Small progress

Your bargaining team met with CFIA on May 12-15th. On the 12th, your employer tabled 2 proposals. The first dealt with editorial changes including the removal of furlough leave as there are no longer any employees who qualify and the second amended Article 63 to ensure future changes to NJC Directives are included in our collective agreement. The team agreed with these editorial changes and signed off on May 13th.

The 2nd proposal tabled by CFIA dealt with changes to Article 13 Leave With or Without Pay for Union Business. Unfortunately in this proposal, the employer would agree to withdraw one of its proposals if we agreed to withdraw 14 of ours. In the spirit of true negotiation, we responded by agreeing to withdraw some demands while retaining our demands for some of the more substantive improvements. In the end, because they would not agree to discuss the real issues, nothing was signed.

The employer then offered to withdraw its demand for Article 27 and asked us to withdraw our demand to improve the meal allowances while on overtime. We offered to remove some of our demand if they would agree to increase the meal allowance from $10 to $15. They countered that they were not against increasing the allowance but were not prepared to discuss monetary issues at this time.

On May 14th, we had the opportunity to present several issues for discussion. We reiterated our position that improvements were needed as follows:

ensuring all types of harassment are grievable under the collective agreement (not just sexual harassment)
more time is allowed for medical appointments for pregnant employees
the application of injury on duty leave needs to be more consistent and transparent
if no maternity re-assignment is possible, the employees should be put on leave WITH pay
definition of family for Leave Without Pay for Care of Immediate Family needs to be expanded and clarified
Personnel Selection Leave with pay should include competitions outside of CFIA
our members should be entitled to full mobility rights when moving within the public service.

The overall response from the employer was that they are satisfied with the collective agreement as it is and were not interested in negotiating improvements.

Negotiations ended on May 15th with your team yet again outlining some priorities for discussion at the next round and urging this employer to come back to the table in June with a mandate and willingness to negotiate improvements.

The team will be returning for a caucus meeting on June 1st & 2nd and meetings with the employer on June 3rd through 5th.

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Date Modified : 2008/07/30

Public Service Alliance of Canada | 233, Gilmour Street, Ottawa, ONTARIO CANADA, K2P 0P1, Tel.: 1 888 604-7722 (PSAC) Local: 613-560-4200