Day of Mourning

 

Day of Mourning – April 28

Maybe you’ve never experienced a close call at work or been the victim of a serious incident. But chances are you know someone who has.

In Canada alone, 852 workers died from workplace-related injuries or illnesses, and another 232,629 suffered a lost-time injury or illness in 2015.*

April 28, is the International Day of Mourning.

It’s a day to remember those injured or killed on the job and those suffering from an occupational illness.

It’s a day to remember that every moment counts and to work safely for ourselves, our co-workers, our friends, and our families.

 

Life is full of choices. So is your pension.

Find out more about your OMERS pension plan by attending an OMERS Information Session. You’ll learn how your OMERS pension is calculated, how your bridge benefit works and more.

We’ll be in your area on April 26, 2017 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Belleville & District Fish & Game Club located at 170 Elmwood Drive, Belleville. The session is free and open to you and a guest – but hurry, space fills up quickly.

To register for this or another upcoming session, click here or call OMERS Client Services at 416.369.2444 or 1.800.387.0813.

If you can’t make it to a session, consider registering for an OMERS webinar.

See you there!

Regards,

OMERS Education & Training

 

One University Ave., Suite 400, Toronto, ON, M5J 2P1 t.416.369.2444 | 1.800.387.0813 w.omers.com

Please take the time to answer a few questions regarding how you would like to see the new education and apprenticeship funding that we will receive due to the extension. We appreciate you taking the time to fill out the survey. The more people to respond the better, this will give us a clear picture as to what our members feel would be most beneficial.

 

​If you have any questions please feel free to contact a member of the executive. ​

Kevin French-President, Jennifer Connor-VP West, Andrew Eves-VP East and Liz James-Chief Steward will be meeting with the board to discuss best ways to allocate staffing funding to reach the most student need’s.  We would like your opinion on how you best feel additional staff could benefit your job classification.  Schools across the province were given additional funding for full-time CUPE positions that directly impact special education or promote healthy and safe school environments.  It is our perspective that all of our members promote healthy and safe schools but the government was specific in naming positions that the money had to go to.

The following job classifications are specified in the contract extension agreement to have additional staff allocation funding are: EA, YW, other special staffing related to special education, LRA, clerical, secretary, IT, custodian and maintenance.  Please know that there isn’t a huge amount of money available.  Everyone will have ideas as to how the money will be spent and we will do our best to bring as many ideas to the table, but not all ideas will be implemented.  We will take the most popular ones forward.

Please have your response in by April 7th.  One survey per member in the above groups.

If you have any questions please contact the Executive.

 

Contract Extension: Additional Staff Funding Survey

Let’s show solidarity to fellow union members who are not getting paid properly.

We plan this to occur every two week forward till Phoenix is fixed!

Too many Federal workers have gone for too long without being paid, with being underpaid, etc.

Rally will take place on Friday March 24th at 4:00 pm at MP Mark Gerretsen’s office at 841 Princess Street.

The following will be onsite:

Chris Snooks PSAC Area Council President 613-305-2297
Bill Bailey Regional Vice-President Ontario CSC 613-483-0236
Rej Bruneau UNDE President Local 641 613-305-2290
Catherine St-Georges UNDE Local 641 Public Relations 613-539-0552

 

 

Information on the Phoenix Pay System:

8,000 federal workers still stuck in Phoenix pay system backlog

By Monique Scotti National Online Journalist, Politics Global News

 

Deputy Minister of Public Works and Government Services Marie Lemay is pictured during a technical briefing on Thursday, Aug. 11, 2016.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

The federal government is still working to clear a backlog of pay files linked to the beleaguered Phoenix pay program, with officials providing no estimate for when the system will return to a “steady state.”

The latest update from Ottawa came on Wednesday, with the deputy minister of public services and procurement answering questions about the progress made over the last two months.

Government misses deadline on Phoenix pay system backlog
Marie Lemay, who has held a technical briefing every few weeks since the program’s meltdown last summer, assured reporters that work to fix Phoenix has continued over the winter. She acknowledged that there is still a backlog of around 8,000 files that need to be handled.

