Q1: A company hires full-time and part-time cleaners. Do these similar or identical positions fall under the same job class?
A1: Possibly. If full time and part time employees do similar work, they would belong to the same job class if they have the same compensation schedule, salary grade or range of salary rates, and meet the other three tests for job class outlined in the definition quoted above. However, where both full- and part-time employees perform similar duties and responsibilities but the part-time cleaners are paid an hourly rate and the full-time ones are paid on salary, or the part-time cleaners do not have benefits but the full-time ones do, then the full- and part-time positions would be in separate job classes.
Q2: There are ten “Secretary” positions in a company. Do all the secretaries belong to the same job class?
A2: Not necessarily. Even if all the secretaries performed similar duties and responsibilities but one secretary is not paid the same as the rest, that secretary must belong in a separate job class according to the Act. If there are secretary job classes that are similar to each other, these job classes can be grouped together using a “group of jobs” approach.
- What is a “Group of Jobs”?
A group of jobs is a series of job classes that involve similar kinds of work performed at different levels of skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions [6. (10)]. The wages for each job class usually increase proportionately through the series. Typically, employees progress from one job class to the next job class within the group.
Example of a “Group of Jobs”
A group of jobs all doing similar “secretarial” work might be:
- Clerk
- Senior Clerk
- Clerk Typist
- Intermediate Clerk Typist
- Senior Clerk Typist
If an employer chooses to use a group of jobs approach, job classes that are related to each other in some way are grouped together to maintain the positions of the job classes relative to each other. Deciding which job classes to group together in a group of jobs should be based on an assessment of the actual tasks and duties performed not just similar sounding job titles.
The group of jobs approach enables employers to:
- reduce the number of female job classes to evaluate and compare; and
- maintain the relationship between the female job classes in the group of jobs, since the same pay equity result will be applied to the whole group.
The group of jobs approach is applied as follows:
- The female job class with the greatest number of employees is selected as the representative job class for the group.
- The selected pay equity comparison method is applied to the representative job class. (See Methods of Comparison).
- The resulting pay equity adjustments, if any, are applied to all the positions in all the job classes in the group as though they were all one female job class.
