Introduction
This document is intended as a resource guide on pay equity in Canada. As the discussion below indicates, pay equity developments are ongoing. The issues are often complicated and the chronology of events difficult to follow, especially when litigation is involved. This reference guide is meant to assist students and scholars interested in pay equity to better understand the sources available and to locate those sources. In an effort to facilitate access to information we have provided addresses, telephone numbers, and web sites where applicable.
The resource guide is divided into eight sections. The first section lists Canadian academic bibliographic sources including doctoral dissertations and master theses. This is followed with bibliographic references, section II, on the US, UK and Europe. As anyone familiar with pay equity knows, the academic literature is vast and a conscious attempt was made to include either recent bibliographic references or those that we believe are particularly helpful in understanding the political aspects of the pay equity movement. The selected annotations, which comprise section III, were chosen with the preceding statement in mind. Section IV lists Canadian government sources in the federal sector and by province. Here the reader will find a brief explanation of pay equity legislation or policy as well as reports summarizing pay equity results in the various jurisdictions. Section V summarizes significant court decisions. We have attempted brief overviews that highlight relevant case law. Section VI lists women’s movement and advocacy groups that support pay equity. The activities and documents of equal pay coalitions, with the exception of Quebec, are reviewed. Section VII lists union sources. We would like to thank the union researchers who took time out of their busy schedules to answer our queries about pay equity bargaining, and who forwarded valuable information to us for use in this document. The guide ends (section VIII) with a few listings of opponents of pay equity policy.
Pay equity is a term that has different meanings in the literature. In this bibliography we use pay equity to mean any process that is based on the principle of equal pay for work of equal value. This includes legislation that is complaint driven as well as that requiring employers to redress gender based wage inequities, usually referred to as pro-active pay equity legislation.