Thank you.
On behalf of the membership of the Canadian Federation of University Women and the National Association of Women and the Law, we thank you for this opportunity to present today.
CFUW is a non-partisan, self-funded organization with over 10,000 women graduates and students in 118 clubs in across Canada. We work to further women's human rights and education globally. The National Association of Women and the Law is a national non-profit women's organization that promotes the equality rights of women through legal education, research, and law reform advocacy.
Our concern today over the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act begins with its introduction as part of the 2009 budget package. Parliament was not able to evaluate the legislation independently of the budget. Given that the law aims to change existing legislation on pay equity for the federal public service in a manner that is not endorsed by labour unions or women's groups, this is cause for alarm.
I will list some points of particular concern with regard to the legislation itself.
First, the act suggests that “equitable compensation” should replace “pay equity”. These are not equivalent terms. Pay equity is a fundamental human right enshrined in such things as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Equitable compensation is not defined in the act. As a legal concept, equitable compensation is also untested by domestic and international human rights law.
Further, the act seeks to change the generally accepted criteria used to evaluate whether or not a female job is of equal value to a male job by inserting the words “market forces” into evaluations. When it is these same market forces that create wage inequity in the first place, it is ill-advised to include them in legislation claiming to create equitable compensation.
The act represents a deliberate marginalization of the 2004 pay equity task force report. In 2001 a federal pay equity task force was established. After thorough review and consultation with the stakeholders, this task force made recommendations for a new proactive pay equity system that included a pay equity commission and tribunal. These recommendations were widely supported by unions, women's advocates, and employers. It is dismaying to see the work and consensus built up through that process being pushed aside in favour of the regressive provisions of the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act.
This act leads to confusion between negotiated equitable compensation and proactive pay equity legislation. For example, on February 25, 2009, the Honourable Vic Toews, President of the Treasury Board, responded to a question in the House by stating, “We are simply following the recommendations of the Liberal task force in 2004 that said proactive pay equity legislation was needed.” This is a misleading statement.
The new legislation was compared to the actual recommendations in the task force itself. The task force report explicitly recommended that the process for achieving pay equity be separated from the process for negotiating collective agreements. The new legislation makes unions and employers jointly responsible for negotiating equitable compensation despite the fact that unions have no control over whether federal money is spent fairly on compensating women working in the public service.
Likewise, the Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act sets out equitable compensation as one issue to be discussed along with all other collective bargaining issues, rather than something to be treated separately, as it is in Manitoba. This means that the right to be free from sex discrimination in pay could be bargained away, because other issues are of more importance to the employer or to the union.
The act contains a clause that removes the right of public sector workers to file complaints on pay equity with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, thereby effectively removing pay equity as a human right of federal government employees. The act imposes a $50,000 fine on any union that would encourage or assist a member in filing a complaint, despite the fact that under Canadian labour law, unions are legally required to represent all of their members, including women. The individualistic approach taken by the act is deeply problematic because, by definition, pay equity complaints are group complaints reflecting systemic discrimination. Moreover, preventing unions from assisting in complaints means that both non-unionized and unionized women will lack the resources and information about pay rates and job descriptions needed to make a viable complaint to the Public Service Labour Relations Board.
The act defines a female-dominated group as one in which 70% of the workers are women. Only those groups can seek equitable compensation. This is a rigid definition that does nothing for job groups whose membership is 51% to 69% women. The legislation also restricts comparisons of male and female job groups so narrowly that comparisons can only be made within defined segments of the federal public service, or within federal agencies, and not across the public service as a whole.
CFUW and NAWL agree there are problems with the current pay equity regime. It is long, complex, and often unresponsive to the needs of women. However, this act does not address these problems.
Pay equity is a fundamental human right to be protected, affirmed, and championed by Parliament, as it is in legislation such as the Canadian Human Rights Act, which has recognized pay equity as a right since 1977. The Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act is a dangerous move backward that effectively removes pay equity from the realm of guaranteed human rights.
We urge the committee to adopt recommendations that reflect the urgency of protecting Canadian women workers from the fundamental injustices enshrined within this law.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.