Following the meeting of the National Executive Committee on April 3. 2020, the CBC and APS accepted the renewal of the collective agreement until March 31, 2022. The joint announcement of this agreement was made today Monday, April 6, 2020.
The Agreement to Renew
The exchanges between the parties to examine the possibility to renew the agreement, have been going on since October 2019 when APS and the CBC had met under the auspices of the National Joint Committee to raise the possibility of renewal. The duration article of the agreement contained a provision clause (23.2) to stretch the end date of the contract to March 31, 2022, if the two parties agreed to do so. « I believe we have a good deal to redress and compensate errors that we felt were affecting adversely some of the members, » said National President Stéphane Désautels at the end of the National Executive meeting last Friday, « The employer demonstrated a willingness to review and modify points of contention to the benefit of our members who are also employees of CBC/ Radio-Canada. This is a win-win result ».
In essence, APS had four points of contention, it wished to resolve to keep the agreement alive: salary issues with the more senior members of the union, interpretation disagreements over the midpoint of salary bands and payment of on-call premiums and finally the creation of a new and unauthorized class of casual workers.
All four irritants were finally resolved through mediation and negotiations between the two sides to the benefit of APS members who will be the ultimate winners in the short and long run as the detailed account of those settlements will be presented to you on this Web site starting on Tuesday, April 7, 2020. At that time, we will be explaining the renewal provision along with the salary increases for those employees left out of the loop following past band increases. Wednesday we will cover Mediation agreements for employees on-call as well as the agreement covering employees having reached the midpoint of their salary bands until last October. Thursday will be dedicated to the agreement concerning Script Editors.
Financial Gains
All those changes involve major financial settlements for a great number of our members. Thus, the Tuesday communiqué will explain the 2 or 3 % salary increases to be paid out in April for the next two years for most of our members who were situated above the midpoint of their bands when the corporation increased bands in the past. (APS will contact the concerned members individually). For those agreements to be presented on Wednesday, financial gains will be available for all employees working on “on-call” status while some 30 members involved in the other agreement have already collected retroactive payments worth thousands of dollars for each. All employees reaching the midpoint of their salary bands in the future will also benefit from this agreement. Finally, for the Script Editors, a retroactive payment representing 12.5% of salaries paid for the last two years will be awarded to the 9 employees involved.