IBEW members to strike CN Rail midnight Friday
(The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, System Council Number 11, issued the following news release on March 22.)
MONTREAL – “CN signal and communications workers will stop working Friday midnight. The picket lines will go up. Another CN strike is about to begin,” says Kevin Kearns, IBEW General Chairman.
This evening the union gave corporation the required 72-hour notice.
IBEW members install, maintain and repair CN’s signals and communications systems including highway warning systems, fibre optic networks and the centralized traffic control system. The union represents about 730 CN employees across Canada.
“We are disappointed but we had no choice. There are a number of problems including standby provisions, quality of life issues, wages and benefits,” Kearns says. “But the real problem is trust.”
He says CN did not honour an agreement contained in the last contract which required the corporation to conduct a skills study.
“In full view of 730 IBEW members CN broke its word. It denied, evaded and delayed. Four years later we have no skills study. The skills study is very important to us. But making the corporation understand it can’t just break its word with no consequences is even more important,” Kearns says.
Kearns says the skills study would identify the level of technical expertise required of signal and communications employees and thus help the union to make comparisons to workers in other sectors.
“We’re underpaid compared to people doing similar jobs in other big companies,” Kearns says.
Kearns says the union expects the strike will have an immediate impact on CN’s bottom line.
"They are going to have to pay twice as much to get half the work done. With CN operating at capacity any degradation of the system that leads to deterioration of on-time rates is going to take money straight out of the $18 million