More than 220 employees of Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) will be heading to the ballot boxes on May 21, voting on whether to accept a new collective bargaining agreement.
If the majority of the Com-munications, Energy and Paperworkers (CEP) Union members accept the new deal, it will mark the end of more than 16 months since the end of the last three-year contract. The union is recommending members accept the contract.
"It's a mediated settlement," said CEP Local 466 Union president Scott Rush. "We've concluded the tentative agreement, but we're still waiting on a ratification."
The tentative agreement was reached late last Friday (May 9), and the information package is expected to be in employees' hands by today (Friday). SCRD chief administrative officer John France said the final few issues to be hammered out centred around wages, agreements on recreation and transit staff scheduling and earned days off. While management entered the negotiations with their own list of concerns, France said the SCRD board provided direction on the monetary issues.
"I think what's been negotiated is a good agreement; it benefits both parties," he said. "There's good reason for both parties to ratify the contract and move on."
If union members do accept, the SCRD board will need to give final approval to the contract.
Negotiations on the new bargaining agreement didn't begin until five months after the previous one had expired on Dec. 31, 2006. Since provincial mediator Mark Brown was brought into negotiations in January, scheduling conflicts between the three parties involved limited talks to an average of less than two days each month.
An issue that could be of concern to employees will be whether wage increases gained as a result of banding - a job rating scale used to reassign wages within the SCRD, based on the premise that equal work should be paid equally - will be 100 per cent retroactive for the employees.
If members should reject the contract, Rush said there's no predetermined action the union plans on taking.
Brown, who's also the associate chair of mediation for the B.C. Labour Relations Board, met with each side in the contract talks about half a dozen times, and both sides shared the cost. A spokesperson from the labour relations board was unable to disclose the cost of those sessions to Coast Reporter.
