 noelstrommeh.Premium
join:2003-04-07
London, ON
1 edit | reply to HeywoodFloyd
Re: Unionized cuts starting at Bell said by HeywoodFloyd:Things are really bad at Bell because of the 11 layers of management (Rogers only has 4). Depending upon which business unit you reference for numbers, Bell Canada has 52k employees. 5100 Bell technicians are CEP. I'm not sure about the Expertech and BTS technicians but lets be liberal and pretend that these two add up to 4900 for a total of 10k technicians. (BTW, these people are CEP as well but corporate politics has made sure they have different CEP contracts, which do not come due at the same time). It has nothing to do about corporate politics. It has everything to do with the timing of the original CTEA certification over 50 years ago. It is something that is trying to be corrected, although, it may not as currently, the CEP Craft bargaining agreement, the CEP Sales collective agreement and the CEP Clerical Agreement all come due within a year. Seems to me that's good timing already.
said by HeywoodFloyd:Now the last time I counted, there were 12k clerks in an employee association known as the CTEA. If you divide 52 by 22 and drop the fraction you will see that there are two managers for every employee... Now the clerks have been getting fired left and right for 4 years now because the CTEA has no real power. (in fact, 30 years ago if you wanted to go into management, one sure fire way was to become a CTEA rep). So in 2007 the CTEA employees voted to dissolve the CTEA (association) and join the CEP (union) but this can't happen just yet because the Bell still has a valid contract with the CTEA. I can assure you that is not true. I am a former CTEA, now CEP rep. The paperwork is done, and we are recoginzed by the Federal Labour Board as a certification in the CEP. The reason the collective agreement still exists without renegotiation is because when one union certifcation merges with another (which is what happened here) their collective agreement goes with them. We are now preparing to negotiate our new contract, as our current agreement expires at the end of May, 2009. The CTEA may have had Association in their name, but rest assured we were a striking union. Why didn't we ever strike? Because our membership NEVER gave us the mandate to in a strike vote. We were close in 2005, but the contract passed, thus nullifying the strike vote.
said by HeywoodFloyd:OK so the Teachers are taking Bell private on December-11 and you know that the new owners will want to cut costs but letting dead wood float away. If middle management gets rid of clerks who are about to become unionized employees, and they do so by outsourcing this work to India and the Philippines, these managers will still be around to manage the foreign contractors. Managers are sacrificing employees to save their own skins and they don't seem to care how many customers will be driven away by this decision. (I have heard loss numbers of 10k per month or 120k per year) Once you are hired at Bell, you are a unionized employee, unless you are hired specifically as a contractor. There is no such thing as a clerk who is about to become unionized. You're unionized the day you are hired. Don't forget, the management ranks were trimmed by 2,500 positions between September and October. Anyone who thought that unionized staff would not be affected was kidding themselves. That's not the point here. I can understand staff cuts due to budget cuts and jobs being eliminated. I can not, and will not support or stand by while CEP jobs, no matter what certification, are eliminated, and the work moved to an outsourcing company, whether it's onshore or offshore. |
