UTGB Vol 5.pdf - Robson Hall Faculty of Law

66 Underneath the Golden Boy
changes in the labour market. 57 Women-and particularly women of colour and
recent immigrants-predominate in low-wage incentive,based work such as
that in the garment industry 58 and are vulnerable to exploitation and
inadequate compensation for their work.
Again, keeping in mind the purpose of employment standards legislation to
protect workers from exploitation and to redress inequality of bargaining power,
incentive,based workers must be guaranteed a fair and reasonable wage. The
current Manitoba practice of deeming all incentive,based workers to be paid at
the minimum wage for the purposes of calculating entitlements such as
overtime rates under the Code is unjust and must be changed. Manitoba should
adopt the Ontario approach, which calculates an incentive-based worker's
hourly wage as the amount earned in a given week divided by the number of
non,overtime hours worked in that week.5 9
A final related matter of inequality concerns the Code provisions and
regulations governing 11 call...in wages., The general rule, set out ins. 51, provides
that an employee who is called in to work must be paid for at least three hours
of work, even if they work less than that (unless the employee's regular hours
are less than three hours per day). However, s. 10 of the Minimum Wages and
Working Conditions Regulation 60 exempts employees who work in theatres,
hotels, restaurants, or rural areas, as well as all children, from the call,in wage
provision. The fact that children and workers in the service sector (hotel and
restaurant)-a sector in which women predominate 61 -are exempted from even
this most basic protection is an example of the Code's failure to comply with the
substantive equality rights of women and children guaranteed in the Charter
and under international human rights law. We call on this Review to
recommend the repeal of the exemptions from caU..in wages. 62
57
See generally Rittich, supra note 25.
58
United Nations Platform for Action Committee Manitoba, Women and the Economy:
Globalization and Clothes, online: United Nations Platform for Action Committee Manitoba
.
59
Section 18 of the Regulation provides a formula to calculate overtime wage rates for
employees receiving incentive pay in a manner similar to the Ontario model.
60
Man. Reg. 62/99, s. 10.
61
62
Jackson, Is Work Working for Women, supra note 27 at 16.
The exemptions from call-in wages have been repealed by the amendments. However, s. 51
of the amended Code allows employers to schedule workers for shifts of less than three
hours and to pay them for that short shift (for example, for one or two hours only). The
only protection is against being called in for a three hour or longer shift and then being paid
for less than three hours.