Dear friends,
As some of you may know, the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers (PAFSO), of which my husband, along with more than a thousand Canadian Foreign Service Officers, is a member, has been without a work contract since July 1st, 2011. The negotiations which were to lead to a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) broke down earlier this winter and, in March, PAFSO's membership gave a resounding mandate to their union for labor action to begin. Since April 2nd PAFSO has been in a legal position to strike and has judiciously used this job action mandate to demonstrate the importance of a quality Foreign Service for Canada, its economy and prosperity, and its foreign policy and immigration objectives to the Employer and to Canadians.
The one outstanding issue has to do with pay comparability between the Foreign Service (FS) group and other Public Service professional groups such as Commerce Officers (CO), Economists (EC) and Lawyers (LA). Over the last several years, due to various reorganizations and restructurings within the Departments where FS are employed, numerous positions have been either reclassified as being open to FSs, COs, ESs and / or LAs, created outright as being available to members of those various employment groups, or just more or less randomly staffed with employees of any and all of these groups. It is important to note that job classification is an administrative process based on rigid civil service rules – these equivalencies were not pulled out of a hat. They do, however, provide much-desired (from management's standpoint) flexibility for staffing. Employees of these other groups benefit from this unstated equivalence when they are assigned to postings outside of Canada, in positions that are classified FS.
To PAFSO, these equivalencies mean that FSs, COs, ECs and LAs are, well, equivalent. Therefore we seek to have our pay scales adjusted to reflect that fact – as employees of the latter three groups receive higher salaries, at levels deemed equivalent by the Employer, than FS employees. Said adjustment has been estimated to cost $4.2M over the course of the duration of the CBA currently under negotiation, or about 1.5% of the total pay envelope for the FS group. In the meantime the economic impact of PAFSO's job action has already been estimated by the industry to have reached $280M *in the tourism sector alone* for *this summer*. Already some Canadian universities have to scramble to readjust their orientation weeks as their international students will more than likely not receive that student authorizations and (if required) visas in time to arrive for the beginning of the school year.
Last week PAFSO offered to the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) to go into binding arbitration to finally put an end to this dispute. TBS's president, Minister Tony Clement, replied that the TBS would accept arbitration provided PAFSO agreed to various conditions. It turns out that one of the conditions to which the TBS wanted PAFSO to agree was for the arbitration board to be instructed to *not* take into account the salary scales of the CO, EC and LA groups (basically to disregard key provisions of the Public Service Labor Relations Act). All the while the Employer maintains that it is negotiating "in good faith" and that is has tabled a "fair and just offer". You will understand that PAFSO refused this condition. Hence, there will be no arbitration board and the labor conflict continues.
If you have made it this far, thank you. If you are Canadian, please write to Tony Clement at tony.clement@tbs-sct.gc.ca or tweet him at @TonyclementCPC as well as your MP. Let Minister Clement and your MP know that you want the Government to treat its Foreign Service fairly and equitably. Let him know what you think of wasting hundreds of millions of dollars to save $4.2M. Let him know that unfairness, pettiness and arbitrariness are not Canadian values.
Thank you.
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