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Kotsopoulos fighting for collective agreements

Provincial Bill 8 could affect the collective agreements of hospital workers and threaten their wages and benefits, paramedic Bill Kotsopoulos says.
Provincial Bill 8 could affect the collective agreements of hospital workers and threaten their wages and benefits, paramedic Bill Kotsopoulos says.

Kotsopoulos, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 139, has gone to Sudbury today along with about a dozen unionized health care workers
to address the province's Standing Committee on Justice and Social Policy about Bill 8.

Under Bill 8, Kotsopoulos said, a health care union and an employer could be ordered to address “certain issues” through collective bargaining.

“And in the event that they fail to do so, they could be subject to an order requiring them to reduce wages or benefits, or to eliminate no-contracting out or successor rights protections contained in collective agreements,” Kotsopoulos said.

Backs it up
CUPE Local 139 represents 530 service and clerical employees at the North Bay General Hospital, Kotsopoulos said, but Bill 8, subtitled ‘The Commitment to the Future of the Medicare Act, could affect unionized workers at every Ontario hospital.

“Our perspective is the protection of our current collective agreement and any other ones that may be negotiated in the future too,” Kotsopoulos said.

Ontario Health and Long Term Care Minister George Smitherman was in North Bay last month and said he’d spoken to CUPE Ontario president Sid Ryan and reassured him Bill 8 would not jeopardize unionized positions.

“That’s fine and we appreciate what he says, but we have to make sure that he backs it up too,” Kotsopoulos said.

No government has the authority
CUPE will be asking for amendments to Bill 8 that will protect collective agreements, although the union doesn't want the bill scrapped, Kotsopoulos said.

“Mr. Smitherman said that it will not affect any current collective agreements," Kotsopoulos said, "but that leaves the door open to any collective agreements that we will be bargaining for in the next eight months in hospitals in Ontario.”

Kotsopoulos’s message to the committee is that, “present and future collective agreements be maintained and that no government has the authority walk in and take our collective agreements away.”

A prominent Toronto labour law firm has provided CUPE with a legal interpretation of Bill 8, Kotsopoulos said, “so we’re going on their guidance that there is a possibility that our collective agreements can be dismantled and that’s what we’re worried about, and that’s why we’re going to Sudbury: to protect our collective agreements.”