The failure to shrink the male-female wage gap and the attack on public sector wages

Women's wages caught up to male wages when broader public sector (BPS) wages grew but when BPS wages were suppressed, the wage gap grew. 

Women comprise 74% of the Ontario education, health care, and social assistance workforce.  A strong female majority is present in all three of these sectors but is especially marked in health care and social assistance, where 762,800 women work.  These three industries account for 31% of all women employees in Ontario. So what happens to these workers has a big impact on women.

For men, it's a different story -- education, health, and social assistance account for only 9.89% of all male employment in Ontario. So, overall, males are much less affected by what happens in these sectors.

Source: Statistics Canada. Table 14-10-0022-01  Labour force characteristics by industry, monthly, unadjusted for seasonality (x 1,000)

These three industries are the great bulk of the provincial broader public sector or "BPS."  The BPS is the portion of the the public sector that is primarily funded and, to a large extent, controlled by the provincial government. It is comprised of about 1.2 million workers, or 18.5% of the Ontario workforce.  It excludes the federal government and municipal governments.  The BPS also includes 66,000 employees  in the provincial civil service -- another large employer  where the majority of employees are female.

The Male - Female Wage Gap: The Financial Accountability Office (FAO) reported last week that progress on reducing the gap between men and women’s wages ended in 2010.  “The gender wage gap has made no progress over the past decade, with women earning 87 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2022.”  

This coincided with the attack on the wages of the female dominant BPS by the provincial government.  Similarly, when BPS workers achieved higher settlements, the overall wage gap between men and women shrank sharply. 

The Attack on BPS Wages:  In 2010 the provincial government began imposing austerity on BPS wages. In that year the Ontario government required BPS unions to negotiate over a proposed wage freeze. Few unions took them up on their offer -- but that was the start of more than a decade of wage austerity directed at BPS workers.  This proved to be a serious and lasting campaign, with women workers the major target.  

The campaign really took off after the introduction of  Bill 115, which would freeze BPS wages. Teacher unions and others fought off the Bill in a 2012 showdown. While the right to free collective bargaining was retained for BPS workers and the Bill was ultimately withdrawn, the result for hundreds of thousands of BPS workers was lower wage increases. 

There was a slight reprieve in 2017, as the failing Liberal government sought to repent just before it faced the electors -- and their negative judgement.  After the PCs came to power in 2018, however, the new government announced their plan to introduce Bill 124, and this legislation imposed lower wage settlements on the BPS once again, dampening the bargaining climate for everyone.  

Here’s the chart that shows that BPS settlements have lagged other settlements over the post 2010 period up until the pattern began to change at the very end of 2022 when the school board illegal strike pushed the BPS average way up -- a pattern that is being built upon, with new, even higher BPS settlements.  

For many decades, public and private sector settlements have had a close relationship with inflation in the year of settlement, sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower.  That remained true for private sector settlements over 2010-2021, but public sector settlements, while still bearing a close relationship to inflation, fell a little behind.  

The Gender Gap Shrank When BPS Workers Did Well: Public sector settlements are sometimes higher than inflation and higher than private sector settlements. And that is what happened over 2000-2010 decade. Once again the wage pattern in the BPS is associated with a change in the male-female wage gap: but in this period strong public sector settlements were associated with women's wages catching up to male wages. 

The male-female gap decreased sharply between 2000 and 2010 (see the FAO chart below), with female wages catching up from 80% of male wages to 87%. During that period, public sector settlements were above inflation and above private sector settlements.  

The NDP took up a similar theme, noting that Bill 124 and its attack on BPS wages has exacerbated the gender wage gap:  “Instead of efforts to close the wage gap, the government has chosen to widen it. They’d prefer to spend money taking nurses and midwives and teachers to court rather than pay them a fair wage,” said NDP leader Stiles.  And she is right - -the provincial government has acted to suppress women’s wages though Bill 124.  But there is a longer history too.

The class struggle in the broader public sector is closely aligned with the struggle for women’s equality.  When BPS wages are suppressed, women's wages are heavily weighed down  -- when BPS wages do well, women's wages are bolstered.  Other major employers of women workers (retail, food services and accommodation) provide limited pathways to fair-paying employment and low levels of unionization to push those wages up. 

The Ford government has taken a special interest in portraying itself as a friend of private sector, blue collar workers, i.e., a group that is mostly male and which is under threat due to de-industrialization and the province's switch to the service and IT economies.  

This makes for a lot of photo opportunities, with plenty of cosplay and lots of money thrown at private corporations.  But, for workers, the talk is cheap: the Ford government doesn't pay these private sector blue collar workers even one slim dime, and the government claims to be pro-worker even as it pursues an attack on its own BPS workforce.  The largely female BPS workforce. 

It's impossible to see this as an innocent move. Ford is stoking gender divisions to further his class war on on BPS workers.   That is now being challenged as BPS workers -- like  the school board strikers - -challenge the low wages (for men and women BPS workers) built on the government's sexist strategy.