Thank you, Madam Chairperson, for the opportunity to appear today to talk about pay equity in the federal public service.
I intend to provide you with information on pay equity, and take you through some of the key differences among three models: the CHRA, the Canadian Human Rights Act; the Bilson report recommendations, or some of them; and the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act.
The goal of pay equity is to redress systemic undervaluation of women's work compared to men's work within an employer's organization. This requires that a comparison be undertaken between the work done predominantly by women with that done predominantly by men. The value of work must be measured with a view to putting equal-value female and male work side by side. If they're paid equally, then there's no problem. However, if the pay is unequal, then there is a pay equity problem that has to be fixed.
It does sound simple; it isn't. It is a highly technical exercise. Employers and bargaining agents either need to agree or they go to an independent third party for resolution.
To put pay equity into practice, an employer's jobs have to be grouped. Often, the job groups or job classes simply follow the employer's occupational group structure. In the Government of Canada, our current occupational group structure would produce 73 groupings for pay equity purposes, at least.
Even though this sounds pretty simple, in practice there is disagreement because the groupings can follow smaller subsets of an employer's occupational structure. A good example of what could be a group structure is the clerical and regulatory group, CRs. They include employees who do data entry, mailroom, records office work. It's one of the largest predominant occupational groups, with 25,000 employees more or less, and the group is almost 80% female.
Experts play a role in pay equity and the measurement of value of work is one of the most important areas where experts need to be relied upon. Experts, often an expert for the employer and one for the bargaining agent side, will advise on the input, the jobs to be evaluated, the tool to measure SERWC—skills, effort, responsibilities, and working conditions—and then the application of the tool. Sometimes the experts come out with the same or similar results; sometimes they don't. Then it's up to the parties or an independent third party to resolve the areas where there are differences of opinion.
The next four slides give you a flavour of how a typical pay equity analysis does wage comparisons. This is where we get technical. I hope you have the slides. They were handed out.