Thursday, April 19, 2007

CN Rail employees could be on the job again this morning as federal back-to-work legislation received royal assent Wednesday evening and the Canadian National Railway Co. lifted its lockout on some workers.

The legislation -- which was bulldozed through the House of Commons on Tuesday after organizations such as the Canadian Wheat Board and the Vancouver Port Authority lobbied the government to take immediate action -- doesn't technically come into effect until 4 p.m. today, but CN spokesman Mark Hallman said the company would welcome employees back sooner.

"Now that the back-to-work legislation has received royal assent, CN is lifting the lockout and employees are invited back to work as soon as possible," Hallman said.

CN locked out employees last week in Vancouver, North Vancouver and other CN yards in British Columbia and Ontario in response to rotating strikes staged by the United Transportation Union after its members refused to ratify a tentative agreement reached in February after the back-to-work legislation was first introduced.

At that time, workers had been off the job for two weeks, causing an estimated $1-billion backlog at the Port of Vancouver.

In a news released issued late Tuesday, the UTU, which represents 2,800 conductors and yard workers at CN, criticized the passage of the bill, challenging the need for back-to-work legislation when it was CN, not the union, that had slowed rail traffic by imposing the lockout.

Mark Thompson, professor emeritus at the Sauder School of Business at UBC, said the federal government has not been willing to tolerate a railroad strike.

"Certainly this government and its immediate predecessor ... are not willing to tolerate much disruption to our economy because of a railroad strike," Thompson said.

And as Canada's largest railway company gears back up for business, the country's second-largest, the Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd., announced it was breaking off talks with its unionized maintenance workers. The Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, which represents CP's 3,000 maintenance-of-way employees, have been without a contract since Dec. 31, 2006 and could go on strike as early as April 25.

Thompson is not surprised by CP's announcement.

"Once the employer figures out the union can't strike then the incentive on them to settle is diminished," Thompson said. "So when I heard that CP wasn't interested in bargaining I thought, 'Well, when they've got the government to do the heavy lifting for them, why would they make any concessions?' "

One incentive to negotiate may be found under the new legislation's "final offer" provisions. Once work resumes, both CN and the UTU will be asked to submit their final offer to an arbitrator, who will pick between the two offers and make it the new collective agreement, a process the UTU has referred to as the "Russian roulette trap of arbitration by final offer selection."

The parties can avoid the process by reaching their own agreement before the arbitrator makes his choice.

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© The Vancouver Sun 2007

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