By Christine McLaughlin
Sometimes ordinary people can do extraordinary things. I had the pleasure of witnessing an example of this recently when I attended a tribute luncheon in honour of the 23rd annual Agnes Macphail Award winner, Beverly McCloskey.
Agnes Macphail was the first woman in Canada elected to the House of Commons and first woman sworn into the Legislative Assembly of Ontario where she played a leading role in passing Ontario’s first equal pay legislation in 1951.
Despite this first legislative step, it was still legal in Ontario to employ “girls” in segregated workspaces, enforce separate seniority lists for men and women, and to negotiate very unequal collective agreements on their behalf. For a group of seven women from UAW Local 222 in Oshawa who were capable of doing the same jobs as their male coworkers, this was grossly unfair. More importantly, they set out to change it. Continue reading