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IN THE MATTER OF AN INTEREST ARBITRATION 1\IAY 12 Z01"i I PURSUANT T~R~~~~~~~:~giECTION AND I DRS _ ~~:;;:srt~~.~:~~:'~''" .. . ·. I

8 E TWEEN: 1_ .. ________ ...... ------.. ----.. -.......... ________ .. ____ ,_ .. .

THE CORPORATION OF THE CITY OF BROCKVILLE

(The "Employer") -and -

BROCKVILLE PROFESSIONAL FIRE FIGHTERS' ASSOCIATION

BOARD OF ARBITRATION

David K. L. Starkman Andrew Reistetter Jeffrey Sack

APPEARANCES FOR THE EMPLOYER

John Saunders Jim Baker Harry Jones Chris Dwyre

APPEARANCES FOR THE ASSOCIATION

David Stephenson Doug Pert Travis Brennan Craig Mason David Collins Ryan Wells Chris Francescone

(The "Association")

·Chair· Employer Nominee Association Nominee

Counsel Director, Human Resources Fire Chief Deputy Fire Chief

Advocate President Secretary Bargaining Member Bargaining Member Bargaining Member District 2 Vice-President

Mediation in this matter was held on June 23, 2010 and Arbitration took place on

September 30, 2010 at Brockville, Ontario

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AWARD

This Award concerns a renewal collective agreement for approximately thirty-one fire

fighters and four dispatchers employed by the City of Brockville. The agreement shall

consist of matters agreed to by the parties and the following matters addressed in Part

A of this Award. No item shall have retroactive effect unless expressly provided for.

Part B of this Award deals with matters upon which the parties are requested to make

further submissions.

PART A

1. ARTICLE 1.02

Amend and insert the language proposed by the Association.

3. ARTICLE 5.07

Add the language proposed by the Employer.

4. ARTICLE 8~01

Amend to include parental leave.

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5. ARTICLE 8.04

Amend and insert the language proposed by the Employer.

6. ARTICLE 11.06

Delete existing language and insert the language of article 24.01 and 24.02 found in the

collective agreement with the Brockville Police Association.

7. ARTICLE 16.01

Amend and insert the language proposed by the Association

8. APPENDIX A- PART-TIME DISPATCHERS

Insert the following:

Part-time dispatchers shall not work overtime uritil all full-time dispatchers

have been offered the available shift.

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9. SALARY

For the 2009 calendar year increase wages by the same amount and on the same

dates as those payable to the Brockville Police.

These increases are to be paid retroactively within thirty days of the date of this Award.

With respect to the salary differentials for dispatchers, increase the differential, effective

the firstfull pay period after the date of this Award, as follows:

First Class 80%

Second Class 70%

Third Class 60%

With respect to Experience Pay, effective the first full pay period after the date of this

award delete the words "excluding employees in the Communications Division".

PARTB

At the hearing it was the position of the Association that the agreement should have a

two year term from January 1, 2009to December 31, 2010. It was the position of the

Employer that the agreement should have a three year term from January 1, 2009 to

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December 31, 2011.

The Board directs the parties to make any further submissions to the Board with copies

to each other, within thirty calendar days of the date of this Award, with respect to

whether the term of the collective agreement should be for two years or for three years,

and any further submissions they wish to make concerning the base salary grid for fire

fighters in such second or third year of the agreement as the case may be. Following

receipt of such submissions, each party will have a further fourteen calendar days to

respond to the submissions of the other, following which the Board will make a decision

concerning these two issues

The Panel shall remain seized with respect to all issues until a collective agreement is in

effect.

6

Dated at Maberly, Ontario this gth day of May, 2011

lll~ David K.L. Starkman Chair

"See attached dissent" Andy Reistetter Employer Nominee

"See attached partial dissent" Jeffrey Sack ' Association Nominee

DISSENT OF CORPORATION NOMINEE

ANDREW REISTETTER

BETWEEN:

THE CORPORATION OF THE CITY OF BROCKVILLE

AND:

THE BROCKVILLE PROFESSIONAL FIRE FIGHTERS ASS.OCIATION

It is with regret that I must dissent from the Award in this matter.

