74 CRO - Hamilton CRA Branch Activity Report

Number of Members:        260 Regular    20 Retired       0 Rands

Current Executive Members

Joe Stanziani              Branch President

John Liberatore          Branch Vice President

Joanne Haslip             Secretary

Steve Budz                 Treasurer

Ward Cluff                  Member at Large

Cheryl Gasse             Member at Large

Christine Bozek          Member at Large

Chris L’Estrange         Member at Large

James Ramkissoon   Member at Large

Leo Piro                      Member at Large

Tony D’Amico            Member at Large

AGM

Previous AGM:           April 6, 2017

Next AGM:                 April 5, 2018

Executive Meetings

Last Meeting Date:     February 15, 2017

Next Meeting Date:    TBD

Number of Executive Meetings held since last Regional Council: 4

2017 Activities

 

-    We work closely with and hold many of our activities jointly with the Hamilton Sub-Group. 

-    We have done many plant gates to distribute flyers around bargaining at the Hamilton Niagara TSO of the CRA.

-    We recently held a visibility and thank you session to show our support for our bargaining team in achieving a new collective agreement by giving out coffee and donuts to our members of the Branch & Sub-Group. Unfortunately our employer would not allow us to do it on CRA premises so we had a tailgate out of the back of the Sub-Group President’s SUV in the back parking lot of the CRA building.

-    We participated in the Labour Day parade held in Hamilton in September of 2017.

-    We frequently had loud shirt, orange camo pants and/or black shirt days to support our bargaining committee during 2017 negotiations.

-    We have distributed flyers to our members along with the UTE Executive of the Hamilton Niagara TSO on issues that concern both our unions, such as our fight against the CRA to stop them from taking away our sick leave that we have earned as well as fix Phoenix.

-    We have filed many grievances to protect our members’ rights over the past year.

-    We represented our members in a number of discipline hearings over the past year.

-    We withdrew from all consultations with management in the Hamilton Niagara TSO of the 

     CRA (eg. UMC, etc.) except for Health & Safety Committee (ones we were legally required to 

     be on) for a number of months to demonstrate our displeasure with the slow pace of contract

     negotiations and the lack of consultations with the employees, AFS and PIPSC, with

     respect to the GTA Modernization.

 

Issues and Concerns

 

Our issues were centered around supporting our bargaining team to get a fair collective agreement during 2017. We are now concerned with supporting our Group in getting Treasury Board to sign off on the collective agreement. The AFS Bargaining Group has ratified and CRA has signed off.

Locally our issues center around protecting our members rights in the collective agreement and ensuring CRA managers behave in a reasonable manner and follow the collective agreement and CRA policies.

Local Senior CRA Managers have targeted both myself and the Sub-Group President for our activity in the union and defending our members’ rights under the collective agreement over the past year.

We are seeing many mental health issues at the Hamilton TSO.  We are also seeing CRA Managers who do not know how to deal with these issues and are not following the CRA policy on accommodation.  In addition, the CRA Managers are not applying the mental health training to their everyday situations. We have had a number of CRA Managers in the Hamilton TSO threaten to fire our members who they know have mental health issues.

We are continuing to remind our employer to fix the Phoenix Pay System and bringing to their attention the many problems and financial hardship this malfunctioning pay system is causing for our members.

Resolutions to the Regional Council

None

Submitted by:      Joe Stanziani

                             Branch President – Hamilton CRA