When you're dealing with pay equity as the issue, you're going to be bringing in people who are experts in that kind of bargaining, who are focused on it, and who are going to be dealing with getting rid of the gender-based discriminations that exist in many classifications. I've hung around pay equity stuff for a long time, and it took me a while to figure out the effort piece. I could never get my head around it.
Think about it this way: if a man on a construction site goes and picks up two 50-pound bags of cement and hauls them off to whatever he's doing, that's considered to be “effort”. A woman who works in a grocery store picks up hundreds of five- to ten-pound bags of groceries in the course of a day, but it's not seen as “effort”. Same thing with a woman who works on a keyboard, whose hands are constantly moving, and who may get carpal tunnel syndrome—that's not seen as “effort”, because I guess she didn't sweat or grunt and those sorts of things.
The reality is that you have to go at these things and take out the gender biases, and that takes expertise and help. So that helps.
The other part of it is that the union, from our perspective, has the responsibility of going out and talking to their members about this. The union would have access to all of the information that would be necessary. But it needs to be done separately, because you'll get into negotiations and the employer will eventually give you a “final offer”, and then you will have to choose between continuing to talk about pay equity or workboots or some health and safety issue. That's what will happen.
In the federal sector, the interesting thing is: how is the union responsible when there are legislated wages and wage freezes imposed? How can the union be responsible for negotiating something when they don't have the ability to negotiate it?
There are all sorts of things. Women will not benefit from what's in front of us now. They will benefit if we actually take the advice of the people who worked for a long time on this.