A Kelowna modular home building company has been ordered to pay the union representing its employees $30,000.
A labour relations arbitrator found SRI Kelowna to be in violation of the collective bargaining agreement set up with United Steelworkers Local 1-423.
The union filed a grievance against SRI in February 2022, claiming the company changed the wage scale without authorization despite the concluded bargaining of the collective agreement in December 2021.
The employer stated it was an innocent mistake made over the challenge of attracting new staff and SRI was losing business to its competitors.
To combat the 220 per cent increase in backlogs, the company hired a third-party recruiter and applied for the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP) in the summer of 2021.
In order to be part of the TFWP, an employer must prove that it has not been able to hire staff locally by advertising for at least 30 days with an “appropriate wage” determined by categories under the TFWP. SRI chose a category with an “appropriate wage” minimum of $20 per hour, which did not fall in line with the collective bargaining agreement that started employees at $18.27 per hour for their first 60 days effective July 1, 2021, and again agreed upon during bargaining in December of the same year.
The union was awarded $30,000 in compensation from SRI for breaching the bargaining authority.
Local 1-423 also requested that SRI compensate more senior employees $2.62 per hour for 60 working days and $1.63 per hour for the next 60 days, estimated at $2,550 per employee. Instead, the union was awarded $1,500 to be paid out by SRI to each employee working full-time as of Jan. 12, 2022, and did not receive compensation above the set rate of the collective agreement.
While the employer argued that no employees lost any money and the arbitrator Randall K Noonan agreed that “no employees were paid less than the rates established by the collective agreement, the more senior employees were deprived of an opportunity to bargain a higher rate of pay had the employer been candid about its plans during collective bargaining.”
Noonan found that in this case, it is appropriate to award damages both to the union and to some of its members.
“I will reserve jurisdiction to deal with any issues that arise out of the interpretation or implementation of this award… Any such disputes will be dealt with in an expedited manner in a process that I will determine after consultation with the parties,” Noonan added in his decision.
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