Finance committee  Would anybody care to answer that?

Finance committee  I'll defer to Dr. Puffer to answer your question.

Finance committee  No. We would support such an arrangement, providing it's a voluntary arrangement.

Finance committee  Not necessarily. I'll defer to Mr. Markham, who'll be able to help us with this answer.

Finance committee  I will. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you very much for inviting us to talk to this committee once again. I am John Farrell, the executive director of Federally Regulated Employers--Transportation and Communication, otherwise known as FETCO. Here with me as advisers to FETCO are Mr.

Status of Women committee  Generally speaking, there are job descriptions for all manner of jobs that exist in an organization.

Status of Women committee  Sometimes the way in which work is performed is part of the negotiation process.

Status of Women committee  The employer does.

Status of Women committee  In a non-union environment, most employers who are genuinely interested in creating equity within their organization completely--that's pay equity throughout their organization--will typically engage in some form of job evaluation process whereby the jobs are evaluated against one another, and then they try to apply some scientific process to make sure pay is established at various levels of the organization, which recognizes the skill, responsibility, and working conditions of the job.

Status of Women committee  In a union organization, it's a little bit more difficult than that, because the unions participate in the bargaining process and they have a say in where wages and benefits are allocated to the employees for whom they are negotiating. We are compelled to negotiate with them; they present bargaining demands; we engage in collective bargaining; there's a give and take and there's a back and forth.

Status of Women committee  I think your question does not face the reality of what happens in the real world, with respect.

Status of Women committee  I think this notion of negotiating away a human right is really sloganism. We hear it come up regularly. This is not what is intended at all. We believe that in order to resolve this problem in a bilateral process, both parties have to come to the table to resolve the problem and have to be responsible for resolving it.

Status of Women committee  We are hopeful that this new approach will be much better than the current approach, which is mired in litigation and long cases that have never gone away, and there has been no satisfactory resolution. We believe that if the unions and the employers are both responsible for finding solutions, they will be found.

Status of Women committee  I think that is true. Take a look at what happened to General Motors just the other day. Market forces are affecting the wages and working conditions of many employees across the country. As there's more and more unemployment, there's going to be a lot more pressure on a downward level of compensation.

Status of Women committee  In fairness, we didn't have any input into the amounts of the fine.