AMAPCEO - AMAPCEO Bad Faith Bargaining Complaint - Members' Update

	AMAPCEO Bad Faith Bargaining Complaint - Members' Update Thursday, May 05, 2011 AMAPCEO would like to set the record straight from its point of view regarding the now no longer secret 1% salary increase negotiated by OPSEU with the Government of Ontario. In fact: 1. There can be no question that the additional 1% wage adjustment (in addition to the 2% made public) to take effect January 1, 2012 for OPSEU-represented employees was intended by both the Government and OPSEU to be secret and to be hidden from public view. The evidence already agreed to by the Government in the OLRB proceedings brought by AMAPCEO confirms this. As the Board stated at paragraph 15 of its May 3rd decision: “the Employer agreed that there was a confidential agreement between the Employer and OPSEU”. Moreover, both OPSEU and the Employer sought to keep this agreement secret, by seeking an order from the OLRB to impose a confidentiality cloak on the evidence. On the face of the Government/OPSEU collective agreement itself, there is no mention whatsoever of an additional 1% wage adjustment for 2012. Instead, the collective agreement, which by law must be filed with the Ministry of Labour (see s. 90 of the Labour Relations Act), states that the increase for 2012 is 2%, not the real 3%. In fact, the Ministry of Labour documented these increases in its collective bargaining publications as the face amount and excluded the hidden 1%. Thus, everyone relying on the Ministry of Labour data was misled. Clearly, the additional 1% was secret, and intended to be secret, from its inception. The Government and OPSEU pretended to negotiate a more fiscally restrained 2% increase for 2012, but actually negotiated 3%. The goal was to deceive other Ontario Public Service (OPS) and Broader Public Sector (BPS) unions and employers. The employer wanted a pattern agreement, one that all public servants would accept at lower amounts. Let us be clear: this has never happened before. We hope that the result of our bad faith bargaining complaint will be that it never happens again. We understand that now that our bad faith bargaining complaint is public, it has understandably become a matter of political controversy. Honesty and integrity, however, are not partisan values. They are at the core of our public service, which serves all political parties and citizens of Ontario. They are also AMAPCEO’s founding principles and our objective is to represent our members while staying true to them. This we have done. We have bargained when all three parties have been in government. 2. Questions have been raised about AMAPCEO’s motivation in bringing forth its bad faith bargaining complaint. In fact, AMAPCEO has been consistent, both in our public statements and in our arguments before the OLRB, that our overwhelming concern has been that AMAPCEO, together with the entire labour relations community, relies on the principles of openness, honesty, integrity and trust that are critical to ensuring that fair and open collective bargaining can work. Efforts to characterize this as only being about AMAPCEO members’ selfish economic interests are untrue. There is no question that AMAPCEO firmly believes that we were prejudiced in the last round of collective bargaining as a result of fundamental misrepresentations being made by our employer. But our complaint is about much more than that. It is about unfair and dishonest bargaining. It is about restoring trust in the Ontario Public Service and in the broader public sector bargaining system. 3. It has been suggested that OPSEU made unique concessions in other areas in return for the secret 1% wage adjustment. Even if this were the case, it is difficult to fathom why the 1% “offsetting” increase was made secret and hidden from the public. The so-called concessions were included publicly in the OPSEU collective agreement. There was nothing secret about them. The labour relations community was told that any concessions achieved between the Government and OPSEU were negotiated in the context of a 2% 2012 salary increase. Now we know the truth: in order to get an agreement with OPSEU, the employer secretly gave OPSEU an additional 1% in 2012. That there might have been concessions attached to a salary increase (the type of tradeoff that often happens in collective bargaining) provides no justification for pretending that the increase did not happen, and for hiding the increase from other unions and the public. Moreover, in bargaining with our OPS employer, AMAPCEO has agreed to virtually all of the very concessions that now allegedly underlie the justification for the additional 1% secret deal the Government made with OPSEU. So, for example, AMAPCEO agreed to the same Surplus Factor 80 concession as OPSEU did in the last round of bargaining. With respect to the concessions on termination pay, AMAPCEO agreed in 2007 (the prior round of bargaining) to the same concession OPSEU agreed to in the 2009-12 collective agreement. In fact, in the last round of bargaining, AMAPCEO agreed to limit termination pay for new hires, a concession that OPSEU did not make. Like OPSEU, in the previous round of bargaining, AMAPCEO agreed to the redirection of employees’ annual share of EI rebate and revised employment stability measures. AMAPCEO does not consider diversity initiatives, hiring of internationally trained professionals or renewal of the Ontario Internship Program to be concessions, but like OPSEU we agreed to them. Finally, AMAPCEO has always had an efficient and effective dispute resolution procedure. The attempted justification of the additional 1% given to OPSEU, on the basis that OPSEU made concessions that AMAPCEO did not, flies in the face of the facts. What’s more, none of this provides any justification or excuse whatsoever for hiding the 1% wage adjustment. 4. It has been suggested that no apology is owed either for misleading the public and the labour relations community about the actual monetary settlement reached with OPSEU, or for other unions settling for less than the actual 3% wage increase that was secretly negotiated, because they were misled into thinking the OPSEU settlement was 2%. We disagree. AMAPCEO believes that it is of critical importance not to confuse the fiscal challenges we collectively face with the fundamental obligation of government to act with integrity and accountability, and its legal obligation as employer to bargain in good faith, including not misrepresenting the true value of collective agreement settlements. There are legitimate ways for government to achieve and bargain fiscal restraint; misrepresenting its collective bargaining settlements, and cutting secret deals, is not one of them. [Click here to read President Gary Gannage's April 28th letter to members, which contains links to the original bad faith bargaining complaint filed by AMAPCEO, the employer's response and the initial ruling by the Ontario Labour Relations Board on procedural matters.] printer friendly Email this to a friend