Job Evaluation Update - March 2010

March 2, 2010 Negotiations for a new gender neutral and pay equity compliant job evaluation system were halted over a year ago. During that time, OPSEU staff and the Job Evaluation team have been busy working towards a legal process to deal with our ongoing problems with the OPS classification system and the pay equity maintenance process, neither of which have a dispute resolution mechanism.

Our Charter Challenge

In December 2009 OPSEU launched a charter challenge on Sections 51 and 52 of CECBA, provisions that legally bar us from arbitrating classification complaints. This was introduced by the Harris Tories, and reinforced under the present Liberal government.

OPSEU’s argument is that our ability to bargain collectively has been interfered with and therefore violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

A Charter challenge is a long process. It could be late this year or early 2011 before we can get our case in front of a judge, and that will only be the beginning of the hearings.

The Pay Equity Front

Our position is that classification issues and the new job evaluation system (which was agreed would be pay equity compliant) are entwined.

Originally, our strategy had been to go straight to the Tribunal with our complaint about the employer’s refusal to jointly negotiate a job evaluation system. One of our major concerns is the collection of information about member’s jobs, and ultimately we are concerned about having access to some sort of dispute resolution mechanism.

The Tribunal said we could not bypass review services, so we made submissions to the review officer. The review officer required more information and we are now revising our submissions using the information we gathered from the charter challenge research. By March the review officer will have enough information to decide whether she can make an order or write a notice of decision which will then put us before the Pay Equity Tribunal again.