YEAR-END 2022 CEIU LOCAL 70705 NEWSLETTER// FIN D'ANNEE 2022 SEIC SECTION LOCALE 70705 BULLETIN

Contents

Land acknowledgement// Reconnaissance du territoire
President's Year-end Statement//Déclaration de fin d'année du président
International Women's Day 2022
Anti-Racism
Solidarity Actions
Donations
Our issues looking to 2023

We acknowledge that our workplaces, located in NCR, are on the unceded, unsurrendered Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation whose presence here reaches back to time immemorial.

Nous reconnaissons que nos lieux de travails, situés dans la région de la capitale nationale, sont situés sur le territoire non cédé de la Nation algonquine anishinaabe, présente en ces lieux depuis temps immémoriaux.

President's Year-End Statement

As your Acting President, I, Osvaldo Diaz Gonzalez, would like to share some of the actions we have taken since last December as your representatives.

For those who were essential and had to work in the office, our local requested that they be provided N95 masks for their protection. This became an IRCC policy after our local fought for this for our members.

During the convoy occupation of downtown Ottawa this winter, we discovered that some of our members were still obliged to work on site at the Jean Edmonds Towers. After Local scrutiny, our members were sent to work at Cremazie. They lost the parking they had already paid for and our local asked management to cover the costs of parking at Cremazie which they finally accepted.

During the pandemic, storms and power and network outages, our local has continuously demanded that 699 leave be available to our members when they were unable to work for reasons outside of their control. We have had to continuously remind management of the Labour board’s recent decision which states that the employer cannot force workers to exhaust all other leave options before considering requests for 699 leave for COVID-19 related reasons.

In regard to overtime, several branches were conditioning the offering of OT to only those employees who met or exceeded production targets. This practice has been consistently found by the labour board to be contrary to clause 28.04 of our collective agreement. Several members at CPC-Vegreville had already successfully grieved this practice in 2010. This situation has been brought to management’s attention and there was agreement that this would not continue. If there are other cases, we can pursue grievance.

In addition, the Cremazie building had a fire during the storm that left much of the NCR without power. Management had opened the building once power was restored before the health and safety committee could inspect the damages of the fire. Our Local raised concerns with the employer that they had not reached out to the workplace health and safety committee (WHSC) to advise there had been a fire, nor to provide a report on the fire’s impact in the building and any potential hazards. We believe the workplace health and safety committee should have the opportunity to see the employer’s report, and conduct an inspection, prior to the building reopening. A message was sent about the fire to employees after this message was sent. The workplace health and safety committee was finally able to conduct an inspection of the building thanks to the efforts of brother Dinu on the workplace health and safety committee.

Our local has assisted over 150 members; attending disciplinary hearings, meetings with supervisors, helping members who were placed on LWOP because of the vaccine mandate and advising those that might need assistance with management or our collective agreement.

We have been regularly participating in on-boarding meetings with groups of new term and indeterminate employees at CPCO and OSC to introduce our Union. We negotiated for our local’s information to be included in the welcome packages for new term and indeterminate members at both offices.

International Women's Day

We marked International Women’s Day by picketing along with the Office of the Auditor General staff who were on strike demanding equal pay for the predominantly female staff who were being underpaid. We brought coffee and tea for those in the bitter cold but they warmed our hearts with their spirit of solidarity.

We have Director-level meetings every month with OSC and CPC-O to raise members’ concerns. Now we have minutes for these meetings to make them more official. We have also been meeting with management in other branches and at more senior levels on topics of concern to our members.

Anti-Racism

Our local has had many meetings with management demanding fair treatment and access to training and promotions for all our members. When overseas TD opportunities were offered to various branches across IRCC; OSC and CPC-O members were limited to those who only received “surpassed” in their PMAs. This was brought to the attention of management as an issue of equity as these workplaces are predominantly composed of racialized members who are limited from these types of opportunities. Management while not changing their policy agreed to take this into consideration in future.

We helped organize Black History month activities and keep Anti-Racism as a standing item in our meetings with management to keep them accountable to their commitments.

In regards to the PMA objectives, the employer included vague Anti-Racism statements in the PMAs without providing clear indicators nor consulting with the union on these objectives. Our local brought concerns from several members to management who have yet to respond to our concerns. We believe that Anti-Racism is best placed in the values and ethics statements and not as an objective in the PMAs of our members. We are following these issues carefully. CN has already agreed to remove these PMA objectives.

Solidarity

Your Local Executive members represented our Local at May Day, Labour Day, Pride Parade, The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and rallied with CUPE education workers in Ontario.

Finally, we have started this Newsletter and webpage to keep you informed of our activities. We have a new account from Action Network, a non-profit organization that works with civil society to help with online resources and email.

We again hosted the Canadian Labour International Film Festival 2022 with a selection of 9 films for our members to view virtually.

We held our first General Membership Meeting of 2022 in July. Guest speakers, including Alex Silas PSAC REVP spoke with members about contract negotiations with the employer. Crystal Warner, CEIU NEVP briefed the meeting about senior department-union consultations. We celebrated our last General Meeting on December 9, 2022 and held elections for our new Treasurer and Women's Rep.

We want to give a special thanks to those members who have volunteered their time to help us in our work; especially those who have helped with the French translations- MERCI.

Donations

Our Local and CEIU NCR made donations totalling $1750 to the following organizations:

Ottawa Food bank
Cornerstone (cornerstonewomen.ca) (women's shelter)
Minwaashin Lodge
Acorn Ottawa & Gatineau
Canadian Labour Film Festival 2022
In memory of our late member, sister Mary Anne Wilson.

Our issues looking to 2023

Targets: We see our members have been asked to increasingly do higher and higher targets and this not only effects their mental health but also program integrity. It undermines our values and ethics as public servants to favor volume over quality decisions and program integrity. Our job as public servants must be to protect Canadians and apply the law in a fair way not to meet numbers. While it is a challenge to meet increasing volumes, there are other ways to deal with this rather than imposing targets (our members have many great ideas on this but do not have the time to participate in the decision-making process). Targets create an atmosphere of stress, isolation for those who struggle to meet daily- now even hourly targets. Finally, these targets do not uphold the value of providing quality services as applicants are treated as numbers to be achieved and not as persons deserving of fair processing without undue delay.

Automation and AI: Our members are being asked to process like machines, while at the same time processes of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are being explored by IRCC. I am not sure if this is a planned effort to undermine our work and replace it with automation but sometimes it appears to be this way for our members and it is very discouraging and demoralizing.

Return to office: We have collected concerns from our members who attended our last General Meeting on December 8 and will be sharing with management.

Some polling results for our GM: when asked whether they are considering leaving their current job for another position that can offer hybrid options: 13% answered "maybe"; 50% answered "no, not at all" and remaining 37% answered "yes, if the situation in my current job changes". For those asked their preference, 18% answered "having option of hybrid"; 82% answered "work 100% from home" and 0% answered "work 100% from office".

I wish everyone health, safety, joy and love for this Holiday Season and the BEST for 2023!!

In solidarity,

Osvaldo

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CEIU LOCAL 70705//SEIC SECTION LOCALE 70705

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Malheureusement, toutes les informations contenues dans ce courriel ne sont pas disponibles en français.