Collective Bargaining and Labour Market Outcomes for Canadian Working W

Collective Bargaining and Labour securities industry Outcomes for Canadian Working Wo hands IINTRODUCTION UNIONS, LOW PAY, AND EARNINGS distinctionThe major purposes of this paper be, first, to examine the impacts of corporate bargaining on outwear food market outcomes for women workers in Canada, specifically with respect to gestate, benefits coverage, the incidence of low cede and the extent of winnings inequality, and, second, to suggest ways in which positive impacts could be extended via the expansion of collective bargaining coverage. This part of the paper short reviews the literature on the impacts of collective bargaining on earnings, low pay, and earnings inequality, and startle II provides some background description of the labour market position of Canadian working women. Particular attention is paid to the station of the majority of women who continue to work in lower paid, often unassured and part-time, clerical, sales, and service jobs. The central conclu sion of the empirical 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 pregnant positive impacts in wrong of raising pay and access to benefits, and in terms of reducing the incidence of low pay among women workers. However, the level of collective bargaining coverage for women is genuinely low in precisely those vault of heavens of the economy where women in low paid and insecure jobs are most concentrated, namely in private serve and in smaller enterprises. Promoting better labour market outcomes for women workers accordingly requires a major extension of collective bargaining. Part IV of the paper shortly considers ways in which this could be achieved through trade union legal action and through changes to public policy.The 1996 OECD Employment Outlook comprehensively documented cardinal differences in the layer of earnings inequality and the incidence of low pay 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, while for men, the wage difference was about $4.50 - or 24 per cent. The wage premium associated with unionization is shown for selected subgroups of women and men in display board 3. It is notable that the apparent union wage premium tends to be high 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 Unionization and Selected Characteristics, Canada 1995WOMENMENUnionNon-UnionUnion agioUnionNon-UnionUnion PremiumAllAge 15 to 24Age 25 to 44Age 45 to 69 little than high schoolHigh school grad.Certificate/DiplomaUniversity degreeFull-timePart-timeManagerial/Admin.ProfessionalClericalSales runBlue Collar devoted size less than 20Firm size 20 to 99Firm size 100 to dFirm size + 500 16.6811.2316.9217.3712.1614.6016.5621.3816.9015.9518.5919.4914.47