Collective bargaining and our collective agreements play a vital role in stopping privatization and creating good pay and employment conditions for local workers. The benefits of good jobs need to be shared broadly in our communities. Bargaining strong language and good pay has a positive effect on communities.
We must continue to negotiate no contracting out language. And we also have to negotiate collective agreement provisions to bring contracted-out work back in-house.
At a local level we need to identify areas of work that should be contracted-in, and gather persuasive evidence and arguments. We need to develop concrete proposals and work with our allies to achieve them. A number of CUPE locals have made important headway on contracting-in. And a new workshop is now available through Union Development to encourage CUPE locals to bring contracted-out work back in house.
We also need to:
- Call for fair wage policies for public sector agencies so that more workers in the community can benefit from higher wages. A fair wage policy means that any company that has a contract with local public agencies must guarantee to pay their workers wages that are in line with municipal policy. We will commit to research on fair wage policies that can be distributed to our locals.
- Press for measures to ensure our employers workforce reflects the full racial and ethnic diversity of our communities.
- Advocate for community-wide employment equity policies. This means that anyone doing business with municipalities or public sector agencies would be required to demonstrate that their workforce is representative of the diversity within our communities.