Thank you, Peter.
Good evening, and thank you for this opportunity to speak to you tonight.
In the brief time remaining, I wanted to provide some comments with respect to the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act or PSECA. In CALL's view, this is a regressive piece of legislation that should be repealed. Rather than proactive pay equity legislation envisioned by the 2004 pay equity task force report, PSECA is a step backwards from the concept of equal pay for work of equal value and significantly interferes with the rights of federal public sector employees by denying them human rights protections for systemic gender discrimination and pay, contrary to section 15 of the charter.
PSECA applies to federal public servants. It was passed in 2009 but is not yet enforced because the necessary regulations under it have never been promulgated. In the meantime, the pay equity complaints of federal public servants have largely been left to languish in limbo. Those that have been filed have gone to the Public Service Labour Relations and Employment Board. This in itself is problematic, given that the board has no expertise whatsoever in pay equity.
PSECA is fundamentally flawed and puts in place measures that severely limit access to pay equity protection. These problems include the following. One is the high threshold for a female-predominant group. That's at 70%, compared with 55% for groups of over 500 employees in the equal wage guidelines under the Human Rights Act.
Another is the introduction of market forces criteria to assess the value of work performed by employees. Market forces are commonly accepted as perpetuating pay inequities between men and women, rather than resolving pay inequity. There is also the fact that pay inequity complaints are to be adjudicated by the PSLREB instead of pay equity experts. Finally, there is the imposition of the incredibly high standard of “manifestly unreasonable” in order to have access to adjudication.
The cumulative effect of these measures is to whittle away at the concept of pay equity so that it has no meaningful content left at the end of the day. PSECA also inappropriately imposes an equal obligation on the bargaining agent and the employer to provide equitable compensation, and makes bargaining agents jointly liable with the employer to pay compensation. This shared obligation fails to recognize that pay equity is a human right, not a benefit to be sought at the bargaining table.
PSECA is inconsistent with the recommendations of the 2004 pay equity task force report. It cannot be remedied and should be repealed. It also calls for a recommendation that complaints of federal public servants should not go to the board.
We thank the committee for this opportunity to speak and welcome any questions that you may have.