Manitoba Hydro electrical workers begin job action

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This article was published 30/06/2023 (993 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Some Manitoba Hydro electrical workers began taking job action Friday, after contract negotiations between their union and the Crown corporation fell “very short.”

Leadership of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 2034, which represents some 2,300 electrical workers at the provincial utility, rejected Hydro’s latest offer Thursday.

The planned job actions don’t include complete walk-off strikes.

Hydro has contingency plans in place to keep the lights on across the province and to ensure safety for customers and its employees, particularly in emergency power outages, the utility said Friday.

However, “Customers should be prepared for it (to take) longer to restore power outages due to storms or other causes,” Hydro said in a news release.

The latest contract offer included a 1.75 per cent general wage increase for last year, and this year’s wage increase to be determined through voluntary arbitration, as well as service recognition payments of $1,600.

Union business manager Mike Espenell said in a message to members the “very slight bargaining improvements fall very short of the intended mark,” resulting in leadership rejecting to take the offer to a member vote and instead begin job actions Friday at noon.

Union membership previously voted to reject a May 30 offer.

Espenell said leadership expected the Crown corporation to send out a communication to employees “to intimidate and coerce members into accepting the ‘fair deal’… In the meantime, the union will continue urging Manitoba Hydro to return to the bargaining table and to negotiate a fair and reasonable agreement.”

Hydro chief executive officer Jay Grewal said the job actions were not the result the corporation had hoped for.

“I fully believe that Manitoba Hydro’s offer demonstrated our ongoing commitment to finding a solution that respects our customers, all Manitobans and treats all employees fairly,” Grewal said in a statement.

“We recognize the toll a strike puts on customers and employees, and we appreciate everyone’s patience while we work to resolve this.”

The job actions include no workers on standby or working unscheduled overtime at generating and converting stations or at the systems control centre. They will also not go out on service call-outs.

Those workers, who will be allowed to refuse any overtime if wanted, also will only work a maximum of three hours of overtime on scheduled workdays and a maximum of eight hours on non-workdays

Other staff won’t work on standby or scheduled overtime and will be allowed to refuse all overtime if wanted. They will only work three hours of unscheduled overtime on a normal workday and eight hours on a non-workday.

— Staff