IMPORTANT NOTICE to UNA Members regarding Scheduling Optimization

Heather Smith (President of UNA), Kris Farkas (Manager of Labour Relations, UNA) and David Harrigan (Director of Labour Relations, UNA) met with Dennis Holliday (Director of Labour Relations and Negotiations, Alberta Health Services) and Deb Gordon (Chief Nursing Officer Alberta Health Services) on October 17, 2012, to discuss scheduling optimization.

On the whole the meeting was productive and there was lots of open, frank discussion.

It is the intention of AHS to streamline the development of schedules/rotations and make schedules as "efficient" as possible. AHS has been developing provincial "guidelines" to assist managers and rotation builders. This means, among other things, increasing the number of full time employees, and decreasing the number of part time employees.

Our positive discussion saw both parties agreeing on the following items:

- AHS may have a different internal system for approving or denying requests, but the employer cannot and will not unreasonably deny requests for permanent evenings, permanent nights or weekend workers.

- The employer will not post new schedules, and oblige employees to choose new FTE's if their current FTE is not reflected in the new schedule/rotation.

We then talked about the use of position elimination (Article 15) for anyone whose FTE did not appear on the new schedule. The employee would get notice of position elimination and have the right to take a vacancy or displace another employee within the bargaining unit. We explained that this too would be a violation, based on an grievance arbitration decision several years ago (informally referred to as the Devon decision). They indicated they were considering questioning the interpretation of the collective agreement flowing from the Devon decision. We explained that we would view this as an extremely hostile action and would respond accordingly.

We told them they have two options to achieve the changes to schedules they desire, either change the collective agreement in negotiations or achieve the scheduling changes through attrition. We discussed at length how attrition could work.

No firm commitments were made, and we agreed to continue discussions - there will be no implementation until we have had further discussions.