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April 26, 2007 To: Deputy Minister, Department of Human Resources Re: Public Service Act Review Committee Thank you for your letter dated April 24, 2007, which I have discussed with the Executive Committee of the NEU. It is the view of the NEU that the meetings of the review committee are not confidential. The Terms of Reference (TOR), which I signed, contain no general confidentiality clause and, while I agree that the TOR requires that recommendations of the committee should be made by the Chair, I am not aware that the committee has yet made any recommendations. While it may be in the interests of the government to operate in secrecy it is not in the interests of the members of the NEU. All members of the NEU have the right to know what discussions its officials are engaged in on the members' behalf. When the government floats ideas that would be damaging to our members interests we shall not keep quiet about them - to do otherwise would implicate us in the damage to our members' interests. By using consultative meetings in that way the government is not acting in good faith. If you wish the NEU to be involved in confidential discussion then you must respect our involvement by not bringing forward ideas which are offensive to a union. You should, therefore reconsider the role of the committee and the information presented for discussion. Furthermore, the feedback, which we have had from many of our members (the majority of whom are Inuit), makes it clean that they regard the government's attempt to cloak ideas like 'lockout' and 'forcing a vote on a final offer' in the mantle of Inuit societal values as false and distasteful. I would also like to suggest that, if you wish the NEU to continue its involvement in the PSA Review Committee you must revise the TOR. The Executive Committee has determined that the union cannot agree to NTI being the only arbiter with the government in settling disputes, particularly after they do no attend the meetings. Doug Workman President Cc: CEO Tunngavik Inc. President, Nunavut Teachers Association Revisions to the Public Service Act If you work for the Government of Nunavut (GN) you should be aware that the GN is revising the Public Service Act. This is the law governing the employment relationship of all public servants with GN. It deals with issues like how you get hired and fired by GN, the terms and conditions of employment, and how collective bargaining is conducted. The current Act dates back to the Government of the Northwest Territories. When Nunavut was formed the GN was obliged by the land claims agreement to change all of its laws to reflect the fact that 85 per cent of the population are Inuit. Nunavut was to be a place which reflected Inuit society and culture. The GN insists that it wants to integrate Inuit societal and cultural values into the Public Service Act and, indeed, it is bound by the land claims agreement to do so. These values are set out in GN's main policy document, Pinasuaqtavut. The following are some of the changes GN wants to make to the collective bargaining process. Second mediation session The current act requires mediation before there is resort to a strike. GN would like to have two mediation sessions before a strike. They say that by trying mediation twice they are putting talking before striking and that is putting Inuit values into the Act. Perhaps they are right and, because the union does not want its members to lose money by striking, we have agreed to this idea. The union would like to avoid a strike because of the pay GN employees will lose. We call that common sense. The union has asked the GN to consider compulsory arbitration instead of a strike on the grounds that we want a fair settlement for GN employees and we also believe that a strike will be damaging to Nunavut's fragile economy. Nunavut's problems in health, education, and other areas would be much better dealt with if public servants are working on them and not out on the picket line. Nevertheless, the GN is absolutely opposed to arbitration because they see it as giving up some of their power. Minister wants to force the members to vote on the GN's final offer Before the union can call a strike it must get the approval of the members through a secret ballot. The GN would like to have the power to decide when that vote takes place by presenting a "final offer," at a time of their convenience, during the negotiations and forcing the members to either accept their offer or strike. This is illegal in all but two provinces in Canada because it is considered a direct interference in the employees' right to decide when, if at all, they will withdraw their services. GN says that giving the Minister this power is in keeping with Inuit culture and society. The union believes that is nonsense. Lockout Far from wanting to "keep talking" to achieve a settlement, GN would also like to lock out its employees. This power would enable the GN to close its offices, cut off its employees salaries as through they were on strike, and deprive the public of their programs and services. This, apparently, is in keeping with Inuit society and culture. What should Nunavummiut think of a government that uses the values of the unique society it is entrusted with creating as a cloak to impose greater control over its already battered public servants? The union thinks it is disgraceful. to: Joe Kunuk from: John Bainbridge subject: Inuit employment - casuals date: 3/15/2007 Since I started work at the NEU I have become aware of the plight of casual employees at the GN. As most casuals are Inuit, it seems to me that the extensive use of casuals by GN raises questions about the government's implementation of its obligations under Article 23. You may also feel that it has a bearing on the implementation litigation. Casual employees are a concern to the NEU because the employer can dismiss them without showing cause. This right is only available to a "public servant" as defined by the Public Service Act and a casual is not a public servant. They are employed for four months and this period can be extended for a further four months indefinitely. These extensions must be supported in writing by the union and, because we are not in the business of terminating employment, the union always agrees to the extension but the union does not approve of the practice. The NEU believes that once a casual has worked successfully for four months they should be taken on as full public servants, either in a term position or as an indeterminate employee and receive all the attendant benefits and privileges. As you know, the GN publishes a quarterly report on Inuit Employment in the government. While the representative level in December 2006 was 49 per cent (1462 Inuit employees out of a total GN complement of 3698,) 37 per cent (540) of these Inuit employees were casuals. Although, GN publishes the numbers of employees who are casual and the breakdown between beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries in its IEP Report, it does not publish how long people have been casuals. The NEU gets a dues check-off list each month from GN, which lists all employees by name and when they were employed and terminated (if in that month). They also distinguish between permanent and casual employees, where they are located, and which department employs them. I have attached the list for February 2007 as an illustration. This list is interesting because there are no casuals with employment prior to 2004, although casuals have been employed by GN since 1999 (and we have those lists.) Three years continuous employment is a watershed period because after that a casual would become entitled to