TENTATIVE AGREEMENT REACHED!!

All members:

After a long 12 hour day on Wednesday August 10th, a tentative agreement has been reached with Finning which enhances wages and entitlements for our membership for the next 3 years.  The publishing of the memorandum will be completed as soon as possible and will be supplied to all of you prior to voting. We’re currently working out the details of the roll out meetings at your locations, some of which will involve video conferencing. We will involve electronic voting for our members who work or live in outlying locations, details will all be forthcoming.

Highlights of the Memorandum:

• 3 year term at 4%, 3%, 2% and a $4000 signing bonus for every member
• 2 extra Sick/Flex days (more flexibility of usage) and can use banked time
• Pre-planned medical - no erosion of sick time
• Banked time from 160 to 320 hours
• Saturdays and Sundays are now double time OT
• Improved wage discrepancy for TCRS semi skilled
• True hour averaging for all continuous shift members ie: Ekati calculation
• Vacation improvements to years 13 and 18
• Your choice of 8hr to 12hr vacation usage outside of primetime
• Improvements to premiums and general provisions
• Prorated severance and extended recall

Thank you for your support,

Your Bargaining Committee:

Kevin Clark, Wade Zenchyson, Mark Meldrum,

James McLeod, Jeremy Brydges

Negotiations continued from May 16th to 20th. Traditionally our bargaining can take up to 10 months, usually involving mediation and in some instances, like last contract, a strike vote. In an attempt to break this cycle your committee decided to go right into wages, terms and big ticket items like LTD, sick time, overtime, vacation and flex benefits. Our monetary package took into account inflation, market conditions, forecasted workloads and Finning’s issues with recruitment and retention.

Finning’s counter can only be described as disappointing.

Our concern now is that this response will convert us back to the traditional, lengthy and unpredictable outcome.

Your committee thanks you all for your continued support. We will be meeting with Finning again on June 13th and 14th.