Canadian Wage Law and Employee Relations Incident

Canadian Wage Law and Employee Relations

Incident 9-1

Incident 9-1 describes the mistakes made with the compensation administration with Reynolds Plastic Products. With respect to the compensation administration, a variety of laws are being violated. For example, the Canadian Human Rights Act describes how it is completely illegal to discriminate against employees based on sex, such as gaining or denying employment, or to limit the application of employment based on sex, as stated in sections seven and eight. However, the exact incident with regards to discrimination of sex at Reynolds Plastics has to do with section 11 of the human rights act, which dictates, "11. (1) It is a discriminatory practice for an employer to establish or maintain differences in wages between male and female employees employed in the same establishment who are performing work of equal value" (canlii.org). This is clearly being violated in the case described at Reynolds Plastics when it was stated that, "To make matters worse, two recently hired female machinists complained that they were paid less for the same work than their male colleagues" (canlii.org). This clearly demonstrates discrimination based on sex which implies an unfair workplace for women. Such practices point to the fact that this company is an inhospitable place for women to work, as it favors men, and sees no problem in denying women equal pay for the same amount of work.

These facts and implications are even more exacerbated by the fact that so many of the workers at Reynolds Plastics reported a difference in wage rates, with most people who were allegedly the "head of household" earning more than others; not surprisingly many of these employees turned out to be men. This is again and illegal practice and discriminatory. As chapter four in the class textbooks describes, in 2005 an entity known as Statistics Canada found that on average women earned 85 cents for every $1 earned by a man. While they offered up a variety of reasons for why this might be, it still comes down to the fact that discrimination in the workplace is consistently practices against women when it comes to pay equity. As the chapter four explains, in Canada, the Human Rights Acts prohibits discrimination based on sex, making it illegal to pay women less that men if their jobs are of the same value, which brings up the equal pay for work of equal value. Another area of violation as described in the case with Reynolds Plastics, is that according to Canadian Law, overtime pay must equal one and a half times the rate of regular pay. At Reynolds Plastics, it is not clear if that rate was upheld; furthermore, overtime pay must be given to employees for all time over 40 hours per week; at Reynolds Plastics, it was given only at all hours over 180 per month.

The problems with incentives for executive, production workers, sales people and hourly employees was that the means of compensation seemed very arbitrary and often discriminatory. It's not clear as created by the company why some employees are valued over others. This can only create frustration and disillusionment. The step-by-step process that Reynolds Plastics needs to engage in to fix this is to first start upholding Canadian Human Rights law and providing equal pay for equal work. Overtime rates and methods of salary increase also need to be upheld according to national standards.

However, to really help fix the company, they need to impose a policy of complete and utter transparency with their compensation processes so that employees feel like full and complete disclosure is occurring on all levels of the company .Everyone should know how much everyone else is getting paid. An outside consultant should be hired so that he or she ensures that fair practices and other concerns directly related to Canadian law are upheld.

Incident 10-1

While it's great that the company Soap producers and distributers pays 10% more than other companies in its category, there are still other aspects of employee benefits that need obvious and immediate correction. For example, the company needs to work on the fact that it only offers employees supplemental health and life insurance. This simply isn't appealing and isn't as competitive as the management of the company believes. They need to offer their employees a full benefits package, including dental. Since their positions take so long to fill, they need to be even more competitive and offer full life and even travel insurance.