Canada. Public Service Staff Relations Board. Pay Research Bureau : The Bureau was originally created by a departmental directive of the Civil Service Commission in the fall of 1957. In 1965, the Preparatory Committee on Collective Bargaining recommended that "the Pay Research Bureau be retained as an independent and impartial unit and be placed under the general jurisdiction of the Chairman of the Public Service Staff Relations Board." The Pay Research Bureau was transferred to the PSSRB in 1967 but the Bureau was never given explicit legislative recognition or mandate.
The activities of the Pay Research Bureau began eight years before the founding of the Public Service Staff Relations Board. From 1957 to 1967, the Bureau operated as a branch of the Civil Service Commission in an environment of rapidly changing assumptions about how to organize the federal public service. The consistent purpose of the Bureau both before and after 1967 was to collect data, conduct surveys and complete studies related to rates of pay, earnings of employees, conditions of employment and benefits both inside and outside the public service in a form that would provide an objective basis for analysis and comparison of public service and public sector compensation. This function did not change when the Bureau was transferred from the Civil Service Commission to administrative jurisdiction of the Public Service Staff Relations Board in 1967 but the new environment of public sector collective bargaining greatly affected the methods and scope of its research studies and surveys. Methodological issues dominate the surviving registry and document the growing tension between the Public Service Staff Relations Board attempting to act as a neutral service provider and the Treasury Board Secretariat acting on behalf of the government as principle employer of unionized public sector workers. Throughout its existence, the Pay Research Bureau developed highly sophisticated techniques for measuring and surveying private and public sector compensation rates in response to the requirements of public sector unions, the Treasury Board and other federal public sector employers. The pay and benefit surveys of the Bureau were often distinct in their coverage and structure from broader statistical surveys by Statistics Canada or Labour Canada. The studies of the Bureau were never published as such but rather distributed on a restricted basis to private sector participants in the survey studies and to stake holders involved in the public sector collective bargaining.
