THUNDER BAY - Members with Ontario Public Service Employees Union will be voting to extend the current collective agreement next week, but a local union leader said the agreement will not come close to passing the membership vote.
“It’s going to be rejected pretty heavily,” said Shawn Bradshaw, president of OPSEU Local 708. “It will be a high 90s rejection across the province is my prediction.”
The Ontario government announced on Monday that a tentative agreement with the Unified and Correctional Bargaining Units of OPSEU has been reached. The four-year agreement will extend the current collective agreements between both parties, which is set to expire Dec. 31, 2017.
The agreement includes a 1.5 per cent wage increase on July 1, 2017, with a 1 per cent wage increase in the months of January and July, 2019, 2020, and 2021.
Carl Thibodeau, regional vice president for region seven of OPSEU, said the agreement will be put to the members for voting.
“We are going to allow all the membership to have a vote on this and we are going to leave it up to them on whether it is a good deal or not a good deal,” he said.
But Bradshaw is confident the membership will see this as a bad deal and vote it down.
“It’s not a good offer at all,” he said. “It’s much less money than we’ve been seeking. It will stop us from bargaining our own pensions, it offers zero improvements on any benefits. We will still remain last in Canada in pensions, last in Canada in shift premiums, last in Canada in many other facets of our job.”
Bradshaw added that the timing of the deal was also poorly executed, calling it ‘dirty pool’ because a new bargaining team was about to be elected when one of the leaders received the tentative agreement.
“While it doesn’t meet the standard of bargaining in bad faith, we all consider it bargaining in bad faith knowing we are about to elect a team, to throw an agreement it isn’t even worthy of consideration,” he said.
“You knew we were electing a team to do this process specifically and you tried to end round it and sneak one past us and we are not going to stand for that and we are not going to accept this deal,” Bradshaw continued. “It does nothing to address any of the things we fought the last five years for. It does nothing to bring us back to where we should be.”
The agreement will be voted on June 20, 21, and 22. OPSEU represents more than 6,000 employees in Northern Ontario.
