Tri-Board school transportation workers will address Limestone District School Board trustees in advance of strike deadline.

Representatives of the seven employees who work for Tri-Board Student Transportation Services in Ontario plan to ask Limestone District School Board Trustees to intervene, at their meeting tonight, to avoid a strike.

The affected workers are members of CUPE 1479, and they are poised to walk off the job in a legal strike on Monday, April 3 if their proposal for a fair wage increase is not accepted.

They are on the agenda to plead their case at Wednesday night’s meeting at 6:00 p.m. at the Limestone board offices at 220 Portsmouth Avenue in Kingston.

Also on the agenda to speak are members of CUPE 1480 – education workers like educational assistants, early childhood educators, custodians, clerical staff – a majority of whom have endorsed a letter to Trustees asking them to pay the Tri-Board workers a fair wage.

“Tri-Board transportation planners are the lowest-paid of similar transportation planners across the province, earning 19% below the average,” said Liz James, President of CUPE 1479. “Trustees should use their power to direct Tri-Board to pay their workers a fair wage. It would cost them a tiny fraction of their budget.”

Tri-Board employees and CUPE 1479 and 1022 – representing education support workers at Algonquin & Lakeshore Catholic DSB and Hastings & Prince Edward DSB respectively – requested to speak at the other two transportation consortium controlling school boards’ Trustee meetings this week but were denied permission to make delegations.

The strike deadline is 12:01 a.m. Monday, April 3. The employer and workers’ bargaining committee have not scheduled a negotiating date before then but are working with a mediator appointed by the Ministry of Labour.

Quick Facts:

  • Tri-Board is a transportation consortium that is jointly controlled by Algonquin and Lakeshore Catholic District School Board (ALCDSB), Hastings and Prince Edward District School Board (HPEDSB) and Limestone District School Board (LDSB).
  • Tri-Board transportation planners design over 620 school bus routes in the Frontenac, Lennox & Addington, Prince Edward, and Hastings counties of eastern Ontario.
  • The cost to settle this dispute and avoid a disruptive strike is a tiny fraction of each of the three school boards’ budgets: less than $20,000 or only about $6,500 per school board – less than three one-thousandths of one percent of each board’s budget.

School Board

2022 Budget

1/3 of Wage Adjustment

Percentage of Total Budget

Limestone DSB

$270 million

$6,500

0.0024%

Hastings and Prince Edward DSB

$222 million

$6,500

0.0029%

Algonquin and Lakeshore CDSB

$177 million

$6,500

0.0037%
  • The Tri-Board managers filed for conciliation after only two days of bargaining last July. Three days of negotiations, with a conciliation officer appointed by the Ontario Ministry of Labour acting as an intermediary, took place January and February 2023. A fourth conciliation meeting between the two parties on March 17 did not result in an agreement.
  • A fair labour market adjustment wage increase is the major outstanding issue. The workers have already voted down a tentative agreement the included a lower wage offer from the employer.