UPDATES ON PAFSO STRIKE
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Government+files+notice+appeal+labour+board+faith+bargaining+ruling/8910888/story.html
September 14, 2013
Government files notice to appeal labour board’s bad-faith bargaining ruling
Board says government set ‘unreasonable conditions’ in foreign service officers case, but does not order dispute to binding arbitration By Don Butler, OTTAWA CITIZEN
The federal government has filed a notice to appeal a Public Service Labour Relations Board ruling that the government acted in bad faith when it set “unreasonable conditions” before agreeing to binding arbitration with striking foreign service officers.
“We are disappointed with the Public Service Labour Relations Board’s (PSLRB) decision,” Alexis Pavlich, press secretary to Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander wrote in an email statement Saturday.
“We are currently reviewing the decision and will determine our next steps accordingly. We have filed a notice of appeal, to preserve all available options.
“As we have repeatedly stated, the Government is committed to finding a fair and reasonable settlement for both employees and Canadian taxpayers. That commitment remains unchanged,” the email states.
In a 25-page decision released Friday, PSLRB member Margaret Shannon found the arbitration conditions demanded by Treasury Board President Tony Clement effectively required the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers (PAFSO) to “abandon the position it’s held throughout the negotiations.” That, she said, would render the process moot.
But Shannon declined PAFSO’s request to order the government to participate in binding arbitration. “I do not believe that it is conducive to good labour relations to order parties to participate in final and binding determination when such arbitration is voluntary in the first place,” she said.
Instead, she encouraged both parties to “be guided by my comments in this decision” and renew their efforts to find mutually agreeable conditions to settle the matter through binding arbitration.
In a statement, PAFSO urged Treasury Board to “alter course and return to the negotiating table to settle this dispute.
“Canadians expect the federal government to bargain respectfully and in good faith with its own employees,” said PAFSO president Tim Edwards. “Today’s decision shows it is time for the prime minister and the government to do the responsible thing and reach a negotiated settlement which would put an end to this damaging strike.”
As of 6 p.m. Friday, Treasury Board had not responded to the decision.
The 1,388 foreign service officers — who work for Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada and the Canada Border Services Agency — have been without a contract since June 2011.
This past June, they began strike action at 15 of Canada’s biggest visa processing centres around the world, creating massive backlogs in the issuance of visas to tourists, foreign students and temporary foreign workers.
Edwards said the strike is now one of the longest in public service history, and the economic costs it has caused are approaching $1 billion.
These “severe and mounting impacts” could have been avoided, he said, had the government engaged in free and fair bargaining from the start.
In recent weeks, Treasury Board has settled with two other public service unions by offering them wage hikes that equal or exceed those requested by PAFSO, Edwards noted.
Those settlements are “proof positive that the government is more than capable of addressing long-standing wage gaps of up to $14,000 between diplomats and other government professionals,” he said.
“We think Canada has suffered more than enough already,” he said. “The time has come for the government to change tack.”
PAFSO proposed sending the dispute to binding arbitration in July. But in response to the union overture, Clement set several preconditions, including that the arbitration board could not compare wages earned by foreign service officers and others doing similar jobs within government.
At the PSLRB hearing into the union’s complaint on Aug. 21, PAFSO argued that Clement’s conditions amounted to bad faith bargaining because they would effectively predetermine the outcome of the key issue in the dispute in the government’s favour.
The government responded that the union’s complaint was “wildly inconsistent” with the Public Service Labour Relations Act. The alternative dispute resolution process outlined in the act is “completely consensual,” it argued, and parties are entitled to set whatever conditions they wish for participating.
In her decision, Shannon said she first had to determine whether the section of the act that deals with binding arbitration was part of the collective bargaining process.
The government argued that it was independent from that process, but Shannon found that it was “one of many tools available to the parties to resolve issues or conflicts which arise along the continuum between notice to bargain collectively and signing of a new collective agreement.”
Though the government was not obliged to agree to participate in binding arbitration, Shannon said, “once it entered into negotiations of the conditions under which the determination would occur, it was under the obligation to bargain those conditions in good faith and to make every reasonable effort to conclude a collective agreement.”
By putting forward conditions which it knew or ought to have known could not be accepted by PAFSO, the government “has shut down (the union) and made it unlikely, if not impossible, for the parties to break the impasse between them,” Shannon said.
By proposing these “unreasonable conditions,” she said, the government “seeks capitulation by the bargaining agent” before agreeing to enter into binding arbitration. That is “contrary to the preamble and the intent” of the labour relations act, Shannon said.
dbutler@ottawacitizen.com
