Liberals buy labour peace at revenue agency
The federal government has struck a tentative deal with employees at Canada’s tax agency that will boost their wages 5.75 per cent and abolish controversial severance payments that other public servants had already lost.
Negotiators for the Canada Revenue Agency and the Union of Taxation Employees (UTE) reached the deal early Friday morning after this week’s last-ditch marathon round of contract talks to avert a possible strike.
“It was very long haul, longer than it should have been and we believe we did the best we could without going on strike. We didn’t want a strike and went as far as we could,” said UTE president Bob Campbell.
Campbell said the union is recommending its 29,000 members accept the deal in a ratification vote that will be held within six weeks.
The proposed 5.75 per cent raise will be paid over four years, retroactive to November 2012. The union also has the opportunity to reopen wage talks for 2014 and 2015 to negotiate bigger increases for those years. All employees will also receive a lump-sum $700 signing bonus.
Tax employees represented by UTE were the last holdouts against the Conservative government’s drive to abolish voluntary-severance benefits. The union negotiated a 1.25 per cent pay increase to compensate for the loss, compared to the .75 per cent the agency offered and that most other public servants were given.
The Conservatives struck a deal with the giant Public Service Alliance of Canada in 2010 to relinquish a benefit that had given public servants a lump-sum severance payment worth one week of pay for every year worked when they voluntarily retired, resigned or quit.
PSAC gave it up in exchange for a .75 wage increase and the government has been paying billions to employees in cashouts for the perk to get the liability off the books.
The deal gives workers several options to cash out the severance pay they have accumulated. They can cash out their severance immediately at today’s rate of pay, keep it and cash out at retirement, or cash out some now and the rest later.
But Campbell said the most contentious issue and last to settle was the agency’s insistence on a “me too” clause. That clause that would have imposed whatever wage settlement is reached with Public Service Alliance of Canada and its largest bargaining group. (UTE is a component union under the PSAC umbrella.)
The reviled “me too” clause was replaced by a “re-opener” clause. This gives the union the right to reopen negotiations to try to improve the increase for 2014 and 2015. The two sides have currently agreed to a one per cent increase in each of those two years.
If the union invokes that right and a deal can’t be reached, the dispute could be sent to an arbitrator for a binding decision.
Campbell said that clause was a non-starter because it took away the union’s right to negotiate its own contract. “What we have now is the right to negotiate our own contract and not have someone else’s imposed on us.”
The CRA is the largest agency in the federal government, employing about 40,000 people.
The union stood out as the only large union that isn’t at the table in the current round of collective bargaining with Treasury Board to negotiate the government’s demand to replace the existing sickleave regime with a new short-term disability plan.
The retroactive deal expires in October and could throw UTE into that contentious round of negotiations over sick leave that the other unions have grappled with for more than two years.