The Bargaining Team (BT) for Units 1, 2, and 3 met for the first time on Thursday, February 23. Below is the report provided by the BT.

Processes

The BT estimates that a full team will be assembled by March 22. This is due to a Unit 3 by-election and a Unit 2 run-off. We guessed this would occur simultaneously with the Executive elections. For meetings, we need to advertise better, ask staff to join us, ask union committee members to participate and have better coordination more generally. We can also hold joint BT-Executive meetings to foster better cooperation.

Training—we discussed soliciting CUPE National to do a workshop on Ontario labour laws and an overview of the bargaining process.The BT needs to learn more about our national representative and the role of lawyers as a resource.

The BT needs to discuss the rules of quorum. There are no formal by-law rules on this.
Justin can do a presentation on financial analysis and reading income statements of large organizations.

We need to schedule an anti-oppression workshop for each member to complete.

Communications

The BT needs to create an e-mail account. We will also request a website log-in so we can post reports right to the website. The minute-taker for the day will be in charge of posting to the website.

Surveys

Focus groups were brought up as a way to hear from unit 2s.

Unit 1 suggested contract workshops where we try to bring departments together and distribute the contract and survey members.

Unit 3 surveys can be direct contact since the bargaining unit is so small now.

Next meeting: Tuesday March 7 at 2:30pm. We will create a draft of the survey. 3903 staff offered to do a short presentation on issues among members at the March 7 meeting.
We can schedule town halls between March 15 and March 30.