21 November 2007
As reported in our website message of July 26, 2007, negotiations for the FS Group have gotten off to a slow start this round. We did serve notice to bargain on March 6, 2007 but the Treasury Board Secretariat was undergoing a number of staff changes. There have been two negotiators assigned since that time and the result was that the employer’s proposals only began to materialize in late September.
In early October, we met to discuss the issues that resulted from the last round but nothing really got resolved. We expect to exchange bargaining proposals in early December but we don’t expect to start the process until February 2008. PAFSO has a lot of proposals this round and it may take longer than normal to review and, hopefully, reach an agreement on some of these issues.
On November 13, we learned that the TBS negotiator had been replaced making this the third negotiator assigned to the FS group since notice to bargain was served. We are optimistic that once the parties have exchanged bargaining proposals bargaining will be more structured and will adapt to what is normally expected in the collective bargaining process.