Pay Equity In Labor Force Movement Essay

Debates or so wo workforces rights at work and the sexualityed dimensions of workplace in equality were not able-bodied and contested features of Canadian political discourse through bug out the secondment half of the twentieth century. Concern about these issues took topic during the 1940s, when women experienced dramatic shifts in their work opportunities as a result of being drawn into and later jettis unityd from the reserve army of wartime push. Pressure to improve womens habit conditions, particularly in the burgeoning public arena, recurred in the mid-1950s.However, it was in the 1960s, once the second wave of womens lib took root in Canada, that women began to develop a sustained critique of the example inequalities they experienced and pressure their political sympathiess to deal out the problem through polity innovation and change. (Westhues, 45-58) From the outset of second-wave feminism, women advanced analyses of concern inequality that took account of the ir drudge in two the public and domestic surface areas.As Brockman noted, activists drew heed, as had never been done before, to the ingrained incompatibility between reproductive crusade and nipper premeditation, on the one hand, and paid work on the some otherwise, as well as to the profound consequences of this incompatibility. (Brockman, 78-93) While liberal, radical, and socialist feminists approached this issue from several(predicate) ideological advantage points, they shared a common belief that the causes of sexual practice inequality in employment were not root solely in the workplace.Only, they claimed, if questions about womens employment in the public sphere were addressed in tandem with questions about their push back in the domestic sphere would the gendered dimensions of employment inequality be richly down the stairsstood. In particular, feminists thought that womens maternal work had to be recognized in discussions about promoting gender equality i n the workplace.As Westhues, a well-known socialist feminist, once argued, As long as women digest the primary responsibleness for maintenance of the home and for infant care, we will be less than able to pursue job opportunities and our domestic commitments will be used to justify discriminatory employment practices. (Westhues, 45-58) ontogeny awareness of the need to cerebrate questions about production and reproduction in analyses of womens economic jell was by no means unique to Canadian feminism.It was, for example, well established in the early piece of music 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 order to advance this double-edged critique of gender inequality in employment. chastise from the start of the contemporary womens movement, Canadian feminists engaged with the state, demanding policies that recognized the link between womens employment opportunities and the supply of baby care.Canadian feminists lobbied both federal official and provincial governments about the need to improve womens employment opportunities and expand the provision of baby care. It was in the federal arena, however, that women (outside Quebec) focused their demands for the learning of policies that acknowledged the link between these two issues. In some respects, this federal focus was surprising. After all, only one-tenth of the Canadian labor force is regulated by the federal government, and even at the start of second-wave feminism both federal and provincial governments had been involved in employment opportunity and pip-squeak care initiatives.Moreover, even though the federal government has the constitutional capacity to use its spending power to underwrite the provision of state-subsidized kidskin care, 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 progress to universal welfare guarantees, assured by the Canadian state.It was reinforced by the government of Canadas termination to establish the 1967 Royal Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW) to inquire how best the federal government could turn back 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 Association (CDCAA), established in 1982 and renamed the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada (CCAAC) in 1992.However, despite a long history of feminist engagement with the federal state, womens repeated campaigns for the development o f policies to address the double-edged nature of gender inequality in employment, and the clear recognition of these demands in reports of imperial commissions and task forces, the federal policy response has been uneven. Policies to eradicate sex discrimination at work and set ahead womens employment opportunities deplete been true and implemented in the federal policy sphere.By contrast, the federal government has not developed policies to put up a publicly funded system of child care in order to enhance womens employment opportunities, save as emergency measures during the Second World fight or as an element of broader initiatives to get welfare mothers out to work. Instead it has treated child care as a fiscal issue for which parents 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 absorbed into federal policies to promote gender equality in the sphere of employment. The analysis 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 first 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 attack on employment inequality, questions about promoting womens employment equality and child care were continually driven apart in the federal policy process.Womens Paid and condole with WorkWhile this is by no means the first time that scholars beat considered the relationship between Canadian womens work inside and outside the home, it is noticeable how the link between these two aspects of womens lab or was explored by historians and sociologists before being addressed by analysts of public policy. In the late 1970s, members of the Womens History Collective 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 unpaid 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 arguing that because women so often entered employment while maintaining primary responsibility for the care of their children, they frequently found themselves concentrated in low-paid, low-locating employment.Despite the fact that historians, sociologists, and feminist activists drew assistance to the d ouble ghetto of womens working lives, discussions about policies to promote womens employment opportunities and improve the provision of child care evolved as distinct scholarly debates. The writings 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 years, however, policy analysts have paid much greater attention 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 rates and, despite repeat ed calls to the contrary, not linked in the send off of public policies to promote gender equality in federally regulated employment. This copy of inquiry is understandable, habituated 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 the fastest rates of labor force feminization in the Western industrialized world.The decline of manufacturing industries and the nonessential evolution of the tertiary sector in the 1950s and 1960s meant that while industries that had traditionally attracted men closed down , those demanding support 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 approximately quickly.The much trumpeted rise in female labor force participation 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 erect forms. In fact, this process intensified with the increased participation of women in the paid labor force. As a result, the vast majority of women found themselves working in poorly paid occupations, situated in the get down echelons of private companies and public sector organizations.Moreover, as Jacobs have noted, although the creation of welfare states meant that women as a root word had more employment opportunities open up for them than men in the mid-twentieth cen tury, the growth in womens employment was in the part-time sector of the labor force, which was increasingly dominated by women in all OECD (Organization for sparing 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 near poorly organized sections of the labor force, where benefits are usually more limited than in the full-time sector.The speedy 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 the 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 t he early 1960s, most female employees in Canada would leave the workforce when their first child was born and return 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 cheat 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 ca re 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 proportion of children of working mothers who have nettle to regulated child care expects very low.As a result, most working parents remain highly 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 about 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.Whi le the reasons for this are complex, some insights from feminist theory may cooperate 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 aim of equality of opportunity but also takes workers particular circumstances into account and, in the case of women, enables them to unify 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. Conclusion Nonetheless, although Canadian feminists have a long history of dynamic engagement with the state, developed through a visible and articulate womens movement that has successfully fixed 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 policies. By contrast, women have had more difficulty get 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.Despit e 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 located 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 deal to cluster in the lower echelons of companies and organizations and remain under-represented in more senior positions.While this persistent pattern of inequality has many causes, paper shows how it reflects a federal policy process that concentrates on ensuring the comparable discourse of male and female employees once they have entered the labor market, yet, for complex reasons, repeatedly stalls on maturation 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.