3.5 Pay Equity Act & Privacy Act
Pay Equity Act
In 1996, the Quebec government adopted the Pay Equity Act to address systemic wage discrimination against women. The Act obliged employers to measure and correct pay inequities in jobs predominantly performed by females. This law covers public and private sectors with over ten employees (Government of Canada, 2023). Pay Equity refers to equal pay for work of equal value based on two principles:
- Pay equality – Male and female workers must be paid the same wage for doing identical work.
- Equal pay for similar or substantially similar work (equal pay for work of comparable worth).
This means that males and females should be paid the same for jobs of a similar nature that may have different titles. In recruitment and selection, the law ensures gender neutrality or no favouring for work done by men. It must be based on skills, efforts, responsibility and work conditions (LawTeacher, 2019).
Canada’s Privacy Act
The Privacy Act is federal legislation that protects the personal information of Canadians in the hands of the federal government. It is a crucial piece of Canada’s framework for protecting your privacy interests (Government of Canada, 2021).
For private sector organizations, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) sets out the ground rules for how organizations involved in a commercial activity can collect, use or share personal information. The purpose of PIPEDA is to establish, in an era in which technology increasingly facilitates the circulation and exchange of information, rules to govern the collection, use and disclosure of personal information in a manner that recognizes the right of privacy of individuals concerning their personal information and the need of organizations to collect, use or disclose personal information for purposes that a reasonable person would consider appropriate in the circumstances (Government of Canada, 2019).
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) oversees compliance with PIPEDA, which includes investigating privacy complaints and helping businesses improve their personal information handling practices. Personal information is defined broadly under PIPEDA as any information about an identifiable individual, such as their name, address, email, phone number, date of birth, social insurance number, driver’s license, or blood type. PIPEDA also covers sensitive data, such as an individual’s ethnic origin, social status, and personal health information (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 2022).
An HR professional has extraordinary access to a precious asset: employees’ personal information. HR professionals must treat such information with care. Here are a few recommendations from the OPC to be aware of during recruitment and selection.
What do you think?
The OPC Knows What Can Go Wrong
The OPC has seen all too often what can happen when personal information doesn’t get the respect it needs. These tips, all based on real-life events, will help you treat all employees’ information with integrity and professionalism.
Tip: Avoid emailing sensitive information to groups.
What can go wrong? Information was sent to a large group of job applicants whose addresses were accidentally put in the cc field rather than the bcc field, which violated their privacy.
Tip: Avoid sending sensitive information electronically. If you don’t have a choice, make sure the message is checked carefully before it is sent.
What can go wrong? A manager’s skills assessment was mistakenly sent electronically to 321 people in her organization.
Tip: When interviewing prospective staff, have applicants sign separate sheets to enter the building. Better yet, hold interviews in different buildings.
What can go wrong? When applicants signed in for an interview, they saw the names of all other applicants because everyone had signed the same form.
Tip: Set up restrictions or logging mechanisms for people to access data banks.
What can go wrong? Hundreds of employees had access to others’ sensitive personal information.
Tip: Do not include an employee’s address on a form to be signed by the employee’s supervisor.
What can go wrong? Someone in power accessed an employee’s home address, which could compromise the employee’s safety and security.
“5.3 The Law and Recruitment and Selection” from Human Resources Management – 3rd Edition by Debra Patterson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.—Modifications: Used section Pay Equity Act.
