Limiting Equity: The Definition of Employer under the Ontario Pay Equity Act

Despite the fact that the Ontario Pay Equity Act has been heralded as the most far-reaching pay equity initiative enacted to date, the legislation is fatally flawed. This is because the Ontario legislation limits the basis of the pay equity comparison to male and female job classes within a particular employer\u27s labour force. Litigators and unions concerned with improving women\u27s wages through the pay equity process have tried to contain some of the damage which results from this structural limitation by attempting to litigate an extensive definition of employer . The comment examines the Pay Equity Hearings Tribunal\u27s jurisprudence on the definition of employer in order to illustrate that it is likely to have an uneven impact on women who work in different sectors of the economy. The author argues that by casting the definition of employer as a technical problem of interpretation to be resolved on a case by case basis through the litigation process, the government has obscured the different, and sometimes competing, interests of women who are employed in different segments of the labour market