Bargaining
ICBC – Bargaining Update #12
December 23, 2019
To: All MoveUP members at ICBC
After 6 days this month at the table with ICBC it would be understandable that the members are feeling frustrated at what can feel like slow progress. In December, we moved into the tough stuff, monetary proposals. And after 5 years of a collective agreement we have many monetary proposals to discuss, some are large, complex issues and others are more straight-forward. You will recall that we tabled 78 proposals and ICBC tabled 16 so there is a lot of material to work through.
We spent a great deal of time discussing the results of our absenteeism survey. ICBC views rising absenteeism as a problem but a solution cannot be found if we don’t know what is driving this phenomenon. We had over 2900 people respond to the survey. For those of you who took the 5 minutes to respond, thank you! Your perspective was most helpful and enlightening.
We presented an analysis of the survey results to ICBC’s bargaining committee. The most significant issue facing our members, regardless of work location, age, years of service or even pay band was exhaustion (mental, physical and psychological). We have attached the power point presentation here that was given to ICBC’s bargaining committee. There is no question in our minds that staff at ICBC are running on empty right now, based on these results. And we are sure you will agree that exhaustion best describes what you have been feeling for a long time. We were very clear in our report to ICBC’s bargaining committee. Most specifically, when they constantly require the staff to work at or over 100% capacity every single day it means:
1) that there is no chance for a break from the onslaught of work,
2) that staff dread coming to work and doing their job,
3) that morale will continue to fall, and
4) that when there is a need for staff to do a little more, (like after a major weather event), there is limited mental, physical or psychological capacity to pick up the pace and do a little more.
We will be returning to the bargaining table in January to continue discussions about monetary proposals with an eye on the priorities set out by our members in the bargaining survey. It is not our intent to drag out the bargaining process but we are being measured and careful in our approach to each one of our proposals and especially theirs.
Wishing all our members a very happy holiday and joyous new year!
In solidarity,
Your Bargaining Committee:
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