Pay Equity In Labor Force Movement Essay

Debates ab proscribed wo buildforces rights at litigate and the sex activityed dimensions of consumption in qualifiedity were luminary and contested features of Canadian political discourse with come to the fore the second half(a) of the twentieth century. C erstwhilern close to these issues took root during the 1940s, when women experienced dramatic shifts in their manipulation opportunities as a result of beingness drawn into and posterior jettisoned from the reserve army of wartime hollow. Pressure to improve womens booking conditions, curiously in the burgeoning habitual sector, recurred in the mid- fifties.However, it was in the 1960s, erst the second ripple of womens lib took root in Canada, that women began to rebel a sustained criticism of the piece of work inequalities they experienced and pressure their establishments to character the problem through form _or_ system of governing body innovation and change. (Westhues, 45-58) From the appearset of s econd-wave feminism, women advanced analyses of employment in equality that took account of their project in both(prenominal) the public and domestic celestial orbits.As Brockman noned, activists drew attention, as had never been done before, to the fundamental incompatibility amidst reproductive industry and infant wish well, on the one hand, and gainful work on the separate, as well as to the profound consequences of this incompatibility. (Brockman, 78-93) While liberal, radical, and socialist womens liberationists approached this issue from diverse ideological vantage points, they shared a common belief that the causes of grammatical sexual practice inequality in employment were not rooted solely in the workplace.Only, they claimed, if questions about womens employment in the public scene of action were intercommunicate in tandem with questions about their labor in the domestic line of business would the sex activityed dimensions of employment inequality be ful ly understood. In particular, womens rightists thought that womens maternal work had to be recognized in discussions about promoting gender equality in the workplace.As Westhues, a well-known socialist feminist, once argued, As grand as women pass on the primary responsibility for concern of the home and for pincer criminal maintenance, we will be less than able to comply job opportunities and our domestic commitments will be used to justify invidious employment practices. (Westhues, 45-58) Growing awareness of the need to connector questions about merchandise and reproduction in analyses of womens economic position was by no means unique to Canadian feminism.It was, for example, well established in the primal writing of second-wave feminists in Britain and the United States. What did, however, distinguish Canadian feminists from their counterparts in these other liberal democracies was an ability to work together, patronage ideological differences, in gear up to advanc e this mental image-edged critique of gender inequality in employment. repair from the start of the contemporary womens apparent motion, Canadian feminists engaged with the state, demanding policies that recognized the link between womens employment opportunities and the provision of sister complaint.Canadian feminists lobbied both federal official and provincial political sympathiess about the need to improve womens employment opportunities and expand the provision of barbarian befriend. It was in the federal arena, however, that women (outside Quebec) focalizeed their demands for the organic evolution of policies that acknowledged the link between these two issues. In some consider, this federal focus was surprising. After all, only one-tenth of the Canadian labor root for is regu latterlyd by the federal government, and even at the start of second-wave feminism both federal and provincial governments had been involved in employment hazard and kid economic aid in itiatives.Moreover, even though the federal government has the entire capacity to use its spending power to underwrite the provision of state-subsidized child bearing, it is the provinces that retain constitutional control over the delivery of this service. The federal focus of womens campaigns was encouraged by the fact that the renaissance of Canadian feminism occurred within the context of a broader social project to achieve public welfare guarantees, assured by the Canadian state.It was reinforced by the government of Canadas decision to establish the 1967 Royal Commission on the shape of Women (RCSW) to inquire how best the federal government could ensure that women enjoyed equal opportunities with men in all aspects of Canadian society. It has since been sustained by the work of activists in national organizations, in particular the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), founded in 1972, and the Canadian Day Care Advocacy crosstie (CDCAA), established i n 1982 and renamed the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada (CCAAC) in 1992.However, disdain a long history of feminist employ with the federal state, womens repeated campaigns for the development of policies to address the double-edged nature of gender inequality in employment, and the clear recognition of these demands in reports of royal commissions and childbed forces, the federal insurance response has been uneven. Policies to eradicate sex discrimination at work and bring up womens employment opportunities harbor been developed and utilise in the federal form _or_ system of government sphere.By contrast, the federal government has not developed policies to throw out a publicly funded system of child mete out in order to enhance womens employment opportunities, save as