Pay Equity Committee on April 18th, 2016

[Debora De Angelis, National Coordinator for Strategic Campaigns, United Food and Commercial Workers Union Canada]

Thanks for the opportunity for UFCW to submit its testimony.

We represent more than 250,000 members across the country. UFCW Canada is a leading trade union in the retail, food processing, and hospitality sectors. Over 50% of UFCW Canada members are women. Close to 10,000 UFCW Canada members work in federally regulated sectors. They work in the transportation sector, at Canadian Forces bases, in credit unions, in the fishing sector, in mining, and in the milling sector, including flour, grain, and malt.

We applaud the federal government's commitment to take action to close the unacceptable wage gap between men and women, which contributes to income inequality and discriminates against women. UFCW Canada supports the forward-looking mandate of the Special Committee on Pay Equity to recognize pay equity as a right. We support the implementation of the recommendations in the 2004 pay equity task force final report, and the commitment to restore the right to pay equity in the public service, which was eliminated by the previous Conservative government in 2009. Proactive federal pay equity legislation is the starting point.

Canada's overall gender wage gap stands at roughly 30%, based upon average annual earnings using data from the most recent Canadian income survey, published by Statistics Canada in 2013. There are 8.5 million more women in the Canadian workforce than there were 20 years ago. With women's labour force participation and educational levels rising, there are still men's jobs and women's jobs, and there is still a substantial link between women's jobs and low pay. Gender-based pay inequalities are fixed in classification and pay.

As highlighted in the 2004 pay equity task force final report, racialized women, immigrant women, aboriginal women, and women with disabilities suffer from higher gender wage gaps. As fully recognized by the 2004 task force report, the gender wage gap is further intensified by the fact that women make up the majority of workers in precarious employment and in lower-paying occupations and industries. This form of employment is on the rise.

The discriminatory gender wage gap arises from occupational segregation and the prejudice and stereotypes reinforced by the labour market, which have undervalued and underpaid women and their work relative to men and their work. Today the Canadian labour market remains divided by sex across occupations in the private and public sectors. Valuing women's work; engaging in non-discriminatory labour market, workplace, and pay practices; and adopting, supporting, and funding social policies that enable and facilitate equal access to work, all build a stronger, more equitable economy.

It's important to recognize that pay equity has been fully recognized as a fundamental workplace right in Canada since 1972. In 1972, the International Labour Organization's convention 100 regarding the equal remuneration for work of equal value was ratified in Canada. Pay equity was incorporated in the Canadian Human Rights Act, but in a complaint-based system that denied effective access to pay equity for many women in the federal sector. The focus on pay equity as a priority human-rights mandate needs a gender and equity based planning, action, and monitoring lens. This is essential if there is a serious commitment to closing the gender wage gap.

The current system, as the other witnesses have already outlined, has many problems. I will skip that part in my witness report because I know it's getting a little late.

Moving forward, the federal government, working with employers and trade unions, needs to develop a systemic plan that targets closing the gender wage gap over a realistic time frame, and strategies for meeting those targets. UFCW Canada supports the Equal Pay Coalition's call to the government to close the gender pay gap no later than 2025. I believe they will be speaking soon to the committee.

We call for a proactive federal pay equity law modelled on the recommendations of the 2004 pay equity task force and the Quebec legislation with which those best align. UFCW Canada joins other trade unions and pay equity advocates in calling for the repeal of the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act. PSECA is fundamentally flawed and cannot be improved by any amendment.

Pay equity legislation, and not collective bargaining, is the proper way to achieve pay equity. Equal pay for work of equal value is an internationally recognized human right. It must not be left to trade-offs at the bargaining table. Governments and employers are responsible for securing this. Unions have a critical role, which must be built into pay equity legislation.

Freedom from discrimination is a fundamental human right, and freedom from wage discrimination is an essential component of this right. Proactive pay equity legislation is necessary to tackle the systemic discrimination in wages as part of a larger package of policy measures. In addition to biased job classification, a pay gap factor such as occupational segregation, precarious employment, and uneven distribution of unpaid labour must be addressed. Employment equity, universal child care, strong public services, decent work, living wages, and free collective bargaining are other measures required to achieve full wage equity.

As an immediate step, this committee has the opportunity to advance a proactive pay equity law as envisioned by the 2004 task force. The federal government should seize the moment to redress gender pay discrimination for workers under federal legislation and show leadership within Canada and internationally as well.

