Conductors, yardmen and traffic co-ordinators at Canadian National Railway (CN) expect to know by the end of this month whether they have a mandate to walk off the job.
The Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, whose bargaining unit in this case includes about 2,700 unionized CN employees, said Sunday its negotiations with the Montreal-based company broke down last Friday and no further talks were yet scheduled.
“We have hardly begun discussions before the employer wants to end them,” Bryan Boechler, spokesperson for the Teamsters’ negotiations committee, said in a release Sunday. “And we all know that it takes two to tango.”
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The union said Sunday it “had no other choice” but to send mail-in strike vote ballots to eligible members.
The results of a mail-in vote are expected between now and the end of September, the Teamsters said, and barring any progress in talks with the company, a walkout or a lockout could therefore take place in the fall.
“We feel that they will lock us out or force a strike in order to have the government order arbitration,” Boechler said. “We invite the company to return to the bargaining table with an open attitude instead.”
Talks with CN began last May, the Teamsters said, as their collective agreement expired in July. There had been just six days of bargaining before CN requested conciliation, the union added.
CN, the union alleges, is proposing an agreement that eliminates all provisions for a rest period. A worker could then potentially be ordered to work 24 of 32 hours, and then re-start the same cycle eight hours later, the union said.
Assigning an arbitrator would disable the normal bargaining process, the union said, adding CN appears to want to use the federal Labour Code “to impose a settlement on the parties rather than bargain by mutual agreement.”
CN had no official comment as of Tuesday.
The situation, the union said, “strangely resembles” that of the labour dispute between CN and its locomotive engineers, also represented by the Teamsters, in late 2009.
The engineers had gone on strike Nov. 28 but reached an agreement with CN Dec. 2, after then-labour minister Rona Ambrose announced plans Nov. 30 to introduce back-to-work legislation.
The subsequent decision by Ambrose’s chosen arbitrator, Andy Sims, is binding on the railway and its engineers until Dec. 31, 2011.
