News - March 2011                        Previous Month         Following Month

Headlines of the current month's news items are listed immediately below. Click on the headline of your choice to see the entire text of the article.

A renewed and refreshed KeyInfo workplace information kit is now available on-line

Locals set to begin delegate selection, submission of resolutions

to our 2011 Triennial National Convention

Please stand by. Problems with our Web site were, and are, temporary!

Official call for submission of demands for new CFIA bargaining round

Transformation of Pay Administration Initiative

A renewed and refreshed KeyInfo workplace information kit is now available on-line
(Posted March 29, 2011)

The Agriculture Union’s KeyInfo workplace information kit is a valuable source of information on a wide variety of workplace issues and solutions. We have just completed one of its regular top-to-bottom updates. For greater ease of reference, we have reduced the number of topics to some two dozen by merging information. No important content has been lost.

In this day and age, virtually everyone has access to the Internet. So, in keeping with the Agriculture Union Green Policy, we have decided that from now on KeyInfo will be available only in electronic format on our Web site.

You will still be able to view, download and print any and all subject topics. And we are still committed to ensuring regular updates and additions to this handy information kit.

So, just click on the KeyInfo logo on the right-hand column of our Web site’s main page to access all these documents. Or, simply bookmark the page by clicking HERE.

Locals set to begin delegate selection, submission of resolutions to our 2011 Triennial National Convention
(Posted March 17, 2011)

The official call to our 2011 Triennial National Convention is now in the hands of all Agriculture Union Locals, beginning the countdown to the August 17 to 19 event in Vancouver, British Columbia

As part of this process, we’ve opened a new page on our Web site. You can access this page HERE and by clicking the Convention logo that figures prominently on our main Web page. Copies of Convention information can be viewed and downloaded as they are mailed to our Locals.

The Triennial National Convention is our Union’s supreme governing body, ensuring that we remain open and accountable to our membership.

Convention delegates discuss issues, set policy and elect our national and regional leadership. Over the course of the three-day Convention, they will deal with a wide range of important issues and matters. They will be called upon to:
           • debate and vote on resolutions submitted by both the National Council and Locals;
           • set a detailed union budget for the three-year period leading to the next Convention;
           • elect our Union’s national and regional leadership from among the Convention’s grassroots

                representatives; and
           • elect Agriculture Union delegates to the Triennial Convention of our bargaining agent, the Public Service

                Alliance of Canada (which is held the year after our own).

Selection of Convention delegates follows the procedure set out in our Union’s by-laws. Each Local has the right to at least one Convention delegate. The number of delegates a Local is able to send to Convention is democratically based on its membership size.

Local executives are now organizing two important tasks:
           • organizing a meeting to elect Convention delegates; and
           • preparing grassroots resolutions for submission to the National Office.

The deadlines for providing this information to the National Office are April 20th, 2011 for resolution and April 15th, 2011 for delegate selection.

Please stand by. Problems with our Web site were, and are, temporary!
(Posted March 15, 2011)

Anyone who spends time with a computer knows that technology is far from infallible. So it was with the Agriculture Union’s Web site, which went ‘down’ for much of last Friday. The problem rested with the company who ‘hosts’ our Web site. A major server failed, cutting off numerous client Web sites – including ours – from the outside world.

The company took this outage very seriously and scrambled to overcome this unexpected but major crisis. The good news is the site has been up-and-running since late Friday.

Coincidentally, over the next several days, we will be uploading numerous changes to our own Web site’s menu system to make it still more user-friendly. This may mean that access may be temporarily unavailable, but only for a few minutes at a time.

Thanks for bearing with us!

Official call for submission of demands for new CFIA bargaining round

(Posted March 3, 2011)

A new round of contract negotiations for our Canadian Food Inspection Agency members is officially underway. Our bargaining agent, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, has issued a Program of Demands and Input Call.

All CFIA members now have an opportunity to put forward suggested improvements to the existing collective agreement. Please contact your local executive if you have any demands you would like considered.

All bargaining demands must be received in the Agriculture Union National office by 4 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, April 1. Then, they will be forwarded to the PSAC.

For your information, the PSAC's Program of Demands and official Input Call are available for viewing by clicking on the following links:

                                          Program of Demands                      Input Call

Transformation of Pay Administration Initiative

(Posted March 1, 2011)

The Conservative government’s Transformation of Pay Administration Initiative has started. This project that will see all pay services positions across federal departments relocated to Miramichi, New Brunswick. When completed, 553 jobs will be created at a new Centre of Expertise (COE). A parallel project will see the current pay system replaced by one based on commercially available, off-the-shelf software. The new pay system is to be rolled out in 2015.

The consolidation of pay services project will be rolled out in two phases. All affected members of the Agriculture Union are covered in the first phase involving departments using the PeopleSoft software that underlies the government’s existing Human Resource Management System (HRMS). Transfer of work from GC HRMS Departments to the COE will be done over the next five years in four waves, with the following proposed start dates, each lasting approximately 18 months:

          • Wave 1 – January 2011;
          • Wave 2 – June 2012;
          • Wave 3 – April 2014; and
          • Wave 4 – April 2015.

Phase II will consist of a feasibility study with respect to consolidation of Non-PeopleSoft Departments.

It is not known at this point which Departments will be in which wave. Anticipatory staffing for Wave 1 began in January. Deployment opportunities were offered to the current compensation community. Travel relocation directives will apply. We are aware that a problem with the deployment opportunities was identified for members working for CFIA. This issue was raised at the meeting with Treasury Board and it was recognized that CFIA employees should not have been screened out of the process. Internal and external (for AS-1 Trainee) recruitment processes have also been run.

The Agriculture Union is having discussions with management at all Departments where we have members employed in pay services to ensure that their rights are fully protected during this process. A Union/Management Committee between our bargaining agent, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, and Treasury Board level has been struck and an initial meeting took place on February 16, 2011.

The PSAC is very interested in setting up an AS Advisory Group and is looking for union activists from the compensation community to participate. If you are interested, please get in touch with our National Office. There is also a need to get home e-mail addresses for members of this community in order that the union can communicate directly with affected members to provide them with the latest information as it becomes available. If you have a home e-mail address and would like to be added to the mailing list, please let us know.

More information about this project will be posted as it becomes available.