Advocates launch ‘pay transparency’ campaign in New Brunswick [video]

Advocates who are fighting to end the gender pay gap have launched a new campaign calling for greater transparency in how much people get paid in New Brunswick. 

The proposed “pay transparency” legislation would require employers to include salary ranges in job postings, protect workers’ rights to discuss their pay, ban questions about past salaries during the hiring process, and require big companies to report their pay gaps. 

The NB Coalition for Pay Equity launched their campaign in Moncton on Friday, calling for the province to “end the secrecy.”

Coalition chair Raphaëlle Valay-Nadeau said that pay transparency “goes hand-in-hand” with pay equity. “To know there’s a problem, we need to know what our salaries are,” she told the NB Media Co-op. Methods relying on employers to disclose pay voluntarily don’t work, she added. 

The launch featured a talk by Toronto-based lawyer Jan Borowy, who is co-chair of Ontario’s Equal Pay Coalition. She outlined how pay equity works by way of example, noting that women are often found in jobs that involve changing diapers, including in long-term care and childcare roles. 

“So for the childcare worker, in the City of Toronto’s municipal pay equity plan, the comparator was a zookeeper,” she told the crowd. 

“The zookeeper was taking care of chimpanzees. The childcare worker was underpaid by more than $5 an hour to take care of children.” 

The campaign follows collaborative work with University of New Brunswick law professor Kerri Froc and other research and is “built on consultations with unions, community groups, legal experts, academics, and activists,” according to organizers. 

Women tend to be concentrated in low-paid fields compared to men, particularly caregiving work. Racialized women tend to earn even less than white women, in part because they’re disproportionately represented in work that is underpaid, non-unionized, and with limited benefits and protections.

Provincial pay equity legislation for the public service came into effect in 2010, but the Act doesn’t apply to the private sector. The provincial government under Premier Susan Holt has pledged to introduce pay equity legislation covering the private sector. 

By 2023, women were earning 92.65 cents on the dollar compared to men in New Brunswick, according to figures from Statistics Canada cited by the NB Coalition for Pay Equity. In terms of median income, women earned about 80 per cent of what men brought home in 2022, a difference of $8,600 annually.

The provincial government provided an emailed statement in response to queries from the NB Media Co-op.

“Women’s Equality continues to advance efforts to close the gender wage gap in New Brunswick, including recent investments to support the work of the Pay Equity Bureau,” a spokesperson said. “We see pay transparency as a powerful tool to address pay inequities and we are currently reviewing best practices and exploring policy options.”

“We commend the NB Coalition for Pay Equity for raising awareness and fostering important public dialogue on this issue. While there is no legislative update at this time, Women’s Equality remains committed to working with partners to support long-term, multi-faceted, evidence-based solutions to improve the gender wage gap.”

David Gordon Koch is a staff reporter with the NB Media Co-op. This reporting has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada, administered by the Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations (CACTUS).