The idea that two people doing the same job should get the same pay seems about as simple as can be.
But for close to three decades, Canada Post has insisted that if one of those people is a woman, she should get paid less.
In tribunals, hearings and appeals courts, all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, the Crown corporation has fought to defend this prehistoric, sexist notion.
On Thursday, Canada Post lost. After all those years, it took the justices only 20 minutes to unanimously decide that equal work means equal pay. Simple, really.
The numbers are still being crunched, but the likely payout is expected to clock in at somewhere around a quarter of a billion dollars.
A large portion of that is 28 years worth of interest on those unfairly withheld wages and pensions.
Doing the obviously right thing back in 1983 would have saved Canada Post an awful lot of money, without even counting the money blown on three decades worth of legal bills.
Hopefully the message gets out: prejudice is an expensive loser of an idea.
The tenacity of the Public Service Alliance of Canada deserves praise. Unions, particularly public sector ones, take a lot of criticism. Organized labour has committed its fair share of abuses and excesses, to be sure. But consider that some of these women actually passed away before their employer paid up.
These cases are what unions are for: to push back for the little gal when an employer is clearly cheating them.
