A tentative agreement has been signed and will be presented to the members once the translation is available. In the coming weeks, we will be sending all members a ratification kit and will be scheduling information sessions. Following these, we will be opening the voting period online. We aim to have sent the ratification kits by early to mid November, and will aim to host information sessions throughout November and into early december. The voting period should be completed by mid to late December. More details with exact dates will be communicated to members as they are scheduled.
Ratification of this new collective agreement is in the hands of the IT Group members. If members vote for this tentative agreement, the collective agreement will be ratified. If members vote against this agreement, the Group will present a case in front of an arbitrator in the coming months, who will make a binding decision.
Over the past months of meetings with the Treasury Board (TB), your bargaining team has worked hard to get you the best deal possible. We have arrived at a deal that your IT Group Bargaining Team believes is the best path forward for IT Group members.
At the beginning of bargaining, I shared with you the bargaining priorities that your bargaining team extracted out of surveys, emails and numerous meetings with IT Group members. Your bargaining team has fought hard to address those priorities. This deal makes important progress on fair pay, improved training and career advancement, and supports and protects our collective agreement language against contracting out. It will put more money in the pockets of thousands of workers and will finally resolve our longstanding and unfair lack of pay parity.
Your bargaining team is proud to report that after years of fighting, we have reached pay parity with the IT workers at the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), and this parity will be applied at the first year of the collective agreement. This means that IT members are the only federal public servants that will have received more than the 1.50% pay increase in 2021. This also means that IT Group members that were in the Group in 2021 will see a significant increase to their retroactive pay. A long time injustice is finally corrected for all our members, and this correction will be applied to the very first day of this collective agreement.
With almost $5 million a year of new money for a dedicated Training and Development Fund, IT Group workers will have better access to the professional training they deserve. This will support career advancement and help reduce contracting out in a time of rapid technological change.
For years PIPSC has been leading the way on the fight against contracting out – with our IT Group members leading the way. This deal preserves language in the collective agreement against contracting out, despite the government’s efforts to remove these protections.
While the government is finally taking action to crack down on wasteful contracting out, make no mistake, we’ll keep up the pressure until we get the job done.
Detailed information, which will include the full text of the tentative agreement, will be provided in the upcoming weeks once it has been fully translated. In the meantime, here is a brief summary of improvements according to your listed priorities.
This is a 4 year deal, starting December 22, 2021, and ending December 21, 2025.