N.B. Coalition for Pay Equity says wage increases still fall short

The New Brunswick Coalition for Pay Equity says the $29.7 million earmarked for wage increases for care workers across the province is welcomed, but still not enough.

“Pay equity evaluations that show these jobs should be getting paid anywhere from $25 to close to $30 an hour and that even with these investments directly into wages, we’re seeing that they’re still falling really short of equitable wages,” said Krysta Cowling, chair of the N.B. Coalition for Pay Equity.

The Coalition says the increases work out to $2.25 an hour for Human Services Counsellors (HSC) working in community residences, family support, attendant care and Employment and Support Programs and Services (ESSP), $2 an hour for workers in group homes and child-specific placements and a two per cent increase for Personal Support Workers (PSW) in home care, special care homes and specialized care bed home residents.

“There’s people leaving the sector when you can go work at Costco for more wages and you’re not physically harmed,” said Laurie Anderson, a Human Service Counsellor in Woodstock, N.B. “We become family for a lot of these that we serve and it’s more than just caring that’s got to pay our bills, too.”

Anderson has been working in the sector for 30 years and after this year’s budget, she will receive an increase of $2.25 an hour.

“I can speak for myself in the adult residences, the pay will go up to roughly $21.80, but the Coalition has done an estimate and it should be up to $28.40,” she said. “The ESSP group, it’ll bring their wage up to roughly $21 an hour and same as family support and things like that. The home support, unfortunately, they saw very little increase. It was actually almost a slap in the face, 0.38 cents and 0.40 cents an hour increase is definitely not enough.”

Cowling says the Coalition is actually advocating for pay equity across the entire private sector in New Brunswick, similar to the one that is already in place for the public sector.

She points out it is not the same as pay equality.

“We compare jobs that are predominantly done by women to jobs that are predominantly done by men and we compare them on the working conditions, the qualifications, the effort and the responsibility, so we’re able to actually assign a point value to each of these things that are related to these different jobs and then if we see that that point value is the same, we would assume that the pay for those jobs is the same, but what we end up seeing is that people that are in work forces that women are predominantly doing the job, they trend to be grossly under paid or under valued compared to jobs that have a similar value that are done predominantly by men,” said Cowling.

The Coalition also points out inflation saw an increase of 3.7 per cent in 2023 and PSW only saw a two per cent increase, meaning they actually have less buying power this year than they did last year.

CTV News reached out to the Government of New Brunswick for a comment, but did not hear back by deadline.

“There is a lot of vacancies and it’s a high turn over rate as well, so we need to have higher wages to be able to draw people in because even the working conditions aren’t always the best either,” said Anderson. “I think if there was some financial increases in the wages it would look more attractive to have people come and remain and stay.”

She adds a lot of people in the sector actually work two jobs to make ends meet and while she is very welcoming of the increase she did get, she believes there is a lot of room for improvement from the government.

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