Speaker 1: In this video, we're going to talk about collective bargaining preparation. What goes into that? We're going to find out starting right now. Hi there, I'm Andrea Adams and the host of HR Shop Talk. On the show, you get expert insight into all kinds of HR topics. I encourage you to subscribe to the show by clicking on the button at the bottom of the screen, or you can subscribe to the podcast to keep learning from my smart and experienced guests. Today, my guest is Jodi Fraser. Jodi is a director of labour relations and a member of the Alberta Labour Relations Board. She has led countless rounds of bargaining, and I'm excited to talk to her about this topic. Hi, Jodi, how are you? Hi, Andrea, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. I'm looking forward to this. Way early in my career, I had the opportunity to sit on a bargaining committee, but it's been quite a while, so I'm looking forward to what we're going to learn here. First question, just to set the stage, what is meant by collective bargaining?

Speaker 2: Some people call it negotiating, or CBA, negotiating CBA. There's all kinds of language used in the sector. Essentially, what it is, it's taking that agreed to terms and conditions. Many times, it's a book or some kind of document, which really outlines all of the terms and conditions for a group of employees that belong to a certain union. That particular union with the employer sit down together and work to try and come up with new terms and conditions and confirm the ones that they want to continue to use. How long do these agreements typically span? That's all part of the bargaining process. Sometimes, the agreement could span one or two years. Sometimes, we've had a collective agreement at my employer for a four-year period, and so it's not set. You need to negotiate that with the parties at the table.

Speaker 1: What's the advantages to negotiating? I'm already getting off topic because we should be talking about collective bargaining preparation, but I'm curious, to having a longer versus a shorter

Speaker 2: collective agreement? I think there's many factors that contribute to the length of the collective agreement and what you want. It depends on, does the organization that you're bargaining for, is there large changes that are coming? You would want a shorter collective agreement so that the terms and conditions have a bit of an end date and you have an opportunity to reset some of those terms and conditions. Maybe you're looking for some labour peace because you've got some major big changes or reorganization that you want to talk about. You would be able to talk about that at the bargaining table and then set a longer term so that the terms and conditions will work for you during that term. You don't have to worry and have the resources involved in negotiations, but you can really move to improving relationships. Maybe you've just come off a strike or some other kind of work stoppage where you want to spend some time and really work

Speaker 1: on the relationship. Back to you and getting focused on preparing for bargaining, what are the steps that you go through as you prepare for bargaining? There's a few factors. I don't have

Speaker 2: a set date and say, okay, well, our collective agreement because of the labour code says I have to start bargaining 120 days before the expiry. You definitely want to be thinking about what that means prior to the 120 days. For me, I take a look at our strategic plan. I spend a lot of time with our senior leaders about where does the organization want to go. Once I find out where the organization wants to go, are there any terms and conditions in the collective agreement which would stop us from reaching that particular goal or inhibit us from reaching that goal? Sometimes even paying attention to grievances, arbitrations, maybe you've lost an arbitration or the union has won one and it forces you to make some changes into the collective agreement that way. There's lots of inputs that come in that you have to think about. One of my strategies is I always keep, and this is pretty old school, so maybe I could move to OneNote in the future, I keep a printed collective agreement available. As the year goes by or as we're implementing, if there's little tweaks or things that I'm thinking about or I'm having discussions about something that is working or not working with the union, I go to that particular section or article in the collective agreement and I'll highlight it and say, do we need to take a look at it? Is this working for us? The other thing that I do is I also go out and sometimes we use our own polls. We will create our own survey, unions many times create a survey and send it out to the members about what's important. We do the same thing, we take a look at what's important and sometimes depending on the group that you're bargaining with, you'll have external sources for what that bargaining preparation looks like, whether it be a pattern across the sector or there's some aligning that you need to do through outside sources. You want to take a look at the market, if you have a market-driven compensation model in your collective agreement, you'd want to review that and see what's the inflation look like, what's it look like in your city, is this a national collective agreement, is it a local one, because those national and local issues would also help drive what you're striving for at the bargaining table.

