Article content continued

It’s no accident therefore that the main examples of wage gaps Maclean’s points to all occur in the (non-competitive) public sector. Thus, often-female civilian employees of the Ontario Provincial Police make less than the often-male ex-active-duty cops moved to identical desk jobs later in their careers. This is the result of a union agreement with the employer, i.e., the government, that allows the uniforms “to reap the same salary bumps and benefits as the boots-on-the-ground officers.” If there were competition in police forces, it would be hard to pay such premiums to uniformed desk workers. Police forces that didn’t would undercut the price of police forces that did, driving them out of the market. But of course we don’t have competition in police forces so discrimination of this sort is possible.

Similarly, at Canada Post, with its monopoly on first-class mail, “rural and suburban mail carriers earn about 30 per cent less than urban employees.” Women are 70 per cent of rural and suburban carriers while men are 70 per cent of urban carriers. Another difference between them is that urban carriers have long been unionized, while rural and suburban carriers unionized only in 2009. With its rural and non-urban workers, Canada Post presumably paid what the market demanded for labour of the quantity and quality it needed. With its urban workers it got held up by the postal strikes with which we all became so wearily familiar before competition from messenger services and email reduced the unions’ power to extort.

A third example involves Ontario midwives, whose salaries top out at about $100,000 a year while doctors in clinics make about $200,000, according to Maclean’s. If midwives really are as productive and reliable as doctors then, in a competitive market for health care, their salaries would be driven to equality. In a market with only one buyer, however, anything goes.

Equal pay for work of equal value? In a competitive market, if the work is paid the same, it’s of equal value. If it isn’t paid the same, it’s not. If you really want pay equity, make more markets more competitive.