks very much for the opportunity to meet with you and speak with you. I appreciate it.
You may or may not know that Campaign 2000 is a cross-Canada network of organizations holding the government's feet to the fire on ending child and family poverty. It comes from the November 24, 1989, resolution where the House of Commons unanimously agreed to seek to end child and family poverty.
We're broad. We include low-income women and children, housing, child care, health care providers, as well as food banks, faith communities, women's groups, and labour organizations. You may well be familiar with our annual report card that we do every year, in French and English, marking progress or the lack thereof, and offering our recommendations for what needs to happen in public policies.
I was interested and pleased to hear some of the similarities I share with Carol Stephenson. I won't go on for too long except to say that I too had the role models of a working mother and working grandmother. I had a mother who said, “Get an education if you want to have choices”, as she didn't; being a single parent in the 1930s was not very popular.
Today we're here to talk about prospects for girls and women. I just want to open by saying that the prospects for low-income girls and young women in Canada are inextricably related to the status of their mothers, not surprisingly. When mothers struggle to pay the rent and feed the children, then girls often miss opportunities. They may not have the scope to develop a vision for the future, and often don't see those choices. As a few women have told me in different consultations, “I can't imagine taking on the debt I would have to take on to go to post-secondary education.” And some of these women have the academic qualifications to do so.
I'll give you a couple of quick facts. We have 639,000 children living in poverty, according to most recent Statistics Canada figures. That's about one in ten, about the size of Regina and Saskatoon together, I believe. And that does not reflect the situation in first nations communities, where about one in four children live in poverty, often in mother-led families.
So let's say that mothers carry a disproportionately high burden of child and family poverty. As you may know, women raising children alone are almost five times more likely to live in poverty than those in two-parent families. More than half of female lone-parent families with young children under six live in poverty.
As Monica Townson sometimes says—you may know her, as she's a well-known economist—“Gender creates a cleavage of vulnerability that cuts across all other groups”, including others who are in vulnerable populations; our aboriginal peoples; people in racialized communities; recent immigrants, about three-quarters of whom are from racialized communities; and persons with disabilities.
I want to talk a little bit about two critical perspectives on girls and women in poverty—how they're treated when they're in paid employment and the situation they find themselves in when they're not—and offer a few recommendations.
As you probably know, women who work full time throughout the year still only earn about 71% of the average earnings of men working full time. The gap's even greater when we look at hourly wages. Of course, since women's wages are on average lower, it's much harder for them to save for retirement. Few women have pensions to rely on.
One result is that one in three children living in poverty in Canada—unfortunately, that's pretty steady, going up or down a little bit over the years—lives in a family where at least one parent is working full time. So clearly the labour market has an important role to play, as do public policies.
Women account for 60% of minimum wage workers, yet among minimum wages across the country, I think the highest is $10.25, in Ontario. It's very difficult to make a decent living. Women are less likely to get EI benefits if they're out of work.
I want to talk about the three critical public policies that low-income women told us they need. I should say that our Ontario campaign did a project in 11 communities across the province, everywhere from Pembroke to Windsor, Ottawa, Toronto, the suburbs, Sault Ste. Marie, including aboriginal communities, and many of our newcomer communities in the GTA.
They were all low-income women. Some relied mostly on social assistance, and some on a combination of that and work. Some were in various stages of paid employment. They said they needed three things. They needed income security. They needed to know that they were somehow going to be able to balance that budget each month, pay the rent, feed the children, and if they were lucky have some choices.
I want to emphasize that public programs play an extremely important role, because as we know, the labour market does not distinguish between women who are parents and women who are not. Programs like the Canada child tax benefit, the GST credit, the UCCB, and employment insurance help prevent families from falling into poverty. They help give some support during periods of economic instability. There's a chart in our report card—perhaps you'll refer to it at some point—showing that our child and family poverty rate would be much higher if we didn't have a number of the programs I just mentioned.
But a pathway out of poverty for a lone parent today has to include a higher child benefit. Ideally our “back of the envelope” statistics show that a lone parent with one child needs full-time work of somewhere between 32 and 35 hours a week, at least $12 an hour, and a full child benefit of $5,400. So that's a little more than $400 a month, which for some people would help balance off the tax and payroll contributions they make. Right now our benefits are about $3,485 as a maximum for the first child, and we want to see that go up.
We know that low- and modest-income women need that money to live on. That money goes back into communities in the form of rent; high child care fees, if they're lucky enough to have child care; food; if they can, maybe some recreation expenses; and of course, clothing. So we're going to recommend that the enhanced child benefit for low-income families go up to $5,400. Of course, that's a progressive benefit, where if you have less, you get more. Yet it would cover about 90% of all children. If you have a higher income you would get less benefit, but it does recognize parenting.
Parents and mothers also told us they needed more and better affordable, high-quality child care. Despite some growth in regulated services over the last couple of decades, and Canada's shrinking number of children, the gap between the level of service and the number of children remains far too wide. As you all know, we have one of the highest rates of women in the labour force in the OECD, in the industrialized world, yet we have no well-developed public child care program to respond to that. We have some good examples. We have some important development in Quebec and Manitoba, and some movement in other provinces.
Campaign 2000 partners across the country believe there is an important federal role in early childhood education and care services to set the policy framework and fund some of it. It's in our social development interest. It's in the interest of women's equality, and it's in our economic interest.
You probably saw there was another study last week from Quebec economists showing that the system of les centres de la petite enfance for preschool children in Quebec more than pays for itself as a result of 14 or 15 years of development of the program. A higher rate of women are in the labour force paying more taxes and contributing more actively to the economy, and the child care program has a lot to do with it.
What we're saying in this time of very tight funding—
View Don Davies Profile
NDP (BC)
Thank you.
Mr. Rowlinson, we've done a bit of research, and if our figures are correct, the apparel industry in Jordan accounts for some 17% of their total exports. It's our understanding that most of those exports are produced in factories in what are called “qualified industrial zones”, which employ about 42,000 workers. Two-thirds of those workers are migrant workers, and 60% of those workers are women. Our research indicates that there have been three minimum wage increases in Jordan within the last five years: one in 2009, one in January of this year, and one slated to come in 2013. To give some perspective, the minimum wage was $155 per month in 2009. It was raised to $212 per month in that year. It was raised to $240 per month just this year, and it's going to go to $269 next year.
However, the legal minimum wage explicitly is excluded for people who work in the garment sector, which leads me to believe that minimum wages in the garment sector are probably below $155 per month. We've also heard testimony at this committee that there are concerns with issues like forced labour, excessive hours of work, physical discipline in some cases, and people not being paid their promised wages.
If that is indeed a fair description of the working conditions in the qualified industrial zones, I'm wondering if you have any suggestions as to how a free trade agreement that we would sign with Jordan might properly address those concerns.
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