July 1999

NASA has scheduled a series of general meetings for the fall to deal with several significant outstanding issues.

Date Location Time Topic

Wed., 06 Oct. 1999 2022 Dentistry/Pharmacy 4:45 p.m. Negotiations

Wed., 27 Oct. 1999 243 Central Academic Bldg. Noon Dues Structure*

*Note: This meeting will decide the resolutions originally proposed at the AGM of 12 May 1999.

Wed., 24 Nov. 1999 243 Central Academic Bldg. Noon NASA Office Restructuring

Please look at the topics and dates of the meetings in order to ensure your attendance.

Over many years NASA has received concerns expressed by members over the length and style of the meetings that have been held. NASA has found in the past that noon-hour meetings have worked best to ensure good attendance. We have decided to hold a number of topical meetings as opposed to one long meeting. Where we felt the topic could be covered in one hour, we have booked it at noon.

The noon-hour meetings will be just that. The issues and debates will be structured under rules of order to ensure that the meetings do not go over their allotted time. The negotiations meeting will be held after work as it is an issue that will need more time than a lunch hour to discuss properly.

Bargaining is just around the corner. If you want to influence its content, it’s good to get your input in sooner rather than later. A number of members responded to the first call for input. Some of their suggested items are:

Benefits: administration and level of coverage

• Acting Pay: automatic appointment if acting continues past a year
• Christmas Break: paid days at Christmas to more members, including apprentices and temporary employees; need to fine tune the language to cover issues of 24 hour operations; benefits for those employees regularly scheduled to work or be on standby for these days
• Apprentices: examination of their treatment, particularly after 1 year of service
• University Credit Courses for family members
• Work Boots: clarity of wording; extension of benefits to include more employees
• Pay periods: a proposal for bi-weekly pay
• Bereavement Leave for nieces and nephews
• Categories of Employee: term vs. temporary entitlements to count service and to benefits
• Maternity Leave Provisions: level of paid leave, length of leave

In addition to the above several items have been identified which would deal with cleaning up language and making the contract easier to read.

The next step is to ensure priorities are properly set. We will ask for your input 06 October 1999. Please make this a personal priority in the fall.

Part-time trust employees who are appointed for more than twelve months accumulate vacation on a prorated basis. That means that the vacation formulas are based on full-time employment but deductions are done to account for fewer hours worked. As an example, if you work full-time in a position that requires 35 hours a week in your first year of employment, you accumulate 15 workdays of vacation, or 105 hours of vacation. If you are a part-time employee in the same position and work 17.5 hours per week, you would get 7.5 days or 52.5 hours of vacation.

If you are employed as a trust employee for less than one year then you would be given vacation pay at a rate of 4% of total earnings, excluding any overtime. Vacation entitlements can be taken upon mutual agreement of the employee and the trustholder. This is subject to the operational and research requirements of the trustholder.

Come September we will be commencing our third set of Steward training courses. These are held over a weekend (2 days) or as a set of seven 2-hour evening sessions. The course will prepare new Stewards to handle their responsibilities with assistance from their Labour Relations Officers.

We have received some concerns regarding the delay in receiving our newsletters. If you receive this newsletter after 22 July 1999, please advise us at 439-3181.

Most employers don’t like unions. Without them, employers can expect to have a free hand in dealing with their employees. They can set wages and benefits at a level that suits them. Managers can hire, fire, promote, demote and move around as they please, and they don’t have to answer to anyone.

It is no surprise then, that North American employers continue to use their money and political friends to attack and undermine unions.

The U.S. labour movement has seen a huge drop in membership and influence over the last 30 years. Political control by labour’s enemies has helped to halve the share of U.S. workers who belong to unions. Declining union strength is reflected in a dramatic drop in the living standards of the average American worker.

In Canada, unions have held their own, with more than 30 per cent of employees still union members, about double the U.S. rate. Relative union strength in Canada is reflected in the fact that real average wages, while not growing, have at least not declined over the last 20 years.

The most recent Statistics Canada data, from the first nine months of 1998, show that 3.6 million Canadians (about 30.5 per cent of the paid workforce) are union members. Another 300,000 are non-members covered by union agreements.

The benefits of unionization to union members are clear. For full-time workers, hourly earnings for unionized workers averaged $19.01, compared to $15.50 for non-unionized workers. For part-timers, the gap was even greater—an hourly average wage of $16.71 for unionized workers, versus only $9.76 for non-unionized workers. In addition, unionized workers have, in general, much better pensions and other benefits, as well as the protection from arbitrary treatment provided by a collective agreement.

Unions do more than just help union members. Our greater union strength contributes to the much lower levels of inequality in Canada than in the U.S. While the rich are richer in the U.S., poor and middle-income Canadians, both union and non-union, actually have a higher standard of living than their American counterparts, according to a recent Statistics Canada study.