The employer transferred several workers from the jobs they had bid for into a different department for an extended period. Management claimed the collective agreement did not protect assignments. The arbitrator found that it did, given that the transfers were not of short duration.
Faced with increasingly frequent temporary reassignments away from their home section into the Parcels section, four postal workers grieved. The union said that the reassignments violated the workers’ seniority rights.
Having used their seniority to successfully bid for the midnight shift in the Pubs and Admail section, four postal workers at the PO4 level found themselves being regularly moved into the Parcels section.
The reassignments began in 2008 and became more frequent. During the week of May 12-16, 2008 most of the workers from Pubs and Admail were reassigned to work for the whole week in the Parcels section.
The testimony of the workers affirmed their frustration at being unable to work in the section that they had bid into. The workers detailed a number of complaints.
The reassignment to Parcels was disadvantageous. The workers were taken out of their regular duty rotation and deprived of the opportunity to work with their friends. Their testimony was that they were given “all the dirty work” and were ineligible for overtime because they were not on the Parcel section’s equal opportunity list. Also, they were treated poorly and insulted by the regular Parcel workers who viewed them as interlopers.
Before the Arbitrator, the union argued that the reassignments violated the workers’ seniority rights under the collective agreement.
Reassignments temporary
The employer argued that management has the right to move employees from one section to another to meet operational needs. There was no language in the collective agreement restricting this fundamental management right. The workers were only temporarily reassigned and were performing essentially the same job tasks in the same building during their regular work hours.
The language in the collective agreement governing duty rotation and seniority preferences did not confer proprietary job rights, the employer said. If the workers had been teased that was unfortunate, the employer said, but there was no record of any formal or informal complaints.
The grievance was a test of seniority rights against management’s right to direct its workforce, the Arbitrator said.
Citing Wozney, the Arbitrator said that clear, cogent and direct evidence is required to support a claim that contractual work protection rights have been violated by management in the direction of its workforce.
However, decisions in Allen et al and Britton found that moving employees from their normal work section can violate seniority rights, the Arbitrator said.
Unlike the previous agreement, in which specific situations where seniority could be used to exercise choice were listed, the language in the collective agreement in question was more generic. However, elsewhere in the contract it was made clear that bidding on vacant assignments was to be “granted by order of seniority.”
Some proprietary rights
In this case, the analysis in Allen et al and Britton applied, the Arbitrator said.
“There is express language in the collective agreement that bases choice of section, indirectly through bidding on assignments, on seniority. Thus, following Arbitrator Norman’s analysis in Britton, through the exercise of seniority, employees do have some proprietary rights to work in the section into which they have bid. These rights are not absolute as Wozney makes clear. Bearing in mind that [the collective agreement] speaks in terms of ‘preferences’ and that the employer has the right to direct the workforce, management still retains discretion to determine its priorities and to move employees across sections to meet operational needs. But this discretion must be exercised in a way that recognizes that employees have used their seniority rights to select their assignments and hence their sections.”
It was notable that the workers in this case were not reassigned for a couple of hours, or even a day, the Arbitrator said.
“Most were reassigned for the entire week of May 12-16, 2008. I conclude that this degree of reassignment violated the seniority rights of employees who bid into Pubs and Admail. Providing employees the right to use seniority to bid into the section of their choice becomes meaningless if they end up working extensively in a section which they did not choose.”
The grievance was sustained.