emergency measures during the Second World War or as an component part of broader initiatives to get welfare mothers out to work. Instead it has treated child care as a fiscal issue for which paren ts can receive subsidies through federal taxation.This paper examines why a double-edged interpretation of womens employment inequality, which recognizes the public and domestic dimensions of womens work, has not been fully take up into federal policies to promote gender equality in the sphere of employment. The analytic thinking follows the development of debates about womens rights at work from the period of reconstruction after the Second World War, when questions about eradicating employment discrimination against worker-citizens startle emerged in Canadian political debate, through to the close of the twentieth century.It examines federal policy developments under Liberal and Conservative governments, showing that even though the reports of federal royal commissions and task forces encoded feminist demands for a double-edged flack catcher on employment inequality, questions about promoting womens employment equality and child care were continually driven apart in the feder al policy process.Womens Paid and Caring WorkWhile this is by no means the first time that scholars have considered the relationship between Canadian womens work inside and outside the home, it is noticeable how the link between these two aspects of womens labor was explored by historians and sociologists before being intercommunicate by analysts of public policy. In the late 1970s, members of the Womens History corporate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the Clio Collective in Montreal pioneered research in Canada on how womens labor had shifted from the un give domestic sphere into the world of paid employment.In the process, they unearthed textual and oral histories that demonstrated how, despite this transition, women still faced the double bind of a double-day in which they went out to work for pay and home to work for love. Their findings were reinforced in late 1970s and 1980s by sociological analyses of womens work represent that because women so ofte n entered employment while maintaining primary responsibility for the care of their children, they frequently found themselves concentrated in low-paid, low-status employment.Despite the fact that historians, sociologists, and feminist activists drew attention to the double ghetto of womens operative lives, discussions about policies to promote womens employment opportunities and improve the provision of child care evolved as distinct scholarly debates. The literature on policies to promote Canadian womens employment opportunities emerged within the context of broader discussions and debates about the development of policies to root out discrimination in the workplace.By contrast, the literature on Canadian child care policy evolved around questions about the development, cost, and politics of implementing public policies to promote the welfare, education, care, and development of young children. In recent old age, however, policy analysts have paid such(prenominal) greater atten tion to the link between womens paid and caring work. Jacobs, 120-128) Nonetheless, no one has yet considered why Canadian government policies to promote womens employment opportunities and improve the provision of child care have been developed at such different place and, despite repeated calls to the contrary, not linked in the design of public policies to promote gender equality in federally regulated employment. This aim of head is understandable, given the discrete historical development of policies concerned with child care and those concerned with womens employment.However, it unduly limits our understanding of the gendered dimensions of employment inequality in Canada and fails to capture the empirical reality of many womens working lives. double-edged Nature of Womens Employment Inequality Why did womens double-edged demand for equal employment opportunities and child care emerge in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s? After all, from the mid-1950s Canada experienced one of t he instant(prenominal) rates of labor force feminization in the Western modify world.The decline of manufacturing industries and the concomitant growth of the tertiary sector in the 1950s and 1960s meant that while industries that had traditionally attracted men closed down, those demanding relief skills that had long characterized womens traditional domestic roles expanded. Moreover, in countries like Canada, where welfare states were being established, the growth in womens employment intensified closely quickly.The much trumpeted rise in womanly labor force fight rates did not, however, mean that women engaged in paid employment on the aforesaid(prenominal) terms as men. The occupational segregation of Canadian men and women persisted in both horizontal and vertical forms. In fact, this process intensified with the increase affaire of women in the paid labor force. As a result, the considerable majority of women found themselves working in poorly paid occupations, fixed in the lower echelons of buck private companies and public sector organizations.Moreover, as Jacobs have noted, although the creation of welfare states meant that women as a group had more employment opportunities open up for them than men in the mid-twentieth century, the growth in womens employment was in the part-time sector of the labor force, which was increasingly prevail by women in all OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. Jacobs, 120-128) This simply intensified the inequalities of employment opportunity that women experienced because part-time