Login / RegisterUnions warn of Stephen Harper cuts
More than a decade ago, in 1999, federal-government employees won a $3-billion pay-equity case. It was the biggest settlement of its kind ever, one that came after almost 15 years of fighting between the Public Service Alliance of Canada and the Treasury Board.
According to PSAC national executive vice president Patty Ducharme,that victory was possible because legislation at that time allowed the union to represent its members in pay-equity cases.
However, in 2009, 10 years after that huge success, the Conservative minority government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper passed legislation that prohibits public-sector unions from filing pay-equity complaints against an employer. The Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act also took away the right of workers to file such complaints before the Canadian Human Rights Commission, constituting a severe blow to the cause of equality for women.
“During the election campaign, they said that there would be 80,000 job cuts as a result of attrition in the federal government, which is probably one in three jobs,” Ducharme told the Georgia Straight on May 10.
Ducharme was interviewed on the sidelines of the weeklong convention of the Canadian Labour Congress in Vancouver. A number of delegates on that day rose on the floor to express fears about what lies ahead for the public service with a Harper-led majority government.
“He doesn’t believe in government having a leadership role in people’s lives,” Ducharme said of the Conservative prime minister. “I think government plays a huge role in our lives, from ensuring our food is safe, ensuring that if we get on an airplane, it’s been inspected, to knowing that [our drinking] water is clean.”
A fact sheet prepared by Canadians for Tax Fairness and made available at the CLC convention spells out where the priorities of the Harper government lie. According to the group, public services are going to be cut while large and profitable private corporations are being given billions of dollars in tax benefits.
The Canadians for Tax Fairness document noted that from a rate of 40 percent during the 1980s, federal corporate tax rates have come down to 22 percent in 2007, and were further slashed to 18 percent in 2010. Further cuts are planned, with corporate taxes dropping to 15 percent in 2012.
“The reduced corporate tax rate in 2012 will cost the public treasury $13.7 billion annually in lost revenue compared to the 2007 rate when the latest round of cuts began,” the fact sheet states.
The National Union of Public and General Employees represents primarily provincial-government employees but it is sharply attuned to the national situation.
An NUPGE document made available at the CLC convention and titled “All Together Now for Public Services and Tax Fairness” notes that total government spending in Canada has dropped significantly in the last 16 years.
The document says that total government spending accounted for 53 percent of the economy in 1992. By 2008, it had gone down to 39 percent.
The document notes that from a 36-percent share of the economy in 1995, tax revenues have declined to 33 percent of the economy in 2008.
“That’s $50 billion less for hospitals, schools, mental health programs, child care, environmental protection and other important services and programs that raise our quality of life,” the NUPGE document asserts. “The fact is that governments are bringing in less money every year because of tax cuts that benefit rich individuals and corporations a lot more than the rest of us.”
In an interview at the Vancouver Convention Centre where the CLC event was being held, NUPGE national representative Len Bush indicated that public-sector employees are in for a difficult period of austerity and attacks on their rights.
According to Bush, provincial-government employees will also feel the effects of cost cutting at the federal level.
“What it will probably mean is that they will cut transfer payments similar to what [former Liberal prime minister] Paul Martin did in the past”¦and that will force the province to be sort of in conflict with their employees,” he explained.
There was a strong sense of fighting optimism among the delegates at the CLC convention.
As Bush put it: “I remind people that Brian Mulroney won in 1984 a much larger majority than the Harper government has, with a much broader mandate, and yet we still managed to”¦hold them back.”
Perhaps Harper sees pay equity this way:
n the U.S., no legislation yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap), not diversity, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.... Nor will a "paycheck fairness" law work.
That's because pay-equity advocates, at no small financial cost to taxpayers and the economy, continue to overlook the effects of this female AND male behavior:
Despite the 40-year-old demand for women's equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of "The Secrets of Happily Married Women," stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years,” he says in a CNN report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier....” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If indeed more women are staying at home, perhaps it's because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they're going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they're supported by their husband, an “employer” who pays them to stay at home.
Both feminists and the media ignore what this obviously implies: If millions of wives are able to accept no wages and live as well as their husbands, millions of other wives are able to accept low wages, refuse overtime and promotions, work part-time instead of full-time (“According to a 2009 UK study by Cristina Odone for the Centre for Policy Studies, only 12 per cent of the 4,690 women surveyed wanted to work full time.” http://bit.ly/ihc0tl), take more unpaid days off, avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/45ecy7p) — all of which lower women's average pay. They are able to make these choices because they are supported, or anticipate being supported, by a husband who must earn more than if he'd chosen never to marry. (Still, even many men who shun marriage, unlike women, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap. If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.
See “A Response to the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act” at http://tinyurl.com/pvbrcu
Nycole Turmel, a former President of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, was elected in the district of Hull-Aylmer in the May 2nd Federal Election. She will be a very knowledgeable and very effectively networked member of the Jack Layton's NDP opposition, able to bring to early and sustained public view any and all service reductions that the Conservative Govt may try to undertake.