Canadian National Railway (CN) has responded to its striking engineers’ claims that the company is uninterested in negotiations, by making a new offer Tuesday to the engineers’ union.
In what it called a “good faith effort to reach a settlement,” CN said Tuesday afternoon it would agree to binding arbitration on issues relating to wages and benefits.
On the matter of a cap for the number of miles an engineer can be directed to work in a month, CN said it would “roll back” its plans for a 4,300-mile monthly cap.
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Montreal-based CN last week made a unilateral change to the engineers’ working conditions, raising the monthly cap from 3,800 to 4,300.
The Teamsters Canada Rail Conference (TCRC), which represents the engineers, reiterated Tuesday that CN’s plans were what prompted the union to submit strike notice last week. The engineers have been picketing since Saturday.
CN said Tuesday it would roll back the cap to 3,800 miles, “on the condition that the TCRC withdraws its work-rule demands from the bargaining table.”
TCRC, according to CN, had “previously offered to submit the wage portion of the dispute to final and binding arbitration upon successful resolution of the other outstanding issues.”
If the TCRC agrees to CN’s Tuesday offer, the company “would be pleased to draft an agreement for resolution of the labour dispute.”
Responding to the union’s statement Tuesday morning, CN said it “has not seen substantive movement by the union to end the locomotive engineers’ strike” and that “the union persists in raising the same issues the parties have negotiated for 14 months.”
The engineers’ previous contract, which had included the 3,800-mile cap, expired Dec. 31, 2008.
