Few issues received more media attention in 1999 than the pay equity settlement reached by the Treasury Board and the Public Service Alliance of Canada. This was not surprising, given the history of the dispute and the significance and breadth of the settlement.

In all, the agreement settling the fifteen-year-old case amounts to some $3.5 billion and affects about 230,000 former and current federal government employees, ranging from secretaries and clerks to hospital and library workers. More than 85 per cent of the affected employees are women.

The case goes back to 1984, when the Alliance filed a complaint with the Commission on behalf of clerks, the majority of whom were women. The complaint prompted the government and unions to undertake a joint pay equity study. The study, carried out between 1985 and 1989, compared the skills, responsibilities, effort, and working conditions of different jobs. While the two sides agreed that predominantly female occupations deserved wage adjustments, they could not agree on how these adjustments were to be calculated. When further discussions proved fruitless, the government chose to make unilateral payments. The two unions representing employees in predominantly female jobs - the Public Service Alliance and the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada - reacted by complaining to the Commission that wage discrimination revealed in the joint study persisted.

When it became clear that the Commission could not bring the parties to a settlement, it referred the case to a human rights tribunal. The tribunal held over 250 days of hearings and argument on the case between 1991 and 1997. In an initial decision in 1996, the tribunal found that the joint study provided a reasonable basis for assessing whether further payments were required. Meanwhile, the Professional Institute of the Public Service had settled its part of the case, securing wage adjustments for its members in predominantly female occupations such as nursing.

In 1998, the tribunal issued a second decision. This time, it set down a formula for calculating the adjustments owed to Public Service Alliance members in predominantly female jobs. In August 1998, the government responded by seeking judicial review of the tribunal's decision.

On October 19, 1999, Mr. Justice John Evans of the Federal Court's Trial Division upheld the tribunal's decision. His ruling confirmed that section 11 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, like the Act as a whole, should be given a broad, purposive interpretation consistent with its status as quasi-constitutional legislation. In the context of pay equity, this means applying approaches that remedy the systemic undervaluation of work performed primarily by women. It also means avoiding unduly restrictive methodologies. The tribunal's decision, Justice Evans ruled, easily met these standards.

Ten days after the court's ruling, the federal government and the Public Service Alliance reached an agreement on how to implement the decision.

This settlement had an almost immediate impact - a positive impact, in the Commission's view. Just six weeks after the agreement was announced, a tentative resolution was reached to pay equity complaints filed in 1991 by public servants involved in personnel administration. Worth tens of millions of dollars in back pay and ongoing wage adjustments, this settlement was scheduled to go before the Commissioners for approval early in the year 2000.

The Public Service Alliance case serves to highlight some of the strengths and weaknesses of section 11 of the Act. Its strength is that it provides recourse for those who believe their jobs are undervalued and thus underpaid because they are performed mostly by women. In so doing, it helps ensure Canada's compliance with international conventions that require equal pay for work of equal value.

The main difficulty with the law is its reliance on complaints, which can lead to needless confrontation, haphazard implementation, and burgeoning costs. A better approach, the Commission believes, would be based on positive obligations and cooperation between employers and unions. This approach to pay equity has already been adopted by several provinces, and by the federal government for employment equity.

The Commission would welcome a public discussion of what must be done to ensure that the effectiveness of pay equity can be maintained in an era of globalization and changing patterns of employment. It is important that pay equity should continue to be treated as a human rights issue and that progress should be monitored by an arm's-length agency.

Meanwhile, to make the existing provisions as efficient as possible, the Commission is publishing documents that explain pay equity concepts in non-technical language. It is also increasing its use of mediation and encouraging parties to adopt non-litigious dispute-resolution procedures.

The Public Service Alliance case makes one thing clear: pay equity provokes discussion. Some still question the very idea of pay equity laws, maintaining that they interfere in the market's wage-setting mechanism. The Commission suggests that this view overlooks clear evidence that wages are influenced by values and traditions as well as supply and demand. Pay equity does affect salaries and employer-employee relations, but so do legal provisions on the minimum wage, occupational health and safety, and maternity and parental leave. Our market economy operates within ground rules fixed by legislatures. Pay equity should be viewed as one of these ground rules.

Other Pay Equity Cases

While the Public Service Alliance settlement dominated the headlines in 1999, a number of other pay equity complaints were also resolved, often with the assistance of the Commission. For instance, a final agreement was reached in a case settled two years earlier by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. and Local 404 of the Office and Professional Employees International Union. The 1997 settlement included a set of initial payments and called for a joint pay equity study by the employer and union. That study was completed in November 1999, leading to additional payments and ongoing wage adjustments for predominantly female jobs. This case helps illustrate what can be accomplished when employers and unions choose to cooperate on pay equity.

During the past year, legal proceedings continued on pay equity complaints brought against Bell Canada, the Government of the Northwest Territories, Canada Post, Air Canada, and Canadian Airlines. While all these cases involve questions of principle, they have often been tied up by procedural arguments filed by the employers - arguments that, at times, seem to do little more than stall hearings into the merits of the complaints. Details on major pay equity cases are provided in the Commission's Legal Report.

The Universal Classification Standard

The federal government continued its efforts to deal with pay issues in the public service on another front in 1999. Through the new Universal Classification Standard, 72 outdated standards will be replaced with a single system for ranking jobs. In 1999, the new system moved closer to implementation.

The Commission supports the Universal Classification Standard's goals of universality, gender neutrality, and simplification. A system that fairly recognizes features of work performed by women will go a long way towards avoiding future pay equity problems. During the development of the new system, Commission staff provided the Treasury Board with advice on how gender neutrality could be advanced.

The progress achieved by the Treasury Board on this challenging project must be recognized. However, it is important that gender neutrality principles and safeguards be fully applied as the work is completed.

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