To all PSAC-UNW Members at Government of the Northwest Territories,
Your Union bargaining team met with the GNWT bargaining team in Yellowknife the week of January 26 to 29 to exchange proposals and begin negotiations.
A quick recap of our last bulletin: a bargaining conference was held last August to review and prioritize membership suggestions for collective agreement improvements. A bargaining team of your peers was also elected to represent those proposals at the bargaining table.
For those of you not familiar with the bargaining process, bargaining proposals are generally separated out between two kinds of proposals:
- Nonmonetary proposals can be further broken down into editorial or administrative changes such as updating contract language to reflect legislative changes, fixing typos and removing clauses that no longer apply. They can also include items that can involve working condition improvements that are “cost neutral”.
- Monetary proposals include wages, benefits, allowances, and leaves.
Normally, the teams kick off the bargaining process with discussions around the non cost items, and as bargaining progresses, once most of the non-monetary items are dealt with to the satisfaction of both teams, we move into financial discussions. That means core monetary items are generally bargained in the final stages of negotiations.
So, for this introductory session, after each team presented their proposals, we started working through the initial packages to discuss them in more detail.
We covered a wide range of topics during this first face to face session. Some preliminary discussions included matters such as: pay administration for retro cheques, time limits on getting a new collective agreement finalized, Critical Incident Leave, Injury on Duty Leave, Health and Safety, the use of technology for workplace surveillance and the use of AI in the workplace.
We did agree to a number of edits and are in the process of finalizing a series of meeting dates so that we can continue with the edits and then move on to more in depth discussions of the substantive nonmonetary proposals at our next session. Once we have finalized the series of meeting dates we will let you know.
In the meantime, if you have any bargaining questions you can reach out to one of the bargaining team members.
We have also set up a dedicated email for your questions: GNWT@psac-afpc.com.
In solidarity,
YOUR BARGAINING TEAM
Lauraine Armstrong
Jeff Groenewegen
Cee Birch
Andrew Gregory
Tamara Holliday
Jabin Carrasco
Gayla Thunstrom, UNW President
Erna Post, PSAC Negotiator
Peter Burjorjee, PSAC Research Officer
Chris Parsons, UNW Director of Membership Services
Caitlin Lacey, Political Assistant to the UNW President