Telus workers were picketing this week in Sechelt and Gibsons after their union rejected the company's new collective agreement, in a dispute both sides expect to see drag on. Telecommunications Workers Union (TWU) members began picketing across B.C. and Alberta July 21, the day before Telus was to implement a new collective agreement.
"The union believes we wouldn't come to work for an imposed agreement," said Pat Duncan, the TWU's shop steward for the Sunshine Coast and North Vancouver local.
He said the union is looking for a fair, negotiated collective agreement.
"The company didn't negotiate it, they just threw it on the table," Duncan said.
The union and Telus have been bargaining for four and a half years and have been unable to reach an agreement, with both sides refusing to budge on negotiations. Short of a miracle, Duncan expects the dispute to last a long time.
On the Coast, there is a Telus compound on Field Road in Wilson Creek and central offices on Inlet Avenue in Sechelt and North Road in Gibsons.
The Gibsons and Sechelt buildings contain the phone network servicing the Coast. Nobody has crossed the picket lines at the two locations, Duncan said. The Coast's 11 workers are installation and repair technicians, cable maintenance workers, linemen and central office maintenance workers. One Coast resident works in Burnaby in technology and operations. Most of them work out in the field, responding to customers' calls for service. They are classified as craft workers.
There is one manager for the 11 workers, who has been responding to customers, along with managers Telus has sent from off-Coast.
The main issue in the dispute over the collective agreement is job security.
"The union wants protection against contracting out of its work. The company wants total freedom to contract out whatever it wants," said Sid Shniad of the TWU's Burnaby office.
Telus says the new collective agreement offers contracting out protection.
"We've guaranteed that no employee will lose their job as a result of contracting out," said Bruce Okabe, Telus' vice-president of business solutions.
The craft workers, classified as "core" workers under the proposed agreement, would not lose their jobs, Okabe said.But Shniad said the language in the agreement does not offer job security.
"They have made no such guarantee," Shniad said.
The proposed collective agreement states, "No regular employee will be laid off as a direct result of the Company contracting work that is normally and currently performed by bargaining unit employees." It goes on to state, "The Company will give notice in writing to the Union before contracting out any work that has been historically done by the employees in the bargaining unit."
Shniad said Telus could contract out to workers elsewhere in Canada, the United States or to Telus' centre in the Philippines.
But Okabe said the Philippines centre was set up to help business customers with their operations in the Far East. He said suggestions that Telus would replace workers with workers in the Philippines are a red herring and rhetoric.
Telus is calling the dispute a strike and the union is calling it a lockout.
Okabe said it's up to the union to resolve the dispute by returning to work and taking pickets down.Returning to work would show an acceptance of the imposed agreement, which is why the workers walked out before its July 22 implementation, Shniad said.
"The existing contract has protection against contracting out. Telus has proposed to strip it away," Shniad said.
In a July letter to Telus and the TWU, federal labour minister Joe Fontana offered to halt the strike/lockout by providing a mediator to both parties to help negotiate a collective agreement. Telus declined the offer because past attempts at mediation had gotten nowhere.
"We just didn't see what another round of third-party involvement would do. This is a stalemate. We're at loggerheads," Okabe said.
Jim Brown, a cable maintenance worker who was picketing in Sechelt this week, said the federally-appointed mediator would have had more power than past mediators and could have come up with a mutually-agreeable solution. "We didn't have to go out," Brown said.
