Thank you, Mr. Chair. As far as a place to read the safeguards and guidelines, the difficulty there is that the majority would come from jurisprudence, from case law, from accepted principles of labour and employment law.
So if I could run through a hypothetical scenario that would apply to the vast majority of our employees that are unionized; therefore, the Collective Agreement applies and labour law would apply, which is how we reference the law that applies to unionized work settings. If we follow through with the scenario of we have an employee
identified for layoff, we choose to direct appoint them into a position where there is presently an incumbent and the end results of that would be that the employing department then is dismissing the incumbent and removing them from the workplace.
I can tell you from my experience in labour relations, what would then happen is that employee, who is a member of the union, would go to their union, the union would disagree that it’s a valid termination, they would allege it’s a termination without just cause and file a grievance on behalf of that employee. Then the grievance process kicks in, which is established under the Collective Agreement, where they file the grievance, it goes through the various stages where the employer is required to respond to the grievance. If the parties cannot come to a resolution on their own, the grievance is then referred to arbitration, so it goes before a third party neutral arbitrator, where the labour jurisprudence very much comes into play because that will guide the determination of the arbitrator as to whether or not the employer had just cause to remove the incumbent. Should the arbitrator disagree with the employer’s position and find that we did not have just cause, the more-often-than-not remedy is that that employee is provided the option, as a remedy, to be reinstated to their position in addition to the likelihood of back pay to cover the period of time that they had been removed from their employment without cause.