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PRESIDENT’S REPORT
EXECUTIVE COUNCIL
MARCH 2004

Betty Bannon Item 6

UTE/CEUDA:

As reported at the December Council meeting, the anomalies were presented to Nancy Riche on November 24, 2003. The lengthy written submission that I prepared was distributed throughout the executives of UTE. Her decision on the anomalies was finally rendered on January 28, 2004. It was placed on our website and distributed to Council, Alternate RVPs, all locals and the national office staff. The results of this decision were mostly positive to UTE. The following locals are now made up of only UTE members, either due to the original decision or the decision on the anomalies: Bathurst, Moncton, Sydney, Charlottetown, St John’s TSO, Peterborough, Kingston, Thunder Bay, St Catharines, Toronto North (Barrie), Lethbridge, Northern BC & Yukon. As well, the mailrooms in both Toronto Centre and North York are under the jurisdiction of UTE. The decision also resolved the Head Quarters local. UTE was allocated all areas of Head Quarters with the following exceptions: Human Resources, Finance and Administration and Information Technology, from the original decision, plus the pure GST areas that were previously agreed upon by UTE and CEUDA. The transfers have been implemented to the best ability of the both components and the PSAC and I stress to the locals that they should be checking their membership lists closely and report any errors or omissions to the national office.

The second issue that has been dealt with since the last meeting were the errors that were made in the original transfers that affected the Taxation Centers; St John’s, Sudbury and Surrey. The President of the PSAC, sister Nycole Turmel, has deemed these transfers as errors and the members are being transferred back to UTE along with the appropriate dues. The decision of the President of the PSAC has been distributed by e-mail. The errors in Jonquiere, Shawinigan and Winnipeg were agreed to by CEUDA and the members are being transferred back to UTE along with the appropriate dues.
The third issue that required the intervention of sister Turmel was the interpretation of “Protected Members” list and what rights go with the member and the component. She has clarified that to be put on the protected list the member would have to have been an active executive, steward or member prior to March 1, 2003 and that the “protection” gives the individual member the right to retain their affiliation with their original component but it gives no workplace rights to the component if the only members they have in a workplace are “protected members”. Thus, if there is a workplace where the only CEUDA members are “protected members”, CEUDA has no right to sit on committees, attend UMC meetings etc. In these workplaces, those rights will rest solely with UTE.

OSH COMMITTEE COMPOSITION:

Since the Government restructuring on December 12, 2003 the PSAC has had to look at the composition of both the National OSH Policy Committee and local OSH Workplace Committees. With the carving out of Customs to the CBSA any CEUDA CBSA members who sat on the CCRA OSH Committees are no longer employees of the CCRA. Section 135.1(1) and (2) of the Canada Labour Code respectively state:

1. Subject to this section, a policy committee or a work place committee shall consist of at least two persons and at least half of the members shall be employees who:
   1. do not exercise managerial functions; and
   2. subject to any regulations made under subsection 135.2(1), have been selected by
      1. the employees, if the employees are not represented by a trade union, or
      2. the trade union representing employees, in consultation with any employees who are not so represented.
2. (2) Despite subsection (1) and if provided in a collective agreement or other agreement, the members of a policy committee may include persons who are not employees.

I have added the emphasis. First of all, any member who has transferred to the CBSA is not an employee of the CCRA and would not fall under subsection (1). We have nothing in our Collective Agreement so an agreement would have to be reached with the CCRA for a non-employee to sit on the National Policy Committee, as stated in subsection (2). You should note that subsection (2) only applies to the National Policy Committee. To my knowledge, the CCRA is only prepared to enter into an agreement for the National President of CEUDA, in order for him to sit on the Policy Committee. The PSAC has also looked at the size of PSAC representation on the National Policy Committee with the transfer of over 7000 members to the CBSA. They have advised the employer that they would reduce their representation to three (3) if the employer reduced by one as well. During conversations with the employer, I am aware that they are prepared to reduce their representation but have not officially informed the PSAC at the time of writing of this report. Thus, UTE has been requested to provide sister Turmel with two names and CEUDA one. After consultation with the Chair of the UTE OSH Committee, I have submitted the names of Chris Aylward and my own.

MEMBERSHIP CARDS:

After consultation with the Components, the PSAC is going to centralize the processing of the membership cards for “new” members. This will be done on a trial basis for six months, effective April 1st, 2004. After that time the process and time lines will be reviewed, there will be further consultation with the components and the membership section will report to the AEC. The components will continue to process cards for name changes, address changes etc.

