Care is what we are all about.
More than 700 workers, who work with the elderly in the Region of Peel’s homes for the aged and long-term care facilities, continue to wait for their pay equity settlements, more than 15 years after their Pay Equity Plan was first negotiated.
The members of Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 966 received raises under the province’s pay equity law, which states that women and men must receive equal pay when they are doing the same type of work. Women still earn only 77% of what men do in the workforce. The law was designed to help eradicate that kind of discrimination and make the workplace fair for everyone.
Highly skilled professionals worked through the SARS epidemic.
CUPE and the Region of Peel negotiated a Pay Equity Plan, as required by law, in 1992. Fifteen years later, women who had worked in Peel’s homes for the aged finally got their back pay – up until 2003. They are still owed back pay for the period from 2003 until today.
Since 2003, two more homes for the aged have opened, and the skilled health care workers who staff them are still getting paid at the old, discriminatory rate. But management refuses to extend the terms of the Pay Equity Plan to these employees at all.
CUPE Local 966 has applied to the provincial Pay Equity Commission to have the terms of the 1992 Pay Equity Plan enforced. This will finally end decades of wage discrimination in two of the four facilities.
At the same time, we are working to have the terms of the negotiated Pay Equity Plan extended to cover the workers in the two newer facilities. These workers do exactly the same jobs and have the same responsibilities as the staff in the older homes for the aged.
This web site is about CUPE’s efforts to bring justice to the workplace. We urge everyone who wants to end wage discrimination against women to support our cause.
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