동일가치노동에 대한 동일임금 원칙 적용의 가능성과 한계: 미국과 캐나다 사례를 중심으로

Currently as non-regular employment has been generalized, the Korean society is facing an urgent task to solve the problems of insecure employment and pay gaps between regular jobs and non-regular jobs for similar or substantially identical work. In this context, this study addresses the question of whether pay equity strategies can work in Korea regardless of the types of employment. To answer this question, the study examines the cases of the US and Canada which have experiences in institutionalizing pay equity policies. Pay equity initiatives have been designed to correct gender wage discrimination and the under-valuing of women's work in the US and Canada. The US and Canada are similar in that they are both liberal welfare states and have adopted a liberal labor market model. However, the two countries differ in that Canada has been implementing pay equity policy based on the proactive model, in which a federal government and local government have to obey the policy, whereas the US has adopted the individual complaint model, in which the pay equity lawsuits of an individual or a class of individuals have resolved by the Equal Pay Act and the anti-discrimination law. This study finds that the consequences of pay equity strategies in the two countries are mixed. On the one hand, they brought about raises in women's pay in the female-dominated sectors of the labor market, even though the relative economic status of women compared to men has not changed much over the past two decades. On the other hand, pay equity's political legitimacy is under threat. Economic restructuring is changing the context in which it operates.