Under section 50.5 of the Fire Protection and Prevention Act, 1997this Board of Interest Arbitration is obligated to take the following criteria into consideration:

(i) The employer's ability to pay in light of its fiscal situation;

(ii) The extent to which services may have to be reduced, in light ofthe decision, if current funding and taxation levels are not increased;

(iii) The economic situation in Ontario and in the municipality;

(iv) A comparison, as between the firefighters and other comparable employees in the public and private sectors, of the terms and conditions of employment and the nature of the work performed;

(v) The employer's ability to attract and retain qualified firefighters.

In this case, it is my respectful opinion that this decision does not reflect these factors.

The City of Brockville Fire Department is a small department with only 31 firefighters and four dispatchers in the bargaining unit. The City was able to clearly demonstrate that they have one of the poorest fiscal pictures of any municipality in the province.

According to BMA Management Consulting Inc, they rank:

- gth lowest out of 75 municipalities with regard to their per capita financial position;

-their average household income is 121h lowest out of 75 municipalities;

- their average value of the household dwellings is rated as "low";

- 78 percent of the municipalities in the province have lower tax rates;

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-they have the gth worst municipal debt to reserves ratio per capita in the province;

-the City does not under spend on its fire services as it has the fifth highest fire expenditures per capita in the province. Its spending is 64 percent higher than the provincial average.

Awarding increases in any benefits that are not justified will only make a bad situation worse and will impose increased financial burdens on the tax payers of Brockville.

This is not a municipality where there is an increased ability to pay for their firefighters. Brockville has lost over 1500 well paying unionized jobs over the past few years. Wage ·

increases in the largest private sector employers (Proctor and Gamble, 3M and Canarm) have ranged between zero and 1.5% per year. Wage increases at the City of Brockville have been between 1.5 and 2.1 percent. Wage increases for the Brockville

Police have averaged between zero and over three percent per year.

There is no difficulty in attracting or retaining firefighters. There has been no turnover in

the past years (excluding retirements) and there were over 300 applications for the last recruitment.

. lnspite of this economic reality, this Board has seen fit to award substantial increases in compensation which are not justified by the economic situation facing the community or on the basis of a comparative analysis which this Board should engage in.

This Board decided to award top-up of pregnancy and parental leave to all members of

the bargaining unit. This would provide a top-up to 90% of regular wages for the two week waiting period and fifteen weeks of salary at 75% of regular weekly salary for Pregnancy leave. In addition, it awarded 75% of regular salary for the ten week parental leave.

No other City employee. has this benefit. The Association was only able to point to 12

other municipalities out of the 80 plus municipalities in the province with unionized fire departments that even had pregnancy leave. The vast majority of these were not comparable to Brockville- Toronto, Ottawa, Windsor, Brampton, London etc. On the issue of parental leave, they could only show three departments in the entire province with this benefit. While the police in this community enjoy such a benefit, no interest

arbitration board for fire departments has ever used police benefits as a method of establishing firefighter benefits. There is simply no justification for this change at this point in time. I do not believe this is adhering to the principal of "replication".

This Board also extended a job security clause in the fire agreement that guarantees that firefighters cannot be laid off or terminated unless they breach the rules of the department. The Association was not able to show that any City of Brockville employee, employee of the Brockville Police Service or employee of any fire department in the province had this type of benefit and yet this Board chose to extend its scope to include more firefighters. No one in the public or private sector has this type of job

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security. Once again, awarding this type of proposal does not replicate collective bargaining.

In addition, the Board chose to increase the pay for communicators from a maximum of 70% of a first class firefighter to 80%. While I might have agreed with this change, the Board then further increased this amount by adding experience pay to this amount which would increase this number by upwards of a further 9%. What is especially significant about this change is the fact that the Brockville police, with whom rates of pay are always compared, do not have this experience pay for their communicators. This change is simply not warranted. This change pays a fire dispatcher over $60,000 per year at the maximum.

This Board also awarded a wage increase of 2% January 1, 2009 and 1% July 1, 2009 to the fiscal year of 2009. This increase is consistent with the Police increases for that time period and I would not disagree with those changes based solely on the traditionally accepted principle of police-fire comparability However, it has to be noted that these increases are very high for the Brockville community.

