Thank you.
I've been listening very carefully to all of your questions. I think I would like to tell you about the Ontario Pay Equity Commission, though, and our work in the last, say, 10 years. We are the oldest of the jurisdictions that have implemented pay equity, and we have a lot of learning because we were first out of the block for a long time.
Just very quickly, the commission is an independent agency of the government established by the Pay Equity Act. It's accountable to the legislature through the Ministry of Labour. We have two separate parts that operate independently, the pay equity office and the pay hearings tribunal.
The office is responsible for enforcement. Our review officers are required to investigate, attempt to settle, and resolve complaints and objections to plans, as well as to monitor the implementation and maintenance of pay equity in workplaces. They have the authority to resolve all pay equity issues by order or decision. The office provides a number of tools and interactive material for employers and employees and unions to understand how to do pay equity. Finally, the office has legislative authority to conduct research and disseminate information about any aspect of pay equity and related subjects. That's the office.
The tribunal is responsible for adjudicating disputes that arise under the act on a de novo basis, but parties must bring their disputes first to our office for investigation before accessing the tribunal process. The tribunal has exclusive jurisdiction to determine all questions of fact or law, and their decisions are final for our purposes, certainly, as the enforcement body.
All Ontario private sector employers with 10 or more employees and all public sector employers must undertake a pay equity analysis, and that analysis process is very well defined in the act, and I think it is the basis for the task force report actually in 2004. There is a process to trigger investigations for non-compliance, but the requirement for employers to have pay equity in their workplaces and to ensure that it is maintained is not complaint-based, as you probably know.
The majority of our work now and for quite some time has really been monitoring employers for compliance with the act. We call it monitoring. Some people might call it auditing, but for our purposes it's monitoring. We run a number of programs that have had different focuses and different ways of engaging employers in this process. We ran a service industry monitoring program between 2007 and 2010, covering, for instance, hotel, motel, retail, and food and beverage industries. Over that time we contacted over 4,000 employers and actually monitored about 1,000 of them to assist them in coming into compliance.
We ran a very unique program in 2011, which we called the wage gap pilot project. That was an exercise in outreach and awareness and an opportunity to broaden the dialogue, not just focusing on pay equity but actually introducing the concept of a gender wage gap. In that program we had a return rate of 81% for the employers that we contacted on a voluntary basis. We asked them for some basic compensation data, we ran some tests, and we did an analysis to see if they showed patterns of compensation that likely would lead us to think that they might not have compliance. We found in that pilot that about 54% of responders did have what we called an apparent wage gap. We then used that to focus our monitoring activities. They were advised if they participated that it could be a likely possibility, and we then started monitoring them.
Also, in 2014 we monitored the classified government agencies for compliance. The 2015 program was an outreach in pay equity awareness program where we sent letters to 14,000 new businesses basically to make them aware of their obligations and to make them aware of all of the tools that we had available for them to assist themselves in coming into compliance and also alerting them to the possibility of being monitored. We're now in the process of starting to monitor those employers as well.
We've gotten a little better at measuring our outcomes as well. We're starting to report on adjustments that we have found to be owing in these monitoring activities. Over the course of the last about four years we have, through our direct intervention, found about $20 million in adjustments owing, over a variety of businesses, as you know.
Those are only the results of our direct involvement. We regularly see announcements in the newspaper that report on pay equity achievements through negotiations between unions and employers. A lot of those negotiations do not trigger our office's involvement, so we have no way of collecting that kind of data unfortunately.
Anecdotally we know that because of our extensive outreach programs now and these letters that are going out reminding employers about their obligations, we have seen and heard that there has been a lot of pay equity activity that has been going on where employers are realizing that, oops, I may have let this slide, and they've come into compliance.
Among our other activities we have consolidated all of our learning material and we now have a guide to interpreting the act, which is on the website and has been widely circulated. As I said, we have a number of web-based interactive tools that allow employers of pretty much any size to go in and put their own data through an interactive process and come up with what they should be doing in terms of pay equity.
We've also partnered with other organizations to provide training material. The most recent one has been a partnership with the Human Resources Professionals Association and York University. The HRPA is now offering a certificate program for pay equity. I was told yesterday that it's their second most popular program, so I think there's a lot of uptake on that.
We also try to disseminate information about pay equity through the various ministries if we have the ability to do so.
Lastly, we've established a gender wage gap grant program. We encourage research around pay equity and related topics.
Those are the activities that we have engaged in knowing that our act is at a very different stage from everyone else's, except for Quebec. We're both now heavily into the maintenance stage. I heard some of your questions so I'm sure you're going to address some of those questions to me. I would say that our act has not been amended since 1993 and if I were to give you some advice I would say that thinking about some kind of reporting system would be a very valuable thing to do.
I did have the opportunity to revisit the 2004 task force report in preparation for coming here. It is probably the most comprehensive piece of work on pay equity that exists anywhere, probably in the world I think. As you've heard tonight, it has covered most of the difficult pieces in terms of maintenance, involvement with the unions, some kind of reporting structure. It is a really great starting point.
