CUPE unhappy with new labour provision in Sask.
A provision kicking in on Friday from two-year-old labour legislation is grinding the gears of organized labour in the province.
A new section of the Saskatchewan Employment Act will allow employers to apply to have its supervisors outside the same bargaining unit as those they oversee.
CUPE Saskatchewan president Tom Graham said removing supervisors from their bargaining unit is “causing quite a bit of concern for a lot of people.”
“Supervisors are usually senior people,” he said. “Now they’re going to find themselves basically booted out of their unions, so it’s something we object very strongly to.”
Employers and unions can — and in some cases, already have — come to an agreement to keep the collective bargaining units as is.
In cases where employers apply to have supervisors excluded from the bargaining unit, Graham said CUPE would help represent the supervisors. “We’ll certainly argue in defence of our members,” he said.
If members are excluded from their bargaining unit, CUPE would “certainly try and reorganize them” into other units, he said.
While this part of the legislation is just coming into effect, Graham said he questions the legality of the provisions. “We have the right to freedom of association in Canada and that’s been proven by the Supreme Court,” he said.
Challenging it in court is, according to Graham, “kind of down the road.”
“I guess we haven’t really had any conclusive opinions from lawyers yet but there’s the thought that this is a violation of people’s charter rights,” he said. “I don’t want to commit to anything now, but all options are open, if it violates people’s charter rights then it needs to go away.”
Pat Parenteau, director of policy for the Ministry of Labour Relations and Workplace Safety, said when the legislation was drafted, the government took a very careful look at legal implications.
“In general, when we did this, we did not believe we were taking away anybody’s rights because we still give them the right to unionize,” she said. “They’re still selecting the union of their choice, and this was done after consultation, and the government wouldn’t have done it if they felt it was unconstitutional.”
Parenteau says the decision to have the provision was made after consultation with stakeholders, including union members.
“When we were doing consultation on the Saskatchewan EmploymentAct, what we heard was people were concerned that they were supervisors in the same bargaining unit that they supervised, she said. “They found that there was a conflict as a result of that.”
Graham, who was a part of that consultation process, said the government put the provision in place because of a couple of anecdotal remarks and no real study has been done to show there are conflict of interest problems.