What is particularly unbalanced about this decision, is that in the face of awarding three items to the Association, for which, in my opinion, there was no justification, the Board . awarded nothing to the City of any substantive value.

The City presented a compelling case to have their lay off language changed and the way in which sick days and lieu days are utilized on Sundays. I would have awarded these two items, especially in the face of the award of the other matters in favour of the Association.

Respectfully submitted,

Andrew Reistetter

Partial Dissent of Association Nominee

I must, with regret, dissent in part from the Award herein.

The starting point, when it comes to salaries and benefits for firefighters, is parity with local police, combined with comparability to similar fire forces. In this regard, the Association has argued that in 2009 the police have fallen $1,000 behind the average of their own police comparators, and therefore more weight should be placed on fire comparators, such as Belleville firefighters, who in 2009 received $2,000 more than Brockville police.

The Chair has, however, chosen to focus solely on the parity relationship with local police, thereby failing to close the gap between Brockville firefighters and their fire service comparators. With respect to this approach, I must register my disagreement.

While the City has argued inability to pay more than a "moderate" increase, the increase awarded by the Chair is in fact moderate (2% in January 2009, 1% in July 2009). The salary rate awarded is in fact less than 1% more than the City itself proposed,. and (through the splitting of the increase) results in only 0.4% more than the cash cost with which the City said it would be content.

It should be noted that the parties in their briefs disagree as to the economic circumstances prevailing in Brockville. Counsel for the City maintains that municipal growth is low, while the advocate for the Association refers to corporate expansion and hiring increases. The Mayor is reported as being optimistic about economic growth, and the City's Development Director is quoted as saying that the future looks good for Brockville.

But, in the final analysis, one must assume that .the economic circumstances in Brockville were factored into the settlement which the Brockville Police Services Board voluntarily negotiated with the police in November 2008. The City c~nnot be heard to. argue that this board should take an approach that departs from the one which it has taken itself.

With respect to paid pregnancy and parental leave, a top-up provision is a relatively new benefit for firefighters, but the trend is already clear, both in bargaining and at arbitration, where most recently it has been awarded in Hamilton, Vaughan and Chatham-Kent. Indeed, the Association's pregnancy and parental leave proposal has already been agreed to by the Brockville Police Services Board with the Brockville police. In this regard, benefits paid to police are recognized as a major touchstone in both bargaining and interest arbitration for firefighters, since benefits are an integral part of total compensation, a faCtor accepted by all as directly related to the determination of appropriate compensation.

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As for job security, the Award does no more than update the existing provision in the

collective agreement. The job security clause has been part of the firefighters' contract

for over two decades and has been automatically updated by the parties in every

succeeding set of negotiations. A failure to track the parties' own approach in this

matter would be to ignore the dynamic of collective bargaining. Moreover, a similar

provision exists in many municipalities across Ontario, either in the form in which it

appears in the Brockville firefighter collective agreement or in the form of a minimum

staffing clause.

With respect to communications operators, I disagree with the Chair's failure to adopt

the province-wide pattern of a 3% increment after 8 years' employment, but I do

acknowledge that an increment of 3% after 10 years has been the level agreed to with

the Brockville police. On the other hand, inclusion of communications operators in an

entitlement to recognition pay is standard in fire services across the province. While

police dispatchers in Brockville do not share in such an entitlement, they fall under a

separate collective agreement from uniformed police - unlike communications operators

in the fire service who are governed by the same collective agreement as suppression

firefighters - and perform a different role, in a different manner, than do fire service

communications operators.

Finally, the award grants several proposals of the City, limiting the number of

employees in the Communications Division who may take vacation in the same

calendar week, and defining a day's pay based on the formula proposed by the City.

Both of these items are of substantive value to the Corporation. As for the rest of the

City's proposals, they are not justified on their merits and, in any event, were not part of

the Corporation's original demands.

