April 2nd, 2006

Brothers and Sisters,

The coming weekend, April 8th and 9th, the negotiating team will be having its first 'face to face' meeting. We are scheduled to attend negotiation training in Vancouver over the weekend. We will be attending this training jointly with the running trades side of the Rail Conference (former BLE and UTU).

This will also be a chance for our Negotiating Committee to get to know each other and preliminarily review some of the issues coming up. There is also a sub-committee meeting on the 3rd and 4th of April, to discuss a couple of other issues which may be framed as demands. This sub-committee comprised of Gary Mcdougal, Jim Daniel and David Brown has been researching one of their more complex issues that we are considering.

Following the training in Vancouver, we will set a date for late April to get together and work on the demands as a package, so if anyone has anything else that they would like the committee to consider, please get it in soon. We already have quite a lot of data to go through and I want to again thank everyone for their help.

Following the April meeting, we will agian get together in late May to finalize everything so there will be no problem having everything prepared and ready to be exchanged on July 4th as planned.

As an aside, the company did approach me around a month ago to see if we would consider attending a joint bargaining training session with them. They explained that these sessions were presente by HRSDC and many other Unions had participated with them in the past. I explained that we had 4 rank and file members on our team and that if the company would committ to pay their wages and expenses, we would surely consider attending. Though they said that they would get back to me in about a week, needless to say that was the last we heard about it.

They did tell us that their team would consist of Vern Graham (VP of Engineering), Anthony Manconi (the Manager of TP&E replacing Gord Pozzobon), Brad Rota (an LR officer), Jackie Romaine (an LR Officer) and Paul Wajda (the Director of LR, replacing Steve Samosinski).

Our team consists of Jim Daniel (local chair and acting Director from BC), Gary McDougal (local chair from MB), Bill Brake (local chair from Toronto), David Scott (local chair from Montreal), Jeremy Spikula (Director, Eastern Region) and myself.

Getting a good contract takes diplomacy, professionalism and some amount of skill and experience, and only one thing is certain, at the end of the day, when the dust clears.... there will be an agreement.

Take care and stay safe. We'll talk soon,

Bill Brehl
President
TCRC MWED