Speaker 1: Wow, that is so many things. How do you organize it all?

Speaker 2: I think one of the things is while you have to be flexible at the table because you don't know what the union is going to propose in their proposal, but for those who do a lot of negotiation, a lot of the work is before you even get to the table. While the conversations are a lot of work and a lot of time and it's important and you want to maintain that relationship, a lot of the time there isn't as much work to do at the table as there is before you get to the table. Essentially, as we're getting ready to ratify a collective agreement, I'm already moved on to thinking about what the next collective agreement looks like. Where did we go? What did we not get? What concessions did we need to make and do those concessions help us go forward or not? There's also this concept of generational bargaining where you have a big goal that you want to get there, but you know that incremental steps around change management, you need to incrementally get there and how far did you get there? What are the hills that you want to die on and what are the ones that you can concede? It's all of those, having all of those conversations and then checking in regularly with your principals to make sure that nothing's changed. Sorry, who are the principals? It depends on whoever has on behalf of the employer, whoever would be signing off that this is the direction that you want to go on bargaining. Where I work, we have a board of governors, but other areas may have a board of directors, you may have the president, depending on the organization. We were talking about the steps

Speaker 1: in preparing for bargaining. Did you cover everything you should cover? I think so.

Speaker 2: Also, it also depends on if you're in a traditional bargaining setting or if you're going to do things like interest-based bargaining because I think your preparations may be a bit different. If you're doing a traditional bargaining where you have articles of language back and forth and you just want to trade away things, that's obviously going to be a lot more work than coming with an interest and knowing what those interests are and what your end game is, but then you work through the language at the table, which obviously takes more time face-to-face with the union. How do you decide who's going to be on the bargaining team? For us and where I'm bargaining right now, we have a communications team member, which has been a new ad for this year. It's been very valuable for really working through that communication strategy. We chose to have the person at the table because, of course, you would have resources at the table and then you would have a bigger team that could help you organize yourself with bargaining away from the table. We've decided to have the communications person invest in being at the table. It's very important for me to have a couple of people who actually are the subject matter experts. While I may be the talking head at the table, I need to have a team behind me who can really understand if we're talking about teaching. I work in a post-secondary institution, so if we're talking about what we call the academy or the faculty, it would be important for me to have someone from that line of business so that as we're talking about things, they definitely are contributing and can challenge any kind of understanding or misunderstanding around what the intent is. So, I've got a couple of subject matter experts, I like to call them. I always want to have a finance friend at the table for me. I think I learned that early on, having someone from the finance, wearing that finance lens is, for me, invaluable. And then I also like to have someone who's responsible for just organizing things, so keeping a running total of what we've talked about, where are we at with our inbound proposal, what have we signed off on, taking the notes and making sure that our agreed-to interpretation is documented for us as the management side. If you found this informative,

Speaker 1: subscribe to see all the episodes and talk to me. Is there anything else you want to see on this channel? Let me know in the comments below. And back to you, Jodi. So, I know that you have to prepare proposals, and maybe that's not for all bargaining types, but how do you decide what those proposals are and what the content of them is going to be, and the approvals? Who approves

Speaker 2: those proposals? Right. That's a good question. So, I think it depends, again, on which type of bargaining you're wanting to participate in. And so, the current round of bargaining that we're participating in, we've taken a bit of a hybrid approach. We knew that there were some things that we wanted to propose some language outright for our friends across the table to take a look at, and then there were other things that we really didn't have any, you know, set direction on where we wanted to go. We had some interests, and we wanted to talk about those, and the conversation and building that relationship was important around those. And so, in that instance, we used an interest-based proposal where we specifically, you know, talked about what the problem is, and then we indicated what our interests were, and, you know, that we wanted to have a conversation, and then there's some things that we do while actively bargaining around giving them some, you know, some additional information. We've been watching some YouTube videos on some certain content because it's important that we, you know, everyone has an understanding about where we're going and why, and some of the research behind it, you know, to try and just provide some data. And so, we do it as collectively as a team, but it's a project. And so, in there is, I think our proposal maybe was about 55 or 60 pages, and we've put everything together, and then before obviously presenting that to the union, you would go and follow, you know, the bylaws that you have of the organization where you work, and make sure that you have the proper authorities put in place. So, where I work, the authority is that the Board of Governors grants the president and CEO of the organization to enter into bargaining, and can conclude bargaining on their behalf, and then through that, what I tend to do is put all the issues on a giant spreadsheet. And so, we have the issue, if there's a cost, if there's an unintended consequence, or impact, or it's a, you know, how big the change is, and then we actually walk through with our, with the principals what those are, and I get a red, yellow, green

