Collective bargaining talks between Canadian National Railway (CN) and the union for its 1,700 engineers ended Friday without an agreement and no further talks scheduled, the company and union said Monday.
But CN said late Monday it will go ahead anyway with plans to raise its unionized engineers’ wages and make changes to the mileage caps under which they operate, starting Saturday (Nov. 28).
CN and the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference (TCRC) had been in talks toward a contract to replace their previous agreement, which expired at the end of December last year. Talks had continued with the help of federal mediators since August, the union said.
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Affected TCRC members had already voted in favour of a strike mandate for use by their negotiators. The company noted Monday that TCRC and CN are now entitled to engage in a strike or lockout, respectively, with 72 hours’ notice. Neither side, however, appears to want to pull that trigger.
“We have offered CN further dates for which to continue negotiations but, to our surprise, CN has declined and we have not seen any change in their position over the weekend,” TCRC president Daniel Shewchuk said in the union’s release Monday.
“Nevertheless, our position is that we want to continue to negotiate but it is very difficult to negotiate when the other party agrees to an issue and the next day, removes it from the table.”
CN said it had “informed the union over the weekend of its intention to increase the engineers’ wages by 1.5 per cent and implement only one work rule change.”
CN’s TCRC-represented conductors now have a 4,300-mileage cap limitation, but its TCRC-represented engineers have a 3,800-mile cap, the railway said Monday. CN’s unilateral change to the engineers’ contract means “both groups of employees working in the locomotive cab will be working under one consistent rule, and the engineers will see an overall increase in their compensation.”
The company said it decided to invoke these contract changes “to move the company forward” after it “regrettably reached an impasse with the TCRC after bargaining in good faith with the union for more than a year.”
