When the pandemic was in its early stages and the City of Greater Sudbury declared an emergency, the municipality and its unions worked collaboratively, the president of CUPE Local 4705 has told Sudbury.com, to respond effectively. But, as the months have ground on, things have changed, Michael Bellerose.
“When the provincial state of emergency started, CUPE Local 4705 and the City of Greater Sudbury worked collaboratively to implement many things,” he said.
This included allowing many people to work from home, mandating one person per vehicle, sanitization protocols, vehicle rentals, taking on extra shift work to have fewer people in city buildings, and allowing workers to be redeployed in other bargaining units where the additional staff was needed.
He said he has watched the city become inflexible and, perhaps buoyed by the added power granted to it by Bill 195 (a.k.a. The Reopening Ontario (A Flexible Response to COVID-19) Act, 2020), unresponsive in some of its dealings with unionized staff, even ignoring suggestions Bellerose said would have saved thousands of taxpayer dollars.
“Bill 195 allows the employer to change certain terms and conditions of the collective agreement and flies in the face of collective bargaining,” Bellerose said.
The province enacted the bill to allow municipalities more flexibility during the pandemic in deploying staff to other jobs. Bellerose said as he understands it, the employer can “put people on shift work, move people around, cancel vacations, redefine jobs, deny leaves of absence and bring in contractors.”
“The city can change the rules unilaterally,” he said.
Other issues the union raised when speaking with Sudbury.com include the current shift schedule and the two-person vehicle policy.
In the winter, the Roads and Distribution crews are on day and afternoon shift work to allow for winter control. That shift schedule was maintained through the summer this year due to the pandemic. Roads and Distribution staff were put on summer maintenance work as the city didn’t hire its usual contingent of summer workers.
But Bellerose said the two-shift schedule is very disruptive to the lives of many of his 1,700 members and they look forward to more predictable summer schedules. This didn’t happen this year because of the pandemic, and despite presenting a couple of different shift scenarios that were more acceptable to workers, he said the union’s requests fell on deaf ears.
Bellerose said the union suggested staggering shift starts as well as moving to a four-day work week schedule of four, 10-hour shifts.
“We were prepared to bring this to the members to vote on,” he said. “However, the city advised us there was a caveat. If approved, the agreement had to be signed off on until social distancing measures were lifted. The union unequivocally said no.”
Bellerose said his members also wonder why the city continues to rent extra vehicles for individual staff to use when other northern jurisdictions are allowing two workers to share vehicles as long as both are masked.
“I’ve spoken to my counterparts in North Bay and Thunder Bay and they’ve already moved to that,” he said.
The city could save thousands of taxpayer dollars, Bellerose said, and cut the number of rentals it was using for some departments, like Roads, in half by allowing two masked workers to share a truck.
“Initially, the state of emergency order was supposed to be a temporary measure to handle the fast-changing crisis. Now, the province created Bill 195,” Bellerose said. “Unions are against draconian legislation like Bill 195. It stifles meaningful bargaining and allows employers unlimited and unjustified powers.”
Sudbury.com reached out to speak with Kevin Fowke, the general manager of corporate services for the City of Greater Sudbury, about the issues raised by the union.
He said the city engaged with its unions early in the pandemic and met regularly with them from March 11 on to put agreements in place to manage the city’s pandemic response.
About 85 city workers were re-deployed to jobs other than what they would normally be doing, mostly to fulfill enhanced cleaning requirements at Pioneer Manor and the city’s fleet of vehicles.
He said he wouldn’t characterize the city’s efforts to keep its employees safe during the pandemic as taking advantage and said he was disappointed the union sees it that way.
“This is not nefarious, this is about health and safety,” Fowke said.
As for specific issues raised by Local 4705, Fowke addressed those as well.
Staggered shifts were possible, he said, at the city’s smallest Roads depots because there are fewer people there. But the larger ones (Frobisher, St. Clair and North West), there are two issues: the number of staff and the size of the facilities meant staggering just isn’t feasible from a safety perspective, he said.
“[Those] are tight spaces and they can have 80-plus people in there at the same time,” Fowke said. “We could stagger shifts in the smaller depots, but it’s just not possible in the larger ones.”
He said other cities might have relaxed the one-person per vehicle guideline, but Greater Sudbury isn’t prepared to do that yet, he said.
“The one-person per vehicle guideline we decided is the best way to keep this group safe,” he said.
As far as Fowke is concerned, he said, erring on the side of safety and caution is the approach the city has opted to take.
“We have a responsibility to take every reasonable precaution to protect workers,” he said.
The pandemic response certainly is a cost to taxpayers, Fowke acknowledged, but he said by not filling positions and redeploying staff, they were able to free up $1.8 million, a number the aim to push over $2 million.
Fowke said the pandemic has been stressful on everyone, particularly on the 500 staff who were sent to work from home and the nearly 100 who were redeployed doing work they wouldn’t normally have done and in places (such as Pioneer Manor) where the risk of contracting the virus was potentially high.
He said city departments, including and especially Roads, have “really stepped up” during the pandemic and this has meant residents are still receiving 85 to 90 per cent of the services that were offered before the pandemic.
“Roads, Distribution and Collection have been really creative.”
