Updated, March 18 — Unionized rail car and locomotive repair, maintenance and inspection staff at Canadian National Railway (CN) have approved the 11th-hour deal that kept them from being locked out last month.
CN, in a release Tuesday, said members of its shopcraft group of about 2,100 employees, represented by Unifor Local 100R, have voted in favour of ratifying a new four-year agreement. Unifor, in a separate release Wednesday, said its shopcraft members voted 79 per cent in favour of ratification.
The shopcraft group was still wrapping up the ratification process Monday when Unifor announced its other CN groups had ratified their 51-month collective agreements.
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Those groups included clerical and intermodal staff, excavator-operators, drivers with the company’s CNTL trucking arm and employees with CN’s Savage Alberta Railway.
“We are pleased that we have renewed the final collective agreement with Unifor in the current round of bargaining,” CN chief operating officer Jim Vena said in a release Tuesday.
The agreement with shop craft staff, he said, will allow Montreal-based CN “to continue our efforts to improve efficiency and customer service.”
Unifor said Wednesday the deal includes wage increases in each of its four years, improved benefits and job security, “stronger” apprenticeship ratios, re-establishment of a joint health and safety committee, provisions for “in-sourcing” of work, and new jobs created.
The union and company will also partner to create a philanthropic fund expected to focus mainly on initiatives related to women’s equality and aboriginal issues, Unifor said.
The deal “showed that we were able to chart our own pattern at CN and not simply accept what had already been negotiated by other unions,” Unifor Local 100 president Ken Hiatt said in Wednesday’s release.
“In negotiating a new agreement, we were able to resolve the concerns that our members at CN have raised and improve their conditions at work.”
Unifor and CN reached their last-minute deal on Feb. 23 with help from federal mediators, just before the shopcraft staff and the other Unifor-represented groups were scheduled to be locked out by CN.
Unifor, the largest of CN’s unions, said in February that the union and company had been in talks for five months to replace their previous deal, which had expired Dec. 31.
According to a separate release Wednesday from federal Labour Minister Kellie Leitch, the Savage Alberta Railway group, which represents about 65 locomotive engineers and conductors, had been without a deal since the end of 2012. –– AGCanada.com Network