Again, I reiterate that firefighter salaries' and benefits should be determined based on a

comparison with other firefighter groups and local police. Here, only one of these two

factors has been taken into account by the Chair, namely local police salaries. This is

not fair, however, where the local police have clearly fallen behind their own police

comparators. In this respect, I must therefore register a dissent, on the basis that the

salaries of comparable firefighter groups should also be considered.

F:IDOC\00331551. DOC

F:IDOC\00331551.DOC

Jeffrey Sack, Q.C. Association Nominee

f tf r qo 1La~1

IN THE MATTER OF AN INTEREST ARBITRATION PURSUANT TO THE FIRE PROTECTION AND

PREVENTION ACT

BETWEEN:

THE CORPORATION OF THE CITY OF BROCKVILLE

(The "Employer") -and -

BROCKVILLE PROFESSIONAL FIRE FIGHTERS' ASSOCIATION

(The "Association")

AND IN THE MATTER OF A SUPPLEMENTARY AWARD

BOARD OF ARBITRATION

David K. L. Starkman Andrew Reistetter Jeffrey Sack

APPEARANCESFORTHEEMPLOYER

John Saunders Jim Baker Harry Jones Chris Dwyre

APPEARANCES FOR THE ASSOCIATION

David Stephenson Doug Pert Travis Brennan Craig Mason David Collins Ryan Wells Chris Francescone

Chair Employer Nominee Association Nominee

Counsel Director, Human Resources Fire Chief Deputy Fire Chief

Advocate President Secretary Bargaining Member Bargaining Member Bargaining Member District 2 Vice-President

Mediation in this matter was held on June 23, 2010 and Arbitration took place on September 30, 2010 at Brockville, Ontario and Supplementary Submissions were completed in June, 2011.

2

SUPPLEMENTARY AWARD

In a decision dated May 11, 2011 this Board requested further submissions concerning

two issues, and this Supplementary Award addresses those issues.

1. TERM

The term of the collective agreement will be January 1, 2009 until December 31, 2010.

2. WAGES

Having considered the comparators referred to by the Employer and the Union, the

Board Orders as follows:

Effective January 1, 2010 increase wages by 3%.

Effective October 1, 2010 increase wages by a further 1%.

These increases are to be paid retroactively.

The Panel will remain seized of all issues until a collective agreement is in effect.

3

Dated at Maberly, Ontario this 241h day of August, 2011.

David K.L. Starkman Chair

"See attached dissent" Andy Reistetter Employer Nominee

"See attached dissent" Jeffrey Sack Association Nominee

DISSENT OF CORPORATION NOMINEE

ANDREW REISTETTER

BETWEEN:

'\

THE CORPORATION OF THE CITY OF BROCKVILLE

AND;

THE BROCKVILLE PROFESSIONAL FIRE FIGHTERS ASSOCIATION

It is with regret that again I must dissent from the Award in this matter.

The only issue which was left to be decided in this case was the. wage rate to be paid for the firefighters in 2010. It is my respectful opinion that this decision does not reflect the facts and arguments which were presented in this case.

Economic Conditions

We know the following statistics for 2010:

- Inflation for Ontario for 2010 was 2.5%.

- Ontario private sectdr wage increases for 2010 averaged 2.0%

- Ontario public sector wage increases for 2010 averaged 1.9%

-City <?Jfs-rockville CUPE employees received increases for 2010 of 1.5%

-.City of Brockville non-union employees received increases for 2010 of 1.5%

- Two of the largest private sector employers in Brockville (3M and Procter and Gamble gave wage increases of 1.5% for 2010

- Other public sector employees in Brockville had wages freezes in 2010 (MPAC, · two Community Living Associations)

- Companies were laying off employees in Brockville in 2010

- The unemployment rate continued to be high in 201 0

-The Brockville Police voluntarily negotiated a 5.5% increase for 2010. This was then followed by three years of wage freezes for 2011. 291,2 and 2013. They have a possible wage reopener in 2013 depending on the police .wages in a series of other police departments

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- The fire departments of the other arguably comparable municipalities gave wage increases which averaged 2.9% for 2010

While the Association argued that the Brockville fire fighters should receive parity with the Brockville police, they seem to ignore the fact that the 5.5% increase in 2010 was the only guaranteed wage increase in a four year deal from 2010 to 2014.

