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.