While their tussle over the recently derailed job evaluation process carries on, the U of S and its 1,500-member support staff union have at least now started to bargain for a new overall collective agreement.

Officials with the University and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) local 1975 have confirmed that an initial procedural bargaining meeting was held in mid-March.

And Greg Trew, a labour consultant for the U of S, says the official exchange of proposals will take place at a planned April 19 meeting. More contract talks are set for May 10 and May 27, Trew adds.

The negotiations will include representatives of the University of Regina since CUPE has historically signed a single collective agreement with both the U of S and U of R. The latest of these three-way contracts expired Dec. 31, 2003.

But while the U of S says the start of negotiations is good news, offering the chance to have discussions about a classification system for support staff, CUPE argues the halting last November of the six-year job evaluation project may mean the University will now try to bargain for pay equity improvements at the expense of overall salary increases for staff.

CUPE 1975’s local president Glenda Graham says, “Our concern is that the University is going to try to bring pay equity to the collective bargaining table, and that’s where our main wage considerations are.”

“We don’t want job evaluation (adjustments) to come out of our pay settlement.”

Graham says CUPE wants job evaluation and any new classification system that addresses pay equity to be done away from the main contract negotiations, with funding for the adjustments not coming out of the funding meant to pay for general wage increases.

But Barb Daigle, U of S associate vice-president of human resources, says the University had to end the separate job evaluation effort last November because it had irrevocably stalled. She says it had no foreseeable outcome, as efforts to cobble together different job ratings for staff at the U of S and U of R would have meant changing U of S results arrived at after years of hard work by employees and managers on campus.

Daigle says now the collective bargaining process offers the best hope for progress on a better classification and pay structure.

“The University wants to develop a new classification model using local U of S data,” she says.

“We’re committed to addressing issues of job classification and finding solutions that address the union’s and the University’s mutual concerns.”

“Though the job evaluation process did not provide outcomes, we believe that through collective bargaining we can make progress on developing a solution for the University of Saskatchewan,” Daigle says.

In another development, the University argued at a March 29 Saskatchewan Labour Relations Board (LRB) hearing to have two CUPE unfair labour practice complaints sent to an arbitration board, rather than be heard at the LRB. The LRB agreed to refer the matter to arbitration but retained the right to hear the complaints if the arbitration process doesn’t settle the matter.

The complaints were filed by CUPE last November, alleging that when the U of S pulled out of the job evaluation process it violated the terms of the 1998 agreement which launched that project.

The U of S argued that the impasse in the job evaluation project meant the only viable option was to end it and address the job classification question in main bargaining towards a new collective agreement.

CUPE president Graham says the University’s agreeing to send the complaints to arbitration is a reversal of its previous argument that the question of the ending of the job evaluation process isn’t arbitrable.

But Daigle says the union had raised the dispute in both of these forums and the University argued that the arbitration forum was more appropriate to deal with this dispute, since the issues involved require an interpretation of the collective agreement. The University will continue to argue at arbitration that its actions in bringing the job evaluation process to an end are defensible.

Graham says she views the move as another in a series of University stalling tactics to avoid a return to the job evaluation process, which CUPE believes was close to setting a final new classification system last fall.

A few CUPE members have used letters to the editor in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix and editorials in CUPE’s newsletter The Skopein to accuse the U of S of misrepresenting its position.

Daigle says the University has never attempted to misrepresent itself and has acted in good faith.

She says she hopes collective bargaining will lead to progress towards an agreement in the near future, and adds it would be unfortunate if bickering and negative public comments sidetracked people from the negotiating process.

“It is through the negotiating process that mutually acceptable alternatives will be developed,” Daigle says, “and the University is willing to hear from CUPE on finding local solutions to the job evaluation problem.”

For more information, contact communications.office@usask.ca

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