The Association also argues that the Brockville fire fighters have fallen behind their comparable fire fighters in other municipalities. They fail to acknowledge, however, that on a comparative basis, Brockville is not in as strong a position from ari economic point cl~e~ 1

I

As the City pointed out, in 2010, of the 16 arguably comparable municipalities, Brockvlfle had:

-the second highest fire cost per $1,000 of assessment;

- the second worst financial position (total fund balances per capita);

- the second worst debt to reserve ratio;

- the second lowest building permit fees in the province;

- no development charges for any form of single detached, multi-dwelling, apartment or non residential industrial properties.

While the Association argues that the Brockville fire fighters should be paid the average of this group, the municipality, its citizens and the economic circumstances which they find themselves in are not located at the average of this group, they are clearly at the bottom end.

The Association makes note of the fact that the City of Brockville charges the average residential, commercial and industrial tax rates'for a different group of comparable municipalities. Assuming it to be correct, this just shows that the citizens of Brockville are paying the average amount of taxes and the municipality is worst off financially and the cost of the fire department is extremely high when compared to other municipalities. This is not a reason to increase rates of pay of fire fighters beyond a normative increase.

The Association also makes note of the fact that in.2011, there are anticipated positive economic factors. They assert that there is interest in development and possible new construction. That might be valuable information for 2Qt1 and beyond, but this set of negotiations only addresses 2010. Anything after that date can be taken into consideration by the parties in their next round of negotiations. There is no rosy information for 2010.

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The Board decided to award split wage increa~es. While this mechanism of awarding pay increases results in a one time saving during the year of implementation, it still increases the wage rate by the compounded total of the two numbers. In reality, it results in a higher number than the original 3.5% wage increase that the Association actually asked for in their initial brief.

There is no justification for any wage increase that produces this kind of an end rate. All of the comparative data and economic data would support a wage increase of substantially less than this award.

Respectfully submitted,

Andrew Reistetter

;-

DISSENT OF ASSOCIATION NOMINEE

I too must dissent from the Chair's award but for reasons that are diametrically different from those of the City's nominee. In the award for 2009 the Chair chose to follow the Brockville police settlement. Although both the City's nominee and I dissented, the City's nominee agreed with the wage award, saying:

"This Board also awarded a wage increase of 2% January 1, 2009 and 1% July 1, 2009 to the fiscal year of 2009. This increase is consistent with the police increases for that time period and I would not disagree with those changes based solely on the traditionally accepted principle of police-fire comparability."

For 2010, however, the Chair has chosen to depart from the principle of police parity in favour of the average of comparable firefighter settlements. And the··. City's nominee, who supported the principle of police parity when it suited the City in 2009, similarly takes the position that it is not appropriate to follow the local police settlement for 2010. The reason is obvious. While the Brockville police settled for a low increase in 2009, they negotiated a higher than normal increase in 2010 (5.5%), presumably by way of catchup. The fact that the local police negotiated lower increases for subsequent years is not relevant since the parties here have agreed to limit the term to two years, 2009-10.

As for economic circumstances, what I said in my dissent for 2009 remains applicable:

_ "It should be noted that the parties in their briefs disagree as to the economic circum~tances. 'prevailing in Brockville. Counsel for the City maintains that municipal growth is low, while the advocate for the Association refers to c~rporate expansjon and hiring increases. . The Mayor is reported as being optimistic about' economic growth, and the City's Development Director is quoted as saying that the future looks good for Brockville.

But, in the final analysis, one must assume that the economic circumstances in Brockville were factored into the settlement which the Brockville Police Services Board voluntarily negotiated with the police in NQv,rober 2008. The City cannot be heard to argue that this board should take an·approach that departs from the one which it has taken itself'. ·

In short, the award for 2009 inappropriately ignored comparable firefighter settlements in favour of the local police settlement. However, for 2010 the award does just the opposite: it follows comparable firefighter settlements while ignoring local police settlements. My own view, as I stated in my dissent for 2009, is that "firefighter salaries and benefits should be determined based on a comparison with other firefighter groups and local police."

Jeffrey Sack, Q.C.