Disagreement over level of coverage offered by company
When a long-time employee’s office was moved from London, Ont., to Mississauga, Ont., he requested the company help him cover the increased costs of living in a different city.
Bruce Verge began working at Bell Canada in 1998. In 2013, the director of service operations advised all 15 employees working at the London office “there was no way that he could guarantee that the office was going to stay open.”
On Jan. 23, 2014, the company advised all workers they had to choose between accepting severance, retiring or moving to one of the company’s locations in Mississauga or Toronto.
Verge was the only employee who accepted a move to another location.
Ghada Sharkawy, senior consultant in Bell’s human resources department, sent an email to the union Jan. 16, and attached a link to the company’s relocation assistance page located on Bell Canada's corporate intranet.
Part of the page sent was known as the regular plan and it included “mortgage interest differential plan (MID)” and “market locality differential plan (MLD)” details.
It allowed employees to claim for the differences when being moved to a housing market with higher costs of living.
The link also referred to the business transformation plan “to support employees who must move to take up a new position under a business transformation initiative” which also covered certain moving expenses for employees but didn’t include the MID or MLD plans.
On Jan. 17, Sharkawy told a union representative that the maximum a technician could claim was $25,000 for moving expenses. The representative eventually sent a link to Verge about the regular plan and it was assumed he would be covered under that plan.
During a Feb. 10 conference call, Verge was advised that he was being covered under the business transformation plan, not the regular plan, and he could not claim for MID or MLD expenses.
After signing off on the move and requesting moving expenses coverage, Verge and the union, Unifor, Local 46, filed a grievance. They claimed the collective agreement allowed reimbursement “in accordance with company practices” which would allow him to claim for the market differential expenses.
Retired employee Paul Cambridge testified Bell paid him about $28,000 to $30,000 over a five-year period when he was moved from Sarnia, Ont., to London and incurred higher housing costs transferring to a more expensive real estate market.
It was identified as “market locality diff” on his paystubs.
The union also argued the business transformation plan applied to workers in a “new position” which Verge clearly wouldn’t hold, because he would be doing the same job but in a new location.
Arbitrator Gordon Luborsky dismissed the grievance. “The company’s decision to limit Verge’s reimbursement for moving expenses to those stipulated in the business transformation plan did not violate the collective agreement.”
“Nor was it contrary to the principles of fair administration of the substantive contractual obligations under article 22.09, and consequently it was not ‘unfair’, ‘unreasonable’, ‘arbitrary’ or ‘discriminatory’ for the company to exercise its negotiated rights in the manner that it did in the circumstances of this case, as much as that will have, regrettably, occasioned significant financial hardship to Verge,” said Luborsky.
The decision to compensate Verge under the business transformation plan, instead of the regular plan was warranted, according to Luborsky.
“It is clear on the evidence before me that the requirement for the move in office locations was caused by a ‘business transformation initiative’ in the sense that the company determined to close the London office and consolidate and move the work from that office to other appropriate locations in Ontario for legitimate business reasons that it was entitled to do under the terms of the collective agreement.”
And the testimony provided by Cambridge was discounted. “From this singular event, I am asked by the union to infer a company practice of paying at least the MLD benefit for employees in Verge’s situation, which may be worth many tens of thousands of dollars to Verge over a five-year period,” said Luborsky.
Reference: Bell Canada and Unifor, Local 46. Gordon Luborsky — arbitrator. Evan VanDyk for the employer. Melissa Kronick for the employee. May 16, 2017.
