Region 6 EA Update
We met with Transit Systems on Tuesday this week and it was a productive meeting. We seem to be moving back towards traditional bargaining which is a good thing, but we’ll be taking much with a grain of salt given all the drama that has come before. Transit Systems has had some personnel changes at a high level so the people that were driving the strategy that delivered us a company Bargaining Representative have now moved on. Hopefully this new direction is consistent.
Keep in mind, the bargaining meetings are not to decide anything- that is done by the members. What we’re trying to do is find a middle road that preserves as much as possible of our rostering provisions, but also delivers us a single pool of work in a combined roster. Unfortunately, it’s the legacy drivers who get shafted when there are 2 rosters in play as we’ve all seen over the last 4 years. The company is now building actual rosters to see how certain changes to their original proposal would look, and how much it would cost.
One of the biggest challenges for both Unions is how we merge the two roster groups. Attached to this are things like 5 weeks Annual leave as well as ADOs which the company has already said they can’t afford to roll out for everyone. While it’s early days, we have an idea on how we might accomplish that and give workers more choice over their pattern of work. A combined RTBU/TWU delegate meeting is planned for October 4th where we’ll try and flesh this out more and then we’ll start having discussions with members in the yards. This is broad level stuff, and we haven’t even talked about what penalties would apply and when. The first step is evening out the differences between the work groups so we can combine all the work together and remove any incentive for the company to favour one driver over another.
A bulletin will follow after the meeting next week and we’ll set up combined yard meetings to start discussions with members and get feedback on what comes out of the delegate’s meeting.