“We continue to work toward the elimination of our backlog,” Lemay said, noting that the majority of the remaining cases involve transfers and “acting assignments” in the public service.

READ MORE: How did this all start, and how did the Phoenix problems get so bad?

Of the 8,000 employees left in the backlog queue, she said, 5,000 have had at least some transactions closed and are waiting on others. The federal government has a total of around 300,000 people on its payroll.

“We are working hard (to clear) the remaining transactions as quickly as we can, but we’re dealing with very old files,” the deputy minister said.

WATCH: Phoenix pay system execs to get bonuses before workers receive money

In some cases, compensation advisers working for the department must research an employee’s pay history then manually input that information into Phoenix. It can take a full day to complete just one of those files, Lemay explained.

“This is a challenge that we’re facing with the cases in the backlog,” she said.
The backlog has diminished by about 2,000 files in the last month. According to Lemay, the government has continued to prioritize transactions that are critical for the end the fiscal year.

People who were overpaid, for instance, need to have their accounts sorted before they are taxed for the additional money they were handed.

By February, the department hopes to post information for employees that will set out service standards so they will have an idea of normal processing times.

At the moment, Ottawa isn’t meeting its 20-day service standard for new pay changes and requests, which are instead taking around 10 weeks to process.

The Phoenix pay system was rolled out in February 2016, but a steep learning curve and deep backlog of existing files led to a meltdown that affected tens of thousands of federal public servants.

The government has estimated it will cost $50 million to get things back to normal. Lemay said Wednesday that it’s likely that tally will increase.

As the crisis comes to an end, she added, her department is “more than ready” to investigate what went wrong with Phoenix. Lemay said she expects to find multiple “points of failure.”

© 2017 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

8 Negotiation Committee representatives from CUPE 1479 are attending the OSBCC conference in Richmond Hill.  This is a very important conference for our local.  Delegates will be updated on many issues including, but not limited too:

• • Chair Report including ELHT- Provincial Working Group Reports
  • Classification Meetings
  • Restructuring
  • Benefits

  We will be up dating members at the next union meeting on March 11, 2017.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  https://cupe.ca/cupe-ontario-president-addressed-education-workers-eve-strike-csdceo

This past weekend we tried out the possibility of offering General Meetings via Skype. Overall the trial was very successful. There was a little sound issue that will be easily fixed if we tried this again on a larger scale. The idea would be to rotate live locations between Belleville and Kingston with the Skype location in the opposite location. We know the struggles of having such a large geographic area and we are trying to problem solve with various options. We want our membership to be informed and active. We will try whatever it takes, this being the first step.

Let us know what you think.

Would you be interested in trying satellite meetings in Kingston and live in Belleville one month then switch for the following General Membership meeting?

On Saturday Jan. 21, 2017 there were votes on whether to extend our current collective agreement for another two years.  The contract was gone over and questions were answered.

Members of CUPE 1479 voted in favour of extending the current collective agreement with the new extension agreement items.  Unit 1 voted in favour of the extension and Unit 2 voted in favour.

For the very first time we tried a meeting via a Skype location.  Bancroft residents were able to view the meeting and cast their votes from Our Lady of Mercy.  We will be exploring other ways to incorporate this into our membership meetings.

Thank you to all the members who came out to vote!  Hopefully we will see that many at the next membership meeting in March!  Come out and bring another CUPE member!

 

Ontario’s Ministry of Education has been holding regional strategy sessions to discuss the well-being of students in our schools.

CUPE was invited to send 4 members to each of the regional sessions. Jen Connor attended the session for our region. This meeting took place in Ottawa and encompassed Ministry Staff, Management, Directors of Education, Students, Teachers, Community Partners and 4 CUPE Members.
In small groups, we discussed and completed guided activities centering around what well-being looks like, what conditions and supports are required to create positive learning environments and what indicators will determine success.
This was an important meeting for CUPE to be invited to. As frontline workers, we are often are the first to witness that a student is in distress. Our feedback to the Ministry is important to effectively plan for Well-Being strategies for our school communities and to help be the voice of our most vulnerable students.