Lawyers for the nurses and Treasury Board reached an agreement in principle about two weeks ago, but the settlement was kept under wraps until Tuesday, when the parties asked the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to endorse it and make it legally binding.
Victoria lawyer Laurence Armstrong, who represents most of the nurses, said the government has estimated the cost of the settlement at $160 million. But that doesn’t include additional payments to reduce taxes owed on the settlement payout, or the higher pensions the nurses will now receive, he said. Including those amounts, the ultimate cost of the settlement is likely to exceed $200 million.
Because the settlement covers ongoing gender discrimination dating back more than three decades, a few long-service CPP nurses stand to collect as much as $250,000, Armstrong said.
Nurses who worked at least six months for the CPP between 1978 and 1989 will receive a lump-sum payment of $20,000. Those who were employed between 1989 and 1999 will get a further $40,000 lump sum. And nurses who worked for the CPP from 1999 to the present will get an additional $16,500 for every year of service.
As well, every nurse will receive $2,000 for pain and suffering. That’s over and above the $2.3 million the tribunal awarded the nurses for pain and suffering last fall.
Exactly how many nurses will receive compensation is not yet known. A total of 417 signed a human rights complaint originally filed in 2004 by Ottawa nurse Ruth Walden, but another 250 nurses who weren’t named in the formal complaint are also eligible, Armstrong said. The number could increase if retired nurses who haven’t yet been identified come forward.
After eight years of legal wrangling, the nurses are “very pleased” by the settlement, said Armstrong. “One of the things that was important to us was finality. Otherwise, we would have just spent years in appeals again. This way, it’s a done deal and they can get on with their lives.”
The predominantly female nurses, who earn between $50,000 and $60,000, determine the eligibility of applicants for CPP disability benefits. They say they perform essentially the same core functions as a male-dominated group of CPP doctors paid twice as much.
In 2007, the human rights tribunal ruled that pay differential amounted to gender discrimination. Despite that, a second tribunal decision in 2009 denied the nurses compensation for wage loss or pain and suffering.
However, the Federal Court of Canada overturned the 2009 decision, a ruling later upheld by the Federal Court of Appeal, which sent the matter back to the tribunal to determine the appropriate compensation.
Negotiations between the two parties began about three months ago. Initially, the nurses were seeking back pay equivalent to 80 per cent of the salary earned by CPP doctors, but ultimately settled for less.
“This is a kind of rational compromise between the two positions,” said Armstrong. While the government negotiated in good faith, he said, “their motivation got higher” as the scheduled July 3 tribunal hearing drew closer.
Despite the settlement, the nurses are still being paid their old “discriminatory salaries,” Armstrong said. Their new bargaining agent, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), will now have to negotiate a new salary scale.
The CPP nurses came under PIPSC’s jurisdiction about a year ago, after the human rights tribunal ordered the government to place them in a nursing category. Until then, they had been classified as administrators, and were represented by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC).
Armstrong said the PSAC not only refused to help the nurses, it actively blocked their efforts to shift into a nursing category, since that would have shifted them into PIPSC’s jurisdiction.
“PSAC put their interests ahead of the interests of their members,” Armstrong charged. “They worked against their own members to keep the discriminatory practice. This was a fight that PSAC should have taken on.”
Since the nurses joined PIPSC, “the difference is just night and day,” Armstrong said. PIPSC entered the legal action as an interested party and hired lawyer Peter Engelmann to assist Armstrong with the case. The union also provided financial support, flying regional nurse representatives to Ottawa for a two-day strategy session.
Armstrong said it is unlikely the nurses settlement will affect wages paid to other federal nurses.
“This was a pretty unique circumstance,” he said. “The discrimination was pretty stark. You had this group of men being treated so vastly differently than this group of women, and yet they’re both doing the same work.”
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Don Butler
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