Strike vote hits phone service in Nunavut

PATRICIA D’SOUZA

About 375 employees of NorthwesTel in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon walked off the job on Monday, in the first strike in the company’s history.

“We’re trying to catch up on settlements over the past seven years,” said Ernest Ness, who represents Local 1574 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the union representing NorthwesTel staff.

“Our wages compared to other northern workers are very low,” he said.

NorthwesTel has put an emergency operations plan in place. Management staff will fill in for striking workers, but some services, such as teleconferencing, will not be provided for the duration of the strike.

The company is giving priority to maintaining service for fire, police and ambulance crews.

And customers who require an additional phone line, or who need their phone line moved to another location may have to wait a long time for their requests to be filled.

“Service is not going to be anywhere near where it was,” Ness said.

The main point of conflict for the two sides is wages. The union is requesting a five per cent wage increase in the first year of the contract, another five per cent increase in the second year and a 25-cent an hour increase in hourly wages across the board.

NorthwesTel is offering three per cent in the first year, three and a half per cent in the second and third years and a one-and-a-half per cent bonus in each of the three years.

“We believe it’s competitive with other settlements across Nunavut,” said Anne Kennedy Grainger, director of public affairs for the company. NWT Power Corp, the government of the Northwest Territories and Yukon Energy have similar deals, she said.

“We compared ourselves to similar employers with similar salaries and wage structures,” she said.

The company’s first offer was turned down by 87.5 per cent of the union’s membership, Ness said. That, in effect, was a vote to strike.

Last Thursday, the union announced plans to walk off the job on Monday if it could not reach a settlement with the company. Both sides gave in a little bit, both Grainger and Ness said, but were unable to reach a compromise.

“We dropped most of our other requests,” Ness said.

A 2001 survey of wages at 13 other telephone companies showed NorthwesTel technicians were the fifth highest paid in Canada, Grainger said. Clerical staff were the seventh highest paid. The survey ranked wages only, and did not include benefits or northern allowances.

But Ness says the offer on the table is an average of southern wages, and just not good enough for northern residents.

NorthwesTel serves the 110,000 residents of Canada’s three territories, as well as northern British Columbia. All of the company’s employees live in the North.

The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bell Canada.