Canadian National Railway (CN) and 1,700 of its locomotive engineers have agreed to settle a new contract through talks and arbitration, in a deal which “immediately” ends the engineers’ five-day-old strike.
Montreal-based CN and the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, which represents the engineers, have agreed “to move forward with a process that gives the parties flexibility to negotiate issues further, but also ensures finality through binding arbitration of issues that remain in dispute,” CN CEO Hunter Harrison said in a release Wednesday.
While CN said Wednesday afternoon that the strike “will end immediately” it did not give an exact time for CN’s regularly scheduled freight service to resume.
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“We have always sought, since starting negotiations 14 months ago, to achieve a settlement with the TCRC through negotiations or binding arbitration,” Harrison said.
CN and the TCRC will continue talks to resolve “all issues” related to wages, benefits and work rules, CN said. Failing that, the parties’ wages and benefits offers will be subject to “final, binding arbitration.”
CN said the company and union can also agree to submit work-rule issues to binding arbitration, but only if they mutually agree on the ones that should be subject to arbitration.
Key among those work-rule issues, the company said Wednesday it will keep Tuesday’s pledge to roll back the monthly mileage cap for locomotive engineers to the previous 3,800 miles from the 4,300-mile cap it put in place Nov. 28.
The engineers’ maximum monthly mileage was capped at 3,800 miles in its previous contract, which expired at the end of December 2008.
Near the end of its last round of talks with the union before the strike began Saturday, CN had announced a unilateral move to change the engineers’ work conditions, adding 500 miles per month under the mileage cap and imposing a wage hike of 1.5 per cent. The union served CN with 72 hours’ strike notice shortly afterward.
“Intense bargaining”
The agreement between CN and the CTRC followed the introduction Monday of back-to-work legislation in the House of Commons by federal Labour Minister Rona Ambrose.
The back-to-work bill, introduced for first reading Monday, had been scheduled for Wednesday’s agenda in the Commons, along with a government motion to speed its passage through second and third reading in one sitting.
In a statement Wednesday, Ambrose said the agreement between CN and the TCRC was reached through “intense bargaining between the two sides over the last 24 hours.” Ongoing talks will include federal mediators as well as an arbitrator, who Ambrose said she will appoint.
“Canada is still at the early stages of a recovery from the global economic downturn and could not afford slowdowns and stoppages in such a critical component of the national infrastructure,” she said.
“Our preference is always to have the two sides reach an agreement and we are pleased they did so in this situation. They will now be able to move forward and, working together, create a constructive labour relations environment within CN.”
