Your bargaining team is continuing with ongoing work that will lead to the signature of the 2023-2028 collective agreement. At this point, we want you to know where we are in terms of drafting the new provisions, how long it will take for the agreement to come into force, and when you can expect to receive retroactive amounts.
Once the tentative deal was adopted on February 21, we began the next part of the process, which is to negotiate the provisions of the collective agreement with the employer. The employer party is responsible for producing a first draft of the provisions. The APTS intervened several times to accelerate the tabling of these texts, and we have now received most of the provisions that we need to study.
We got to work as soon as we received the first provisions. At this stage, to make sure your rights are respected, we need to be extremely careful in our review of the texts we’ve been sent. Multiple exchanges are required with employer representatives to make sure that everything we negotiated during the last contract talks is correctly incorporated, to your benefit, in the collective agreement. Given the number of provisions to be finalized with the employer, this is a process that may take several weeks.
The date on which the new collective agreement comes into force, and the date on which you will be paid the retroactive amounts you are owed, will be set out in the agreement. This means that we will be able to provide you with this information only when the agreement is signed.
We realize these delays may be a matter of concern, and like you, we are impatient to see the agreement come into force so that you can benefit from the new provisions. We are making every effort to ensure the process advances as quickly as possible. But we also have to make sure the job is well done. These provisions will determine your working conditions over the next years, and you will need to use them if you have to face your employer in a dispute.
Stay tuned for upcoming communications – we will send more information as the work advances. If you have questions or would like to know more, please write to us at nego2023@aptsq.com.
In solidarity,
