Edmonton transit union says city refuses to negotiate new deal

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Edmonton’s transit union is accusing city leadership of bad-faith negotiating and lodging a complaint signalling civic labour tensions could be on the rise yet again.

Negotiations were slated to kickstart Tuesday after the Edmonton Transit Service (ETS) employees’ collective agreement expired on Dec. 30, 2023. But Steve Bradshaw, president of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 569, said the City of Edmonton refused to proceed if the union’s strategic advisors were present. The ATU instructed its lawyers to file a complaint with the Alberta Labour Relations Board for bad-faith bargaining on Tuesday.

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“It feels like the city is playing hardball for all of these strategic reasons. There’s no good reason for them to bar anyone from our table, but they’re doing it to us, they’re doing it to others,” Bradshaw said.

Bradshaw told Postmedia Civic Service Union (CSU) 52 president Lanny Chudyk and Liam Peruamaki, representing the Coalition for Edmonton Civic Unions (CECU), had accompanied ATU negotiators to a meeting but the city would not proceed. ATU would not tell the city who they can bring, so the city can’t tell them who they can bring along, Bradshaw said.

ATU, Bradshaw said, is ready to bargain any time — as long as they aren’t told who they can and can’t bring to the table.

“It’s creating a bad working relationship. When that happens, you have services that aren’t getting attended to properly. It’s lowering morale, it’s causing all kinds of side problems within the city’s workforce,” Bradshaw said. “We are prepared to (bargain) anytime. We are not prepared to be told who we can and cannot have at the bargaining table.

“It’s a bit of a standoff.”

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Negotiations have already been delayed as ATU waited for the city to wrap up negotiations with CSU 52. The city narrowly avoided a major strike when it reached an eleventh-hour deal with City of Edmonton and Edmonton Public Library workers on March 14.

Peruamaki, with the local union coalition, was present during negotiations for CSU 52 workers and the city also took issue with its bargaining committee, Bradshaw said. But CSU 52 and ATU are both members of the coalition.

Having other labour leaders present during negotiations is not unheard of, according to Bradshaw.

“(The city was) trying to force CSU to take the same deal that other unions got, including ATU,” he said. “The point is, that if they expect us to take the same deal, then they should expect us to be at the same table. That’s kind of the point.

“They need to know that we are a coalition and we do work together.”

Postmedia has reached out to the City of Edmonton for comment.

lboothby@postmedia.com

@laurby

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