education leave (Art 21 of the Collective Agreement). The fact that most casuals appears to be terminated before that entitlement is gained might have significance for the implementation of Art 23 of NLCA. Whilst they are government employees they are, in reality, also second class employees, in terms of their rights to certain other important benefits. For example, casuals are not entitled to parental leave (Art 21 of the Collective Agreement) or deferred leave, which deprives a casual of an educational opportunity that is available to public servants. More importantly, casuals are not entitled to any of the benefits available under Art 31 of the Collective Agreement which deals with lay-off. These include three months notice, travel assistance in finding other work in GN, and retraining. There were many other benefits under the current Collective Agreement that casuals were excluded from which the NEU has since managed to negotiate for them since June 2004. I have attached a section of the GN's proposals dealing with casuals for updating the current Collective Agreement. You will see that the government is proposing to further severely limit the rights and benefits of casual employees. It may be that as Inuit casual employees comprise 37 per cent of all Inuit GN employees these proposed reductions in their employment benefits will have a significant impact on the achievement of the objective of Article 23. While Article 23 does not distinguish between casual and indeterminate employees the treatment of casuals in the union's view, clearly violates the spirit of Article 23 in maintaining such a large group of predominantly Inuit employees in a second class employment state. Further, indirectly depriving these Inuit employees of educational and retraining opportunities appears to violate the requirement for the government to implement special initiatives. Despite this unequal treatment, GN uses the Inuit casuals numbers to boost their Inuit Employment rate. It is obvious that in order to establish a case for a breach of Art 23, as the Statement of Claim alleges, it will be necessary to produce considerable documentary evidence. It may be of interest to you to know that the NEU has a very extensive documentary archive going back many years listing government employees, their status, complaints, and grievances. Some of this will illustrate how the GN has implemented its Article 23 obligations. I had originally intended to write another "Letter to the Editor" on this topic but it occurred to me that the issue might better lend itself to some collaboration between the union and NTI. On a related matter, I noticed in the Main Estimates of this and previous years that the GN spends less than one percent of its payroll on Training and Development. By contrast we learned from the PSAC, which monitors government spending on this issue that as a general rule of thumb, an organization should spend at least 3 per cent of total payroll on training. February 23, 2007 Is HR department chasing nurses out of Nunavut? In Nunavut there is a continual turnover of nurses and an ongoing dependency by the Government of Nunavut on relief staffing drawn from local casuals and contract nurses brought in from southern agencies. The Registered Nurses Association of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut has more than twice as many nurses registered for Nunavut as there are full-time positions in Nunavut. Many of these are on short-term contracts (some times as short as two weeks) and they are flown in and out at GN expense, which amounts to the same thing as several VTAs a year. Unlike full-time GN nurses, agency nurses also receive free accommodation and food. This makes them far more expensive to hire than nurses employed by the government who do not receive any paid trips to the South and must pay for their own accommodation and food. Of course, the market for nurses is tight, as the GN's Department of Human Resources points out but, remarkably, they are adding to the problem by offering, what is obviously, a better compensation package to contract nurses than their own nurses. This does nothing for the morale of GN nurses and it sends an unfortunate message that they are not valued. The GN's own nurses must wonder if they would not better off working for an agency. It is always instructive to compare the high-minded goals and objectives of government with how they carry them out and the contrast is most striking in the goals and objectives of the Department of Human Resources and the real world of nurses. The HR department states that the interests of all the department's clients are foremost and that the department will operate in a way that promotes fairness and equity. But obviously, there is room for improvement in the treatment of nurses. According to the Nurse Recruitment Retention Survey published by the NWT-Nunavut registered nurses association in May 2006 and available on their website, there is general dissatisfaction with human resource processes. The survey also says that anecdotal evidence shows a level of frustration with human resources processes from delays in returning calls to lack of respect and unclear or inappropriate information. The survey shows that, by far, the most important method of recruitment is by word of mouth: 33.8 per cent of nurses indicated that that they were first persuaded to apply for positions in Nunavut by another nurse. It makes no sense, therefore, to treat these most important and effective recruiters with a lack of respect and to subject them to unfair and inequitable compensation. The GN is right about the labour market for nurses being competitive. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development states that by 2016, Canada will have the worst shortage of nurses of all the OECD countries, with a shortfall of up to 31 per cent for registered nurses needed to meet care demands. The NWT-Nunavut registered nurses association also reports that a national and international registered nursing staffing crisis of unprecedented proportion is looming. This is fuelled, in part, by an aging nursing population who will be retiring en masse over the next five to 10 years. In Nunavut more than 70 per cent of nurses are over 40. The HR department needs to be more efficient and creative in how it deals with nurses. In the fall of 2006, seven nurses resigned from the Baffin hospital. HR has only recently advertised some of these positions. So far, in 2007 three more nurses resigned and it will presumably take the department a long time to fill the vacant positions. Last year five nurses graduated from Nunavut's own nursing program and became licensed to practice in August but only one was immediately recruited. It took the GN four months to place the remainder. It is not difficult to imagine how discouraged those Nunavut graduates must have felt, after four years of study, to be forced into non-health-care employment, such as waiting on tables at the Frobisher Inn. The NWT-Nunavut registered nurses association survey concludes that improvements in the human resources system must become a major focus if any progress is to be made in recruitment and retention issues. In the highly competitive labour market for these vital employees this is a warning that the GN cannot afford to ignore. The blame for all things cannot be placed on the GN. Recently, I wrote that the delay in the negotiations for a new collective agreement with the GN was due to the departure of the GN's negotiator. I have since learned that this is not true and that it was the PSAC's negotiator, because he is busy. John Bainbridge, Exec Director Nunavut Employees Union → back to top |
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