Workers claim that their rights to decide on union representation have been taken away
Kevin Wilson
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Feb 28/01) - Some employees at the Sirius Diamond facility want to know why they're not getting to vote on unionizing.
"The biggest issue that I had personally was what are our rights," wonders Tom Lupton. "The board made this decision," he adds, without giving them the opportunity to vote.
Lupton, along with co-workers Shane Fox and Maxine Finnemore, claim that their rights to decide on union representation have been taken away from them.
"All I want is my vote," says Lupton. The three employees claim that a majority of the employees agree with them. To back up their statement, they showed a letter signed by 11 employees, including themselves. Fox says that two other employees are ready to sign the letter.
The Sirius cutting and polishing factory employs 30 workers, with 25 covered under the union certification.
The Union of Northern Workers (UNW), a component of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, was certified as the bargaining agent earlier this month.
The employees, however, shouldn't expect to be getting an opportunity to vote on certification anytime soon, according to UNW's president.
Georgina Rolt-Kaiser says the board has made its decision and that means Sirius is represented by the UNW. She added that all employees had been kept informed of new developments.
UNW's certification by the Canadian Industrial Relations Board followed months of wrangling between Sirius and the union. The drive for a union began in August 2000.
Ken Chiang, the CIRB officer who handled the Sirius file, says the three-member tribunal that certified Sirius based their decision on the fact that a majority of the workers had signed union cards. "That is normally the criteria," he said.
Under Federal labour law, a union is certified as the employee's bargaining agent when the CIRB verifies that a simple majority of the eligible workers sign union cards.
That's a sore point with Fox, Lupton and Finnemore, who allege that the UNW pressured workers to sign union cards.
"The union called me on a Saturday and told me they had more than 50 per cent of the cards signed," says Lupton.
Scott Wiggs, UNW's Director of Membership Services, says Federal labour laws require that the certification process "has to be posted in the workplace by the employer, so I'm going to assume that the workers knew," they would be automatically certified if a majority signed union cards.
