I totally disagree that pay equity, as a human right, can be bargained. You cannot bargain away a human rights issue. It's fundamentally accepted that you can't do that. Unions do not control the budgets of the employers. They hold the purse strings.
If you want to see the success of pay equity with proactive legislation, you should look at the Quebec model. Their pay equity is about 11 or 12 years old, and they just finished a study, an audit, about a year ago of their pay equity throughout the province. It was very interesting to see some of the results. Of the employers, 82% said they wouldn't do pay equity unless they were legislated to do it, but 100% of the employers in Quebec said they did not close their doors because of pay equity. There was a collaboration between the unions and the employers and that model worked really well because it was a proactive, legislated model.