Bargaining
ICBC – Bargaining Update
July 4, 2019
To: All MoveUP members at ICBC
Your bargaining committee met with the employer on June 25 and 26. We made good progress and were able to sign off on some housekeeping proposals that cleaned up the collective agreement and updated areas that are covered by specific legislation. On the second day we exchanged non-monetary and monetary proposals with ICBC.
Your proposals are a result of meetings with job stewards, the bargaining survey from January which had over 1865 responses, emails and contact with members and the observations of the union representatives who are assigned to represent our members with ICBC. With five years since our last round of bargaining, along with 16 years of a Liberal government hamstringing our ability to make any gains, our package of proposals is robust and extensive.
Our message to ICBC was clear: Our members, their staff, want a strong and successful ICBC but that success will be with the staff and not achieved off their backs. We told ICBC that the members are proud of their work and their contributions to British Columbia, whether it’s in Claims, Insurance, Driver Licensing, Accounting or Information Technology. The members want to be a part of the success and are not going to settle for less than what they believe are fair and reasonable improvements to their existing collective agreement. We pointed out that ICBC has an attraction and retention challenge and wants to establish your workplace to be a more attractive place to come and stay to work than their competitors.
Our package of proposals can be found here and the Corporation’s are attached here. We encourage all members to take some time to read through our proposals.
ICBC advised that their proposals are to build on the government’s platform for sustainability and services for British Columbians they told us. They presented us with 16 proposals with very few details on many. We are concerned to see, once again, that they want to change the nine-day fortnight. They want to limit moving expenses to $10,000, limit the amounts on dental coverage and expand the provincial scheduling to include Claims Adjuster, (Out-of-Province, Commercial Claims, Commercial), and Customer Recovery Specialists.
They want to amend the working from home LOU, but no longer provide the office furniture that they had previously committed to provide. They want talk about employee wellness and attendance, flexible benefits (without any specifics on what that would look like), extend probation, create a new classification which we believe is casual workers and amend hours of work. As well, they are proposing a Temporary Market Adjustment for some jobs, although we do not have any specifics. They also proposed discussions on gainsharing, the supplementary employee benefit (SEB) plan (commonly known as Maternity and Parental/Adoption Leave top up) and changing some of our expense items to payment based on Corporation policy rather than payment based on set dollar amounts.
We are scheduled to return to the bargaining table on July 9th to July 11th where we will seek clarification from the employer on many of their proposals and provide greater detail and justification on our proposals. Should you have any questions, please feel free to email your bargaining committee at icbcbarg@moveuptogether.ca .
In solidarity,
Kevin Smyth, Senior Union Representative
Annette Toth, Vice President
Colin Clark, Executive Board Member
Brenda Chu, Executive Board Member
Bryan Finstad, Executive Board Member
Melissa Maher, Executive Board Member
Gunter Seifert, Executive Board Member
