15 June 2021
A glorious ending of our FPSS-CSQ yearorious ending of our FPSS-CSQ year
Dear school support staff colleagues,
Last week saw the culmination of two very important issues: we reached an agreement on 2010 pay equity maintenance for day care service technicians and school or center secretaries, in addition to reaching agreements in principle in our sectoral negotiations of collective agreements S3, S12 et S13.
Let me explain…
Let’s start with pay equity.
This is an exercise we have been conducting with various successive governments over the past eleven years!
Each of these governments was reluctant to pay the sums due to the female staff concerned, mainly because of the large sums generated by the correction of the job inequalities that we identified.
But we have stubbornly and relentlessly held firm in order to get recognition of the fair value of certain categories of jobs that we represent and thus ensure payment of the amounts due to our affected members. So, this was a great victory last week and we will continue to work the other pending 2015 pay equity complaints.
A few days after this settlement, we announced that sectoral agreements in principle had been reached at three of our negotiating tables.
Remember that the FPSS-CSQ negotiates five collective agreements: S3 (Francophone support staff), S8 (Cree school boards), S9 (Kativik School Board), S12 (Anglophone support staff) and S13 (Anglophone school bus drivers).
The S3, S12 and S13 agreements were then ratified by the appropriate federal union bodies.
I can safely say that we are all eager to present these agreements to you. But we need an intersectoral agreement before we can do this, the one the CSQ negotiates.
Why? Because we are legally required to present the sectoral agreements (specific to members of the FPSS-CSQ) and the intersectoral agreement (which concerns all members of the CSQ) at the same time. This is called a comprehensive agreement.
So, your local union will be summoning you to a General Assembly as soon as possible to submit the comprehensive agreement to you. Until then, the agreements must be kept confidential to maintain their integrity and ensure that you are the only legitimate members to address their content.
In the meantime, I can already tell you this: During the 2020 negotiations, we were bold, innovative and proactive. And it paid off. We believe that the sectoral agreements that we have succeeded in negotiating will set benchmarks for the next round of negotiations, while giving you better working conditions now. All for the good of our students and you!
See you soon,
Éric Pronovost,
FPSS-CSQ President