UFCW Canada is calling on the federal and provincial governments to implement additional recommendations—and I'm just going to list them because they are in front of you.

Make closing the gender wage gap a human rights priority. Enforce and expand pay equity. Promote access to collective bargaining. Require reliable scheduling practices and better notice periods. Legislate a living wage. Legislate equity compliance for workplace and business. Legislate paternity leave and provide high-quality and universal child care.

Thank you so much for this opportunity to be a witness here.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anita Vandenbeld]

Well done. Thank you.

Our first question will go to Ms. Sidhu who has seven minutes.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, panel.

Good to see you, Debi.

Debi, can you elaborate on your comment about job classification done by the institute. Also can you explain more about the charter violation inherent in PSECA?

[Debi Daviau]

Yes, thank you.

As I mentioned, the classification standards throughout the federal public sector are insanely old. They were structures from a different time. With PSECA leading us back to the bargaining table on dealing with pay equity complaints, we're already hindered by this structure that doesn't recognize the necessity to do a proper wage analysis between genders and introduces a whole bunch of other factors into those considerations, as I mentioned. By focusing on those other elements, we take away from our focus on wage parity.

Can you repeat your second question?

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Can you explain more about the charter violation inherent in PSECA?

[Debi Daviau]

It's pretty broad. On the one hand, PSECA takes away the rights of unions to advocate on behalf of our members who may be experiencing pay equity gaps. On the other hand, those members can file complaints against their union even though it's eliminated all the tools for us to be able to resolve those issues.

It's because of forcing this to the bargaining table that there is suddenly no focus on the human right but rather a focus on interests. Pay equity should never be an interest. It is clearly upheld as a Canadian human right and therefore, as my sister and colleague Robyn Benson said, you can't bargain away a human right. To allow that to happen...and I could go as far as to say you have a male-dominated industry negotiating with another male-dominated industry on issues such as pay equity. It doesn't put the right voices at the table to prevent further human rights violations.

By taking this away from the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, you eliminate that expertise. You now have a very similar process ongoing without the expertise and the resources of the unions to support these people. That results in a David versus Goliath scenario where David is simply incapable of fighting Goliath on pay equity. We are never going to achieve pay equity and uphold pay equity as a human right in this environment.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Some unions may have experience representing your members under provincial pay-equity legislation. Could you give us your opinion about what is effective under the provincial pay-equity regime?

[Annick Desjardins]

Is your question, what is effective?

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Could you give us your opinion about what is effective under the provincial pay-equity regime?

[Annick Desjardins]

What is effective is the joint committee working toward achieving pay equity in a collaborative process, rather than adversarial. What's effective is the obligation to achieve a result. If you ask the parties to talk about pay equity at the bargaining table, there is no obligation to achieve it. That's why it doesn't work. We've been trying, before the enactment of the Pay Equity Act in Quebec, to bargain toward pay equity. We made progress but the cases that I litigated were the result of our inability to really achieve true pay equity at the bargaining table.

What's effective is all the elements of a proactive model that are integrated in the act, so it's almost a recipe that you have to follow, and you do it jointly in a collaborative process where people share information and come to a consensus. If a consensus doesn't emerge, there are mechanisms that are available at the pay equity commission, mediation and conciliation, to help us to get around that. It is effective. We make it work.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

What elements of the provincial system do you believe could be included?

[Annick Desjardins]

Right now the maintenance provisions in the Pay Equity Act should be improved. What happened is that in 2009 the Quebec government amended the Pay Equity Act to improve monitoring of pay equity maintenance, but in so doing a number of mistakes were made. First of all, it only allows for prospective pay equity maintenance, so there are periods of immunity that are granted that were actually considered unconstitutional by the Superior Court of Quebec. That case is under appeal, though. That's a mistake.

The other mistake that was made in 2009 was to remove the mandatory pay-equity committee. There is no mandatory employee participation in the maintenance of pay equity. It is still mandatory in the initial plan when it's put in place, but for maintenance it's not mandatory anymore. We have a problem with that because employers are left with full discretion to change wages, despite employees being unionized. This is a problem and.... Well, we addressed it in the courts and we're waiting for the court of appeals decision on that.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Okay.

Can you make a comment on the Bell Canada case brought up in a previous panel by Ms. Byers?

