October 14th, 2011
Today CUSSU submitted its official response/objection to the Québec Pay Equity Commission. Let us remember that the Pay Equity Act dates back to 1996. It was thought that employers would start payments on November 2001 – they had 5 years to complete the exercise. If they did not complete the exercise by November 21, 2001, they would have to pay retroactively to this date.
A lot of employers in Québec had not completed the exercise by 2001, including Concordia.
As employers set out to do the exercise seriously after 2001 (because of the retroactivity and the interests to be paid), the Act however gave them the possibility to ask to pay by instalments as described above, and under some conditions (they had to ask the QPEC). However, if an employer had not begun the process by 2009, they lost their right to instalments (to start the process, one had to identify and post the job categories concerned by the Pay Equity exercise).
The job categories were determined and posted by the Concordia University Pay Equity Committee in July 2010.
Instead of using 2001 wage and job data, the data used was the 2009 data.
The Concordia Pay Equity Committee finished its mandate in March 2011, a full 15 years after the law was first passed.
Having completed the exercise, the University should have posted the wage adjustments and the payments schedule in the second posting. They did not. Instead, they asked the Commission to pay by instalments, so that they wouldn’t pay the full amounts due.
The demand itself should be rejected on legal grounds, since the right to ask for instalments does not exist for employers who are as late as Concordia to do the exercise.
Since September 2011, CUSSU has submitted many written requests for information and more recently we submitted our official objection regarding the University’s request for spreading out over 4 years the adjustments due. You can read the letter which is attached (it’s in French!).