August 17, 2010

Work is continuing on the HPD Central Pay Equity process.

As we had previously reported, the Steering Committee Chairs sent joint letters in January 2010 to the Local Presidents and CEOs at hospitals with outstanding Job Information Questionnaires (JIQ) in an effort to encourage their completion. This was met with some success, but there still remained a number of hospitals with jobs for which questionnaires had not been submitted. The Joint Evaluation Committee was concerned that some of these outstanding jobs included a number of unique positions as well as potential male comparator positions. A further letter was therefore sent in May 2010 to the appropriate hospitals, explaining the importance of participation and compliance, with a focus on obtaining the questionnaires for these jobs. A deadline of June 30 was set for receipt of the finalized questionnaires.

We are pleased to report that there is now a 95% completion rate. A total of 1,562 questionnaires have been submitted, by 1,545 Lead Employees, covering more than 10,000 people. We are overwhelmed at the huge volume of work that you all have done in completing the questionnaires and providing such rich insight into the work that you do.

Although the June 30 deadline has passed, the parties continue to work proactively with our locals and the hospitals to obtain the few remaining outstanding questionnaires. We also want to ensure that anyone who does not wish to complete the questionnaire signs the document indicating they do not wish to participate.

Since our last Update, the Evaluation Committee has met nearly every month and is making progress on the evaluations. We have tentative evaluations on approximately 70 different job titles, involving more than 500 different questionnaires.

The committee’s process is to evaluate the questionnaires and arrive at a tentative rating. When there is disagreement within the Committee, we revisit the matter and work intensively to attempt to agree on a rating and on a rationale for the rating. Where we ultimately cannot agree on a rating for a factor for a job, we set it aside until we can obtain additional information that may help to resolve the issue. If resolution is not possible, the parties can resort to mediation.

We have found it helpful to organize the questionnaires into ‘family groups’. At present we are working on the rehab family group and the male comparator family of tradespeople, and have nearly complete ratings for these groups of jobs.

The work is quite slow, due to the care with which the committee is evaluating the information in the questionnaires and the research through other sources to get a complete understanding of each job. We are working hard to ensure that our evaluations are as accurate as possible.