Report of the CIU Collective Bargaining Committee

National Board of Directors Meeting

April 2010

Chair:                                      Steve Pellerin-Fowlie

Committee Members:             Doug Tremblett

                                                Fred Milligan

                                                Brea Lewis

Resource Person:                   Bruno Loranger

The Committee met at the Ottawa Marriott on April 20, 2010.

We are at the eve of the next round of bargaining. The input call for bargaining demands will be issued by the PSAC in June and will set Oct. 1/10 as the deadline for them to be submitted to the PSAC Centre. As a result, the Committee has set July 31/10 as the CIU deadline for the submission of bargaining demands. The Committee will meet in Ottawa Aug. 12-13/10 to review the bargaining demands and will set the top 20 priority demands for the five Treasury Board bargaining units (FB,PA,SV,TC,EB). We urge each Branch to strike a committee, if you have not already done so, and to convene a meeting to establish the priorities in your Branches.

There will be three regional bargaining conferences in this round. The first will be the Eastern Regional Bargaining Conference (Atlantic and Quebec) which will take place in Halifax Nov. 13-14/10. The Ontario/NCR Regional Bargaining Conference will be Nov. 27-28/10 in Toronto and the Western Regional Bargaining Conference (BC, Prairies, North) will be held Dec. 4-5/10 in Winnipeg. At these regional bargaining conferences, we will elect delegates to the National Bargaining Conference. The delegate formula has not yet been approved by the Alliance Executive Committee. Once we have that information, we will send it out to the field and advise on the process for electing/selecting delegates to the regional bargaining conferences.

As a reminder, we will be electing 4 FB Bargaining Team members at the Sept. NBoD.

With regards to Essential Service Agreements, the ruling came out from the Public Service Labour Relations Board in late November and fully supported the position put forward by the PSAC on the BSO job description. The Chair concluded that, indeed, there are services in the job description which are not essential. The next stage is for the employer to establish the levels of service. This is an unclear stage in the process since it has never been done before and because the CATCA Decision of 1982 was entrenched in the new legislation without really knowing what it means. It is still the intention of the PSAC to have ESA’s settled by the time we serve notice to bargain on Feb. 21/11.

It is important to highlight from the federal budget that the Treasury Board has downloaded its financial obligations to departments and agencies. This means that the 1.5% wage increase due on June 21, for most of our members, will come out of CBSA’s operating budget. This will pose a considerable hurdle in the next round of bargaining, since the employer will argue that a wage increase will cost jobs or programs. We must be prepared for a difficult round at the table.

This report is respectfully submitted,

Steve Pellerin-Fowlie, Chair