[Annick Desjardins]

The Bell Canada case lasted very long. We went all the way to the Supreme Court on various preliminary issues about which comparators could be used. After all these years, we don't have a conclusion in that complaint.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anita Vandenbeld]

Thank you. I'm sorry about the timing.

The next question will go to Mr. Kmiec, for seven minutes.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Thank you very much for your presentations. Actually, this is the part of the evening I've been most waiting for because I have questions about the classification system. I mentioned this to other witnesses, that I used to be the registrar for the HR profession of the province of Alberta. I remember in our workplace we went through a process of drafting job descriptions for everybody in the workplace. I found it the most excruciating work I have ever had to do, where each position involved around 20 pages in minute detail of what it was. When I see here that it says that our belief is to encompass systemic discrimination to allow for easy comparison of the value of female work to male work, I'm kind of concerned because when I think of the federal government, I know there's classification upon classification of work.

Maybe briefly, could someone explain to me what is some of the problem between male work and female work and some of the issues that classification in general has?

[Debi Daviau]

When those first pay structures were stood up around the federal government, there were no bargaining agents. Unions and workers' representatives didn't exist. Right from the get-go you had inequitable pay structures.

Throughout the years, once we were in a position to negotiate on behalf of members, all we could do was make changes to those initial pay structures as well as the job definition structures.

You're quite right, classification will make you pull your hair out, particularly when you're dealing with such an old system that isn't necessarily relevant in today's environment. It is quite something, and my hat's off to the professionals who have to work in this field with such a deteriorated set of tools.

This adds to the barrier on our resolving pay equity disputes through bargaining. What makes this unconstitutional is the fact that the job evaluation plan itself—the classification standard, or the original standard on which this pay is determined—is flawed right from the get-go, and more flawed now that it is 30 to 40 years old. It creates a situation where there is already discrimination inherent in the system before you even get into negotiating collective agreements.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Maybe I could ask, would it be fair—

[Debi Daviau]

To finish off, we can't negotiate organization job structures in the federal public sector, whereas in some of the provincial models they can. That's a barrier in adopting some of these provincial models that might be better. They have tribunals and they have union involvement. Maybe there is some room to move on maintenance, but we can't adopt that model today in the federal public sector because classification standards creates a barrier to that.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I was going to ask, if you were to fix the classification structure on the front end, would that reduce problems on the back end where you're starting to have the employee-employer conflicts?

[Debi Daviau]

I would say it's one step in getting toward a fix, but it's just a barrier and not a solution. It's a barrier we need to take down, and not a solution we need to enact.

[Helen Berry, Classification and Equal Pay Specialist, Public Service Alliance of Canada]

I can speak a bit to the problems with the classification system with the federal public service.

There are 72 different classification plans in the public service, and not all of them measure the same thing. Most of them don't measure the same thing. Some of them were created, like the AS classification for administrative services, in 1965. The computing is not the same group as the CS group, but I think the data processing was created in 1978, and it's still used today to classify these jobs.

Part of the difficulty we have, and this was a problem with the PSECA legislation, is that you can't compare female-dominated jobs—and PSAC covers a lot of female-dominated jobs, most of our workers are female—and male jobs. You can't compare the wages for work of equal value because they use different measures.

In some cases they don't have all the four criteria under the Human Rights Act Equal Wages Guidelines, which are skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions.

The CR group, for instance, which is the clerical and regulatory group, has been around since the 1970s. That classification standard doesn't measure working conditions, which is a huge issue. It is the issue we raised back in our Treasury Board pay equity case. We have done a lot of work around the joint union-management initiative, and your concerns about bringing together job descriptions and things like that have happened over time. We did it in the eighties, and we did it in the nineties, but there hasn't been the impetus to push it forward. We still have the same system we were dealing with in 1965, which is inherently discriminatory.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I'm going to ask, has this classification system ever been submitted to a company for an outside audit? The Hay Group is an HR firm that provides this service to companies out there, especially large companies when they're doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions. They start gobbling up different benefit plans and total compensation starts to get out of whack. You're paying the same person different amounts of money depending on the type of work they're doing, and you're starting to layer on benefit plans. They provide that service, as do Morneau Shepell. I think we know someone who can probably get us a good price if we need them to.

Has there ever been an outside audit provided?

[Helen Berry]

In my experience, I've worked with the Hay Group in other areas.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Okay.