Tuesday January 25 2022
In December, Arbitrator Flynn ruled on CUPW’s application over whether Personal Contact Items (PCI) that RSMCs deliver on the weekend season are pensionable and included in the pay equity agreement.
Arbitrator Flynn ruled on our historic pay equity win for RSMCs, and she retains jurisdiction on some matters of application and implementation of the award.
So when Canada Post Corporation decided it would not treat PCIs delivered on weekends by RSMCs during the 2019 peak season as pensionable pay and service, CUPW saw this as a breach of the award’s terms and took this before Arbitrator Flynn.
Our position was that all PCI deliveries were to be covered by the Memorandum of Agreement that implements the award. CPC’s position was that the PCIs delivered on weekends are overtime work and thus not covered by the MOA.
The arbitrator accepted the Corporation’s view that these PCIs are overtime work and therefore not in her jurisdiction. Overtime was not part of the pay equity analysis and the arbitrator’s retained jurisdiction is restricted.
CUPW is disappointed with this decision, because it means that more RSMC work may move from weekdays to weekends to become a per-piece, non-pensionable payment rather than part of our wages.
We continue to work to hold CPC to their commitments on the implementation of the pay equity decision. The decision is won, but as you can see from this decision, we still have important work to do. A key part of this will be to ensure that eight-hour routes are created.
With the work of the hourly rate committee and a more accurate way of measuring routes, we will continue our struggle to ensure all work performed by RSMCs is compensated.
In solidarity,