Collective Bargaining and Labour Market Outcomes for Canadian Working W

Collective Bargaining and Labour Market Outcomes for Canadian Working Women IINTRODUCTION UNIONS, LOW PAY, AND EARNINGS INEQUALITYThe major purposes of this paper are, first, to get a line the impacts of corporate bargaining on labour market outcomes for women bailiwickers in Canada, specifically with respect to pay, benefits coverage, the incidence of number 1 pay and the extent of net income inconsistency, and, second, to imply ways in which positive impacts could be extended via the expansion of incorporated bargaining coverage. This part of the paper briefly reviews the literature on the impacts of incarnate bargaining on earnings, low pay, and earnings inequality, and Part II provides nearly background description of the labour market position of Canadian operative women. Particular attention is paid to the situation of the majority of women who continue to work in lower paid, often insecure and part-time, clerical, sales, and service jobs. The central end of the emp irical analysis in Part III, mainly based on data from Statistics Canadas 1995 Survey of Working Arrangements, is that collective bargaining coverage, controlling for other factors, has significant positive impacts in terms of raising pay and access to benefits, and in terms of reducing the incidence of low pay among women workers. However, the take of collective bargaining coverage for women is very low in simply those sectors of the economy where women in low paid and insecure jobs are nearly concentrated, namely in private services and in smaller enterprises. Promoting come apart labour market outcomes for women workers accordingly requires a major extension of collective bargaining. Part IV of the paper briefly considers ways in which this could be achieved through trade wedding action and through changes to public policy.The 1996 OECD practice session Outlook comprehensively documented profound differences in the degree of earnings inequality and the incidence of low pa y in the advanced industrial countries, noting that these two labour market characteristics are closely related in that the incidence of low pay tends to be highest in those countries where earnings inequality is the most pronounced. While there is significant variation between countries, a generalized pattern is that continental European countries, particularly in northern Europe, have a strikingly more equal distributio... ...omen in non-unionized jobs, slice for men, the wage difference was about $4.50 - or 24 per cent. The wage indemnity associated with unionization is shown for selected subgroups of women and men in Table 3. It is notable that the apparent union wage premium tends to be higher for less educated workers, though this is more clearly the case for men than for women. This is consistent with the fact that managerial and professional occupations in the private sector have very low rates of unionization.Table 3.Average Hourly Wages of Women and Men, by unionisatio n and Selected Characteristics, Canada 1995WOMENMENUnionNon-UnionUnion bonusUnionNon-UnionUnion PremiumAllAge 15 to 24Age 25 to 44Age 45 to 69Less than high school tall school grad.Certificate/DiplomaUniversity degreeFull-timePart-timemanagerial/Admin.ProfessionalClericalSalesServicesBlue Collar self-colored size less than 20Firm size 20 to 99Firm size 100 to five hundredFirm size + 500 16.6811.2316.9217.3712.1614.6016.5621.3816.9015.9518.5919.4914.47