Unionized male workers with disabilities earn better salaries.

OTTAWA -- Disabled male workers with disabilities, who are also unionized, are likely to find themselves earning salaries in the top quarter of the earning range while most unionized female workers with disabilities still earn salaries in the bottom two quarters of the earnings range says the Canadian Council on Social Development.

A report of the CCSD noted that the key requirements for success in reaching "the top rungs of the earnings ladder" when you are a disabled worker are to be male and to be covered by a collective agreement. However, female disabled workers who are union members are not as fortunate as their male counterparts with less than 20 per cent earning salaries in the top quarter compared to more than 40 per cent of unionized disabled males earning salaries in the top quarter of the earnings range.

For most disabled women who are covered by a collective agreement their earnings are still in the bottom two quarters of the earnings range, but CCSD says that "male workers with disabilities have fairly similar earning profiles to their non-disabled counterparts as long as they are covered by a collective agreement."

Gail Fawcett, CCSD Senior Researcher and the author of the study, says the results "suggest that unions help to level the playing field for male workers with disabilities, but unionized women with disabilities lag far behind," even though "unionization appears to pull them out of the really low levels of earnings, but few make it to the upper income brackets."

However, Fawcett notes that non-unionized Workers with disabilities of both genders "still lag behind their counterparts without disabilities, with women being particularly disadvantaged."

Current estimates suggest that there are about 3.6 million Canadians with some form of physical or mental disability, the majority of which still earn wages below the median.