Speedy ruling in marathon rights case puts employers ‘on notice’: PSAC’s Ducharme
The country’s highest court has closed Canada’s longest running pay equity dispute, but the union representing the workers involved says the fight for pay equity is not finished.
In August 1983, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) filed a human rights complaint, arguing the work done by predominantly female clerical workers at Canada Post was comparable to the higher-paid work done by mail sorters and carriers, who were then mostly male.
After years of lengthy proceedings, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled in favour of the workers in 2005.
Although PSAC had asked for $300 million, the tribunal reduced the damages by 50 per cent to $150 million.
In 2008, the Federal Court overturned that decision and the reversal was subsequently upheld by the Federal Court of Appeal.
On Nov. 18, after 28 years, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favour of the workers, just 20 minutes after hearing oral arguments.
Pat Armstrong is an expert and longtime pay equity advocate; she was also a witness at the original human rights tribunal.
She was “very surprised” by the swift end to a case that has dragged on for nearly three decades, but she’s heartened by the result.
“It creates the possibility of once again having conversations about pay equity,” she says.
The decision covers workers in the clerical and regulatory group at Canada Post from August 1982 to June 2002, which did include some men. While the original complaint covered about 2,300 employees, the union says it’s likely 6,000 people have worked in that classification since then.
PSAC national executive vice-president Patty Ducharme expects the total payout could cost about $250 million dollars.
But she says for many workers that compensation will come too late.
“If I was a single mom 28 years ago and couldn’t afford to put my child into hockey, it doesn’t buy back that missed opportunity,” she says, adding some eligible workers have died, retired or left Canada Post in the ensuing decades.
The case centered on whether the human rights tribunal acted correctly in comparing female employees’ wages to the male-dominated group that nevertheless included some highly paid women.
“Pay equity is a difficult concept for people to understand — that it was jobs, not individuals — being compared (in this case),” says Armstrong, adding it’s an issue that plagues the pay equity debate today.
While much is made of the wage gap between men and women, she says the focus should be on the gaps within a specific workplace or sector.
“That gap may be 60 per cent or it may be 10 per cent,” she says, adding inequality is a result of several conditions, among them uneven pay equity laws. Only a few provinces have pay equity legislation and although there have been several significant decisions related to pay equity, they affect mainly unionized workers.
Armstrong says as the workplace changes — with more people self-employed and working part-time or on contract — pay equity legislation needs to adapt.
“Legislation never works for all time. It needs to respond to changing conditions,” she says.
PSAC’s Ducharme says while the Supreme Court decision “should certainly put employers on notice,” it also underscores the need for a national pay equity scheme — something she says the federal Conservatives effectively blocked from happening with controversial legislation in 2009 that requires federal workers to secure pay equity through collective bargaining rather than in courts and tribunals.
“It not only violates women’s rights to equality, but members’ rights to freedom of association as well,” she says.
Canada Post says it will abide by the Supreme Court’s ruling.