DONATIONS/SPONSORSHIPS:

NEGOTIATIONS:

The NSCC has been meeting each time that the team has been at the table. We are receiving current updates from the negotiators and team members of the NSCC each time. There have also been meetings of the Multi Team NSCCs, usually when CCRA and one or more of the Treasury Board teams are in town. These meetings include the CCRA, CFIA, Parks and the Treasury Board tables NSCCs. Their purpose is to give a broad perspective of negotiations and agree on joint activities, when appropriate. It is quite easy to see that the Treasury Board is driving each table, including the separate Agencies.

It appears that the CCRA wants a strike. Everything that they have done at the table in February and March indicates that they have no interest in coming to a tentative agreement. They are focused on their demand for “definition of a day”. Their behavior is petty, unreasonable and at times childish. I had the pleasure of delivering two cakes from the St John’s locals 90000 and 90001. You can see the pictures on our website. One cake was for our team and the other for the employer’s team. Not only would they not come into our meeting room to receive their cake, they ran and hid in a second meeting room other than their regular meeting room. It was a sad state of affairs.

On a more serious note, our members will be hearing from the negotiators during the Presidents Conference on the process that will take place once we file for a conciliation board. The negotiators and the entire team will be attending our Presidents Conference.

In my most recent travels to many AGMs, the members have made it clear that they are ready to take more serious action in support of their bargaining team. They understand the demands and want the respect from their employer that they deserve. It is obvious that we are not getting it with the pay offer of 1.5%, 1% and 1%. It is more than a slap in the face that the employer has given the PE’s a wage increase of 2.5% while we are at the table with 1.5% in front of us. They certainly are sending us a strong message that they have no respect for us, our work or our value to the organization.

DEADLINES:

I don’t normally address this kind of thing in my report but it has become a problem that the council and local presidents should be made aware. I verbally addressed it before at a council meeting but it has not improved. We have had deadlines for names for courses, reports by council members, action plans by council members, names for observers to the Presidents Conference, just to name a few and there is a problem where the deadlines are not being met.

As one example I’ll use the names of observers for this Presidents Conference. The reason we put a deadline for the names on is for the hotel rooms. The Crowne Plaza this time is fully booked and they needed the names early to guarantee rooms. Our deadline was the end of February. Pierrette was still receiving names the second week of March. The hotel had no more rooms and we now had to go find other hotel rooms to book, and some of them are at a higher price than the Crowne Plaza.

As a second example I’ll use the names for courses. When the names aren’t submitted Carmen has had to spend time phoning either the locals or RVPs to chase down the names. I have been tempted to cancel the course if we don’t receive the names by the date requested. Everyone has said that these courses are both important and needed, yet we have difficulty receiving the names of the participants on time.

As another example, the Executive Committee requested all regional action plans as a result of the UTE Membership Questionnaire. The reason the Committee requested the action plans was so that they could review them before introducing a national plan for the Council’s review. We wanted to look at any duplication, suggestions that could be used nationally, share best practices, etc. I have received three action plans out of the ten regions and only one of them was on time.

We cannot go on like this. It is causing extra work, time, energy and money for no reason. I am asking that all Council members and locals make an extra effort to meet the deadlines that we set.

PUBLIC SERVICE CAMPAIGN:

I have had a couple of queries regarding our involvement in this campaign. This campaign has to do with all PSAC members and their bargaining, including ours. It is an attempt and opportunity to both educate and heighten the member’s activity regarding bargaining and the public regarding the importance of Public Service jobs. It will also probably have some beneficial affect when there is an election call and subsequent party campaigns and promises. This campaign is built to be included in the bargaining activities and to send a broader message than just to the teams. It can be an integral part of the bargaining activities.

DESIGNATIONS:

On February 9, 2004, the PSSRB informed us that the Designation Review Panel we had requested has been established. The Chairperson is Philip Chodos, the union representative is Bill Ireland and the employer representative is Sandra Budd. We have not been advised of any scheduled dates yet.

The Finance and Administration Branch and the Information Technology Branch have submitted their initial proposals, which we did not accept. The Agency was advised that we would not support any designations for those two branches as we did not agree with the alleged importance of these positions when related to the continuation of the social benefits for which the CRA is responsible. The F&A Branch proposal consisted mainly of ATS Officers, Security Officers and Mail Room Clerks. F&A and ITB requested a total of 43 designations this time. However, these only included the positions assigned to UTE by the “Riche” decision. The parameters behind the Riche decision have changed since December 12 therefore the numbers requested for these two Branches may change.

The Appeals Branch has submitted its final proposal and they are requesting the designation of 78 positions. All 78 positions are related to appeals within the social benefits programs for which the CRA is responsible.

We have not yet received the final proposal from the A & C Branch. However, to date they are requesting the designation of 306 positions and we have not yet received any further justification for those positions to which we objected.

