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By Dylana Kneeshaw

COMMUNITY SERVICE OFFICERS

City of Kamloops, CUPE 900 headed to mediation following dismissed appeal of arbitration ruling

Feb 8, 2024 | 6:00 PM

KAMLOOPS — The City of Kamloops says it is ready to move forward after it recently lost its appeal of an arbitration decision related to a union grievance. The legal matter stems from municipal department restructuring in 2020, when employees in the former Bylaws Department became Community Service Officers.

CUPE Local 900 grieved aspects of the move and the BC Labour Relations Board sent the dispute to arbitration, which eventually ruled in favour of the union.

The city’s deputy CAO, Byron McCorkell, says the appeal of that arbitration was based around wording. Now that the appeal has been dismissed, the city and CUPE still have to iron out remaining collective agreement details.

“Really at the base of it was a conversation around, did the city as an employer have the right to create new job specifications? And in the end the arbitrator said, ‘Yes,’ but he took some degree of concern with how we did it,” explains McCorkell. “We knew that there was some issues behind the scenes that needed to be fixed and we’re now looking to go to mediation to fix those with the union.”

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As for what’s next, the city says the recent decision should not impact current service levels from the Community Service Officer department.

“The program evolved quickly because this whole situation is evolving quickly,” says McCorkell. “Seven-thousand calls to 23,000 calls (to the CSO department) in basically four years is a major, massive change in community focus. We’ve had to respond quickly and some things are great, some things aren’t, but we keep moving forward.”

CFJC Today did reach out to CUPE 900 to get comment from representatives on the recent arbitration appeal ruling, but did not hear back by publication time.