Un moindre mal pour les travailleuses? La Commission du salaire minimum des femmes du Québec, 1925-1937
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last few years, the activities of minimum wage commissions in the western provinces and in Ontario have been the subject of several historical studies. Inspired by these projects, this paper examines the work of the Quebec Women's Minimum Wage Commission, from its inception in 1925 to its dismantling in 1937. After giving reasons which forced the Quebec government to legislate on this issue, the author presents the position of international and catholic unions on women in the work force. In his analysis of the operating mode of the commission and, more precisely, his critical evaluation of its mechanism for enforcing the law, the author concludes that as with the other commissions across Canada, the Quebec Women's Minimum Wage Commission would not have allowed wage increases for women. In a socio-economic context where women on average made half of the salary of men, the decision to use the minimum wage as a tool to fight the abuse of the capitalist system had the major consequence of keeping salaries low. In fact, the low rate of the minimum wage agreed to by the commission upheld the principle of pay inequity by gender, thus reflecting the dominant ideology of the era during which the work of women was considered marginal. Resume Au cours des dernieres annees, les activites des commissions du salaire minimum des femmes dans l'Ouest et en Ontario ont donne lieu a plusieurs etudes a caractere historique. S'inspirant de ces travaux, cet article examine le travail accompli par la Commission du salaire minimum des femmes du Quebec, entre sa mise sur pied en 1925 et son demantelement en 1937. Apres avoir expose les raisons qui poussent le gouvernement quebecois a legiferer sur cette question, l'auteur presente la position des syndicats internationaux et des syndicats catholiques face au travail feminin. Au terme de l'analyse du mode de fonctionnement de la commission et, plus particulierement, d'une evaluation critique des mecanismes d'application de la loi, l'auteur arrive a la conclusion qu'a l'instar des autres commissions a travers le Canada, la Commission du salaire minimum des femmes du Quebec n'aura pas permis l'augmentation du salaire des femmes. Dans un contexte socio-economique ou les femmes gagnent en moyenne la moitie du salaire des hommes, la decision de faire du salaire minimum un outil pour lutter contre les abus du systeme capitaliste aura pour principale consequence le maintien des bas salaires. En definitive, les faibles taux de salaires minimums consentis par la commission consacrent le principe de l'inegalite des salaires selon le sexe, refletant ainsi l'ideologie dominante de l'epoque qui considere le travail de la femme comme marginal.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".