Bargaining
CapilanoU – Bargaining 102 – Breaking Down Public Sector Bargaining
May 19, 2022
To: All members at CapilanoU
We’re writing to you today to provide an update on the status of our negotiations with Capilano University. This bulletin will be broadly recapping the current state of public sector bargaining in the province and outlining how it impacts our negotiations. If you haven’t read our Bargaining 101 bulletin from October 7th, 2021, we recommend doing so before continuing. You can find it here.
What is PSEC? What Are Mandates?
There are approximately 500,000 workers in British Columbia’s public sector, which includes Crown corporations and agencies, health and community social services, and K-12 and postsecondary education.
Just like MoveUP and CFA members at Capilano University, nearly 400,000 of all public-sector workers are unionized, across 186 collective agreements. Wages, collective agreement length, and bargaining cycle for these workers are all set by the Public Sector Employers’ Council (PSEC) and are typically the same for all public sector workers. PSEC has coordinated all public-sector bargaining in British Columbia for over 25 years since 1994.
Government, via PSEC, sets the bargaining mandate for the public sector, which all public sector employers are statutorily bound to observe. PSEC must review and approve all language and costing prior to being tabled, and once a tentative agreement has been reached, PSEC must approve it.
Every proposal and counterproposal the employer develops is passed through PSEC to be scrutinized and approved. This approval process can delay bargaining as we wait for PSEC to review and approve or deny changes at the table through the employer, the go-between in these discussions.
This frustrating process isn’t unique to our negotiations with Capilano University. It’s a burden we share with every single unionized public sector worker across the province. It makes it difficult to negotiate changes that matter most to you and unique to your work at Capilano University.
Recent Public Sector Bargaining History
In 2012, PSEC introduced the Cooperating Gains Mandate. Wages were increased by a total of 4% over the course of a 2-year contract, around 2% per year
In 2014, PSEC introduced the Economic Stability Mandate. Minor wage increases were incorporated into collective agreements based on forecasted economic growth in the province, totalling around 7.45% over the course of a five-year contract, averaging 1.49% per year.
Our current collective agreement was negotiated under the Sustainable Services Mandate, which resulted in a three-year agreement with 2% wage increases for each year totalling 6% over the course of the contract, with an additional “conditional funding” that we were able to allocate to labour market adjustments and transit subsidies.
The previous mandates roughly tracked cost-of-living increases within our region:
Consumer Price Index (CPI)
What Should We Expect This Round of Bargaining?
We don’t know, but we have a pretty good idea. Using past practice as a guide, PSEC normally keeps the terms of the mandate under wraps until they settle with one of the bigger public sector unions such as BCGEU or CUPE.
On April 27th, 2022, BCGEU published a news release stating that they had reached an impasse at the bargaining table due to the proposed wage increases. 1.75% in the first year, 2% in the second year, and 2% in the third year. This is a wage cut when compared to forecasted inflation.
As of now, the Government’s wage proposals are just that: proposals, and we should not assume that the proposed wages are going to be PSEC’s final mandate. However, it confirms that we are in for a long and difficult round of bargaining this year.
Where We Are At With Bargaining at Capilano University:
Under Section 45 and 46 of the B.C Labour Relations Code, either party of the Collective Agreement (union or employer) may issue written notice to commence collective bargaining within 4 months of the collective agreement’s expiry date, which is June 30th, 2022, for our contract.
Though the terms and conditions outlined in the Collective Agreement continue post-expiry until the parties reach a new agreement, we try to issue notice as soon as we are prepared to do so to ensure we negotiate the new collective agreement as soon as possible. We issued notice to Capilano University on March 3rd to begin the process of negotiations.
We have since signed a protocol agreement (a set of rules on governing this round of negotiations) with the employer and have received notice that Capilano University is retaining a 3rd party negotiator to lead negotiations on its behalf instead of handling negotiations internally as they have historically done up until now. The lead negotiator will be Geoff Tierney, who has experience negotiating in the post-secondary sector in both British Columbia and Ontario, where he is located.
We are currently scheduled to exchange our proposals with Capilano University on May 25th,2022. We intend on negotiating as much as we can despite no wage mandate from the province, but it is our position that the lack of mandate should not impede us from negotiating housekeeping and non-monetary items. We are pushing ahead in the hopes that the government reconsiders it’s current proposed monetary mandate, and if so, that we can reach an agreement with Capilano University as quickly as possible considering these delays.
What you can do:
This is your contract. You are the Union. Help us out by staying informed, reading our bulletins, and coming to our monthly membership meetings.
Update your contact information if you haven’t done so already, so we can ensure that you are getting up-to-date information on the status of our negotiations. You can update us here.
More information will follow in subsequent bulletins. For success at the table, we need to all move forward together.
If you have any further questions or comments, please contact me by phone or email me at nbeausoleil@moveuptogether.ca.
In solidarity,
Your Bargaining Committee:
Darin Feist, Executive Councillor
Eric Roberts, Executive Councillor
Suzanne Perreault, Executive Councillor
Christy Slusarenko, Vice-President Combined Units
Nathan Beausoleil, Union Representative