Weekly Update: March 29 - April 4

Telus Bargaining Survey Reminder: If you work at Telus and you want a better Collective Agreement, the #1 thing you can do right now to help yourself and your coworkers is to fill out your Bargaining Survey. Not only does this tell us your bargaining priorities, but there are opportunities to provide us a variety of information that can help improve our position at the bargaining table. Please take a moment and complete the survey now before it closes:survey link here

Grievance Committee: You’ve probably heard what a grievance is, it’s the official legal complaint that the Union files when we believe your Collective Agreement has been violated. But you may not know that the decision of whether a grievance will go all the way to arbitration hearings (where a neutral arbitrator decides the case) is made by our Local’s Grievance Committee. The Grievance Committee has existed since 2019, and includes Vice-President Jennifer Turner, and all Local Union Representatives from across the country. 

The Local Rep assigned the case will present it to the Committee, including legal research and their own viewpoint, and the Committee then discusses/debates the merits of each case, based on our collective legal training and experience. Often the Committee will discuss a single case for over an hour, because every single case matters. We now regularly invite shop stewards to be guests at these meetings to learn the process. For instance, on April 2 stewards Helen Young from ADT by Telus and Mark Piccolo from Rogers attended the Committee meeting. There are currently 15 active cases that the Grievance Committee has escalated to arbitration.

In Solidarity,

Michael Phillips
President
USW Local 1944