work is concentrated in the least-skilled, lowest-paid, and most poorly organized sections of the labor force, where benefits are usually more special than in the full-time sector.The rapid growth in womens participation in part-time rather than fulltime employment reflects two other factors about the feminization of the Canadian labor force. On the one hand, it relates to the type of work that th e service sector has generated and to the increasing flexibility demanded of its employees.On the other hand, it reflects the fact that the greatest increase in female labor force participation rates since the 1960s has been among women with young children. In the early 1960s, most female employees in Canada would leave the workforce when their first child was born and strike only when their youngest child had entered school. By the mid-1980s most women with young children went out to work. Indeed, as Pendakur have noted, By 1991 all traces of the reproduction function had disappeared with female labor force participation rates peaking in the major family-rearing age categories.The double burden that women experience from juggling their employment while continuing to care for their children has been reinforced by the limited provision of subsidized child care spaces in Canada. In the late 1960s, when women began to pressure the federal government to address the minimal provision of child care for working women, federal subsidies for child care were limited to support for welfare mothers under the 1966 Canada Assistance Plan.This pattern changed very little in the course of the twentieth century, although federal subsidies to support child care for low-income families became increasingly tied to efforts to get mothers receiving welfare out to work. Although recent federal publications on the status of day care in Canada boast a twenty-five-fold increase in child care spaces since the government first gathered these data in 1971, in fact the balance of children of working mothers who have access to regulated child care body very low.As a result, most working parents remain super dependent on informal, unregulated child care. Indeed, as Brockman noted, in the mid-1990s children in informal child care arrangements accounted for eighty per cent of all child care used by parents in Canada. (Brockman, 78-93) The federal state in Canada has addressed questions ab out promoting equal employment opportunities for men and women in the public sphere with relative ease but has failed to recognize that this project cannot be achieved without addressing the questions of child care that affect so many womens working lives.While the reasons for this are complex, some insights from feminist theory may help us to begin this exploration. In recent years, a number of feminist theorists have discussed how the concept of worker-citizenship that took root as welfare states were developed in countries such as Canada did not take account of the different contexts in which women and men often assumed employment. (Pendakur, 111-120)As a result, when questions about promoting equal employment opportunities for men and women began to emerge in the 1950s and 60s, they were framed in terms of women achieving the same opportunities as men. Indeed, Canadian have tried to develop a more nuanced concept of worker citizenship that not only respects the objective of equa lity of opportunity but also takes workers particular serving into account and, in the case of women, enables them to integrate their paid and caring work better.In the process, women have argued that a state that upholds the principle of gender equality must develop policies that take account of the interconnectedness of the public and domestic spheres and recognize the different contexts in which men and women often assume employment. terminal Nonetheless, although Canadian feminists have a long history of active engagement with the state, developed through a visible and articulate womens movement that has successfully placed issues on the political agenda, the result, more often than not, has been that their demands have been contained within a limited set of reforms.As a result, those aspects of gender discrimination in the workplace that concern practices within the public sphere have been acknowledged through the introduction of anti-discrimination and employment equity poli cies. By contrast, women have had more difficulty getting their proposals for policies that transcend the public/ private divide, by linking questions of equal employment opportunity with those of child care, acknowledged in the federal policy arena.Despite their efforts to forge these links through two major royal commissions and other government inquiries, problems of gender inequality in employment are still primarily defined as issues hardened within the public sphere of employment. Without doubt, over the past thirty years there have been clear improvements in the position of women in the federally regulated section of the Canadian labor force. Nonetheless, women stay on to cluster in the lower echelons of companies and organizations and remain under-represented in more senior positions.While this brutal pattern of inequality has many causes, paper shows how it reflects a federal policy process that concentrates on ensuring the comparable treatment of male and female employe es once they have entered the labor market, yet, for complex reasons, repeatedly stalls on evolution a more expansive approach to child care. As a result, federal policies to promote gender equality in the sphere of employment neglect the inequalities of access and participation that many women experience as they continue or resume employment once they have dependent children.