Coalition char Frances Leblanc, project coordinator Tina Poirier, and executive director Johanne Perron at a virtual press conference Wednesday morning. Image: Inda Intiar/Huddle
A report by the New Brunswick Coalition for Pay Equity has found that fair wages for caregivers in home care, transition houses and community residences should be between $22 and $25 per hour. But in reality, caregivers in those sectors are paid only between $15.30 to $16.80 per hour.
“The sector is still in crisis,” said Johanne Perron, the coalition’s executive director. “It was in crisis before the pandemic, and that is really much linked to the low wages which leads to a very difficult recruitment [of workers] and low retention levels.”
She said many care workers she has spoken to have quit or feel that they cannot stay in the profession because they don’t think they can make a decent living doing that work.
“We’re losing good people….our report shows that really those wages are too low. That’s the key to the problems that we have,” she said.
The report is an update on the pay equity evaluations carried out by the provincial government between 2008 and 2014 for the roles of home care worker, crisis intervener in transition houses for women victims of violence, direct caregiver in community residences for adults, and direct caregiver in community residences for children.
These caregiving roles are predominantly filled by women, and the coalition wants the government to prioritize these sectors to ensure they are paid fairly and equitably.
The report is focused on the private sector, where non-profit and for-profit organizations are mandated by the provincial government to provide care services. The government also funds them at different levels, depending on the sector.
With the new report, the coalition is once again pushing for the provincial government to pass pay equity legislation for the private sector. Perron said the coalition wants the Pay Equity Act of 2009, which covers the public sector, to cover the private sector as well.
“It would be legislation that requires employers to evaluate the jobs that are mostly done by women and the jobs that are mostly done by men in their business or organization, and [see whether] the value is the same for the female jobs and male jobs,” Perron said. “They should be the same, so that the jobs that are mostly done by women are paid fairly.”
In 2018, the coalition called on the provincial government to implement legislation on the private sector by 2020.
Perron said the core issue is that there’s a misrepresentation of the value of care work, in addition to “lagging old ideas about how we used to expect women to stay at home, to take care of the family and to do it for free.”
She says while there was a lot of support for care workers during the first few months of the pandemic, that has slowed down.
Perron believes the support is still there from the population and even the government. The coalition recognized that recent governments have invested in wages in the care sector, but that was done in an uneven and intermittent manner.
The coalition wants the provincial government to develop and implement a five-year plan to reach pay equity in the community care sector. That includes boosting public investments in wages until pay equity is achieved, developing wage scales that take pay equity into account, and annually indexing the wage scales based on the consumer price index.
It also recommends pay equity exercises for all community care jobs that haven’t been evaluated and wants the government to ensure the maintenance of pay equity in that sector every five years.
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Inda Intiar is a reporter with Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
