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Union Vote
No quick answer after University of Waterloo union voting
Waterloo - It could be next month — or later — before results are known from January 24, 2008 vote on whether the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation will become the union for about 1,000 UW staff members.
The Ontario Labour Relations Board, which is conducting today’s vote, has ordered that the ballot box be sealed and the ballots not counted, at least until a meeting of lawyers for the union and the employer with a labour relations officer in Toronto on February 13. A formal hearing by the board would then take place February 19 and 20.
At issue would be exactly which UW staff would be part of the bargaining unit — the group of employees represented by the union — if unionization goes ahead. That in turn determines whose ballots from today’s vote should be counted.
Says a ruling made by the board on Tuesday: “The responding party [UW, as the employer] disputes the applicant’s estimate of the number of employees in the applicant’s proposed bargaining unit. Furthermore, the responding party . . . maintains the bargaining unit as proposed will lead to serious labour relations harm. . . .
“The Board finds that the numerical difference between the parties may be significant. . . . Given the disparity between the two bargaining units proposed by the parties, the Board is unable to craft a more precise voting constituency.”
OSSTF says there are 924 people in the group it seeks to represent — those in salary grades USG 1-8 as well as housekeepers and janitors in the residences, with some specified exceptions. It says 398 of those people had signed union cards at the time the application was filed last week.
All staff members in the group claimed by OSSTF will be eligible to vote yes or no on unionization in today’s vote. The labour board’s order says that “if an employee’s eligibility to vote is unclear or in dispute, the employee will be given an opportunity to mark a ballot, but it . . . will be sealed in a separate envelope until the employee’s eligibility to vote has been determined.”
UW’s human resources department is advising everybody who is in USG classifications 1 through 8 and the housekeepers and janitors group to show up and vote today, and let negotiators and the labour board decide later whose votes count and whose are to be excluded. Department heads will provide time to vote during the work day, an e-mail memo said last night. "You may vote at either polling station. If you wish to bring I.D., that would be helpful but it is not required."
The unionization issue will be decided by a majority of those who cast their ballots.
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