In their final proposal the F&A Branch has requested the designation of 29 positions. This includes a combination of Accommodations, Telecommunications, Security and mail room clerks.

The IT Branch has requested the designation of two positions which fall under the responsibility of UTE.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY:

Email Crash

Late November our email server’s Groupwise database became corrupt. There are several major databases in Groupwise and the one that got corrupted was the WPDOMAIN.DB, which controls the user information and the location of the messages.

After making numerous attempts to rebuild the database without success, a Certified Novell Engineer was hired from a local firm.

Following an analysis of the damage, it was determined that there were only two options available to us in order to get our e-mail system up and running:

1. Send the corrupt database to Novell for them to fix it. Since this happened over the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday it would take two to three business days, and second, they could only guarantee a 50-50 chance of the database being repaired successfully.

2. Start from scratch and create a new email system.

With time being a major factor, it was decided to go for option 2.

The creation of a new email system usually takes one (1) day to complete. In our case it took over a week. The major problem we encountered was that we could not establish a stable system. Every time we had it running, it would crash again. We contacted Novell again and discovered that our database was again corrupted. This time we sent the file to Novell to be repaired. A further investigation revealed that we were working on a workstation that had been infected with a Trojan virus. This despite the fact that the workstation in question was protected by an up-to-date Symantec anti-virus program.

We were advised that the only real safe way to stop viruses and hackers on our systems was to install a good physical firewall and even then, this would not guarantee 100% protection. In consultation with the consultant and the PSAC IT Section, we purchased a Cisco firewall.

With the assistance of a firewall consultant the Cisco firewall was configured in a manner that would offer the most protection and still allow us to conduct usual business. To this end, all traffic to UTE was blocked except for the following:

• Port 25 .outgoing email
• Port 110 incoming email
• Port 80 web browsing
• Port 23 membership application
• Port 1677 Groupwise web access

Most of the problems we were encountering were from viruses that opened a port to be used later by other users, such as running an email server from our workstations or using our workstations for questionable websites.

While we were setting up the firewall, the consultant ran a scan of the network and the network backbone (link from the PSAC) and noticed an alarming number of hacker attacks coming from the PSAC link (or backbone). Even though fault cannot be placed on the PSAC system for all our problems, it nonetheless remains a factor

Steps taken to prevent, as much as possible, an other e-mail crash and to minimize its effect:

• Installed and configured a Cisco firewall
• Upgraded, Installed and configured Symantec anti-virus 8.1
• Installed and configured Arcserve Backup for Novell
• Setup and configured Groupwise archive on all workstations, except the President

Unionmail List Server

Before the crash, one of the tasks was to take all the email addresses provided with the UTE questionnaire and establish a method to allow e-mail communication with these members. With 489 members expressing interest on receiving email, this would be a very time consuming task as well as a strain on our existing email system.

In order to provide that service and safeguard the integrity of our e-mail system, we incorporated a free e-mail server called MAILENABLE, which also contains a built-in “listserver”. One of the requirements of this “e-mail server” was a dedicated hostname, which we registered for a period of ten years at a cost of $105.00. The addresses of all the members who provided them with the UTE questionnaire were imported into this “e-mail server” under members@unionmail.org address, which is basically a group with all of our requested members in it.

GRIEVANCES:

Since our last Executive Council meeting, one hundred (100) grievances, other than classification, were received at the National Office.

During the same period, seventy-five (75) grievances were presented dealing with a variety of issues including three (3) termination of employment grievances. Eight (8) of those grievances were on statement of duties which included fifty-one (51) grievors.

There are presently one hundred and thirty-seven (137) grievances in the National Office inventory which have not yet been presented at the Final Level.

CLASSIFICATION GRIEVANCES

During this quarter, we received five (5) classification grievances.

APPEALS

During this period, no appeal was received in the National Office where the Union of Taxation Employees was requested to provide representation.

INDEPENDENT THIRD PARTY REVIEWS (ITPR'S)

During this period, five (5) Independent Third Party Review (ITPR) were received in the National Office.

ADJUDICATIONS

At the last Council we were requested to verify the status of adjudications with the PSAC. A list of all those files shown on the UTE inventory as being at the adjudication level with the PSAC was sent to the PSAC on February 2, 2004. This consisted of 88 cases. A reply was received from the PSAC on March 15, 2004. To date, we have established that two of those files have been withdrawn, 14 have been allowed, one has been settled through mediation, two have been scheduled for mediation and 15 do not appear on the PSAC data base and the balance are in the PSAC’ active inventory. Numbers aside, another concern was identified so far. The UTE files for those grievances that were withdrawn or otherwise settled contain no documentation indicating this. On the surface, it would appear that the PSAC does not forward such documentation. The verification continues.

Link to Membership Count

President's Itinerary

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