Speaker 1: light. On those red items, are those the items that could go as far as like a labour stoppage?

Speaker 2: Those would be the ones, yes, I would, that I don't have, I don't have the authority from the principals to either enter into an agreement on, or I need to come back. And it's a flag for myself and the team to say, we're not supposed to, we need to have more discussions about this, so let's get more information, or we need more data, or we need to see what it is that the union is asking for in, you know, in return, and come at it from a whole package. So, how do union

Speaker 1: characteristics affect your preparation, or does it? I mean, it must. Yeah, I mean, I think if you,

Speaker 2: if you, as someone who is trying to lead some bargaining, if the other party doesn't want to participate in interest-based bargaining, yeah, you know, don't do it. Or, you know, spend some time getting them to understand the benefits of interest-based bargaining before you start the bargaining process, and start to come to some agreements around, around what that looks like. And so, you know, obviously you don't want to do work twice, or be unprepared, so I think, you know, you do have, I tend to have conversations with the union around, you know, what to expect, or what are you thinking about this, and are we doing a full deal, or do you want to do interest-based bargaining, and have some of those conversations prior to the, even starting the process. So, we would have been talking about it a few months before

Speaker 1: even entering into bargaining. So, you've talked about interest-based bargaining, and then you've talked about more that classical exchanging proposals type bargaining. So, can you talk more about the styles of bargaining, and sort of the default, and sort of build that picture there?

Speaker 2: It's difficult to build a specific picture for folks, because I think it really does, I think the relationship that you have with who you're negotiating across the table is really going to direct that. So, in my experience, I get to negotiate with someone where it's a local union. If you're working with a national union, you have someone parachute in, the issues are nationally focused. And so, it may be more difficult to talk about local issues if it's nationally focused. And so, you would have to take all those things into consideration as you were prepping. But with my particular experience, I have a provincial union, and I also have a local faculty association. It doesn't change the way we prep, but I think it changes the way the outcome of our preparations going forward is. And so, depending on the style, the comfort, the trust within the parties, I think that's what kind of determines what that style is. When you get down to difficult, difficult issues, I think that you tend to revert back to, well, here's my proposal. I don't like it. Here's yours. I don't like yours. And then, it becomes more because you actually have to start to get things on a paper. And until you get things on paper, sometimes it's not comprehensible for people. So, you want to make sure that you're checking in. And if you're too philosophical, then you're just going to spin your wheels and you're not going to actually get anywhere. So, it all depends on how you leave it at the table with your counterpart as to whether or not you have one day every month where you or you're on a regular cycle so that you have those cycles to have that relationship conversation. But sometimes, you may be working with someone who's from out of town and you have two or three really intense days where you can kind of churn out some language. And then other times, you may only meet once every other week. And so, there's some things that you need to do away from the table. So, all those factors kind of come together to try and figure it out. And you can have the best laid plans, but it's not until you're working with that other party that you can land on

Speaker 1: something. Right. So, we talked about that classic exchange of proposals and then interest-based bargaining. Is there any other types or those the two main ones? I think, I'm sure there is a

Speaker 2: bargaining like a labor relations scholar that's going to correct me. I am not that scholar. So, for me, in your practical world. In my practical world, it's for me, that's those two or I've done a hybrid of both. So, I guess there would be a third option to do a hybrid of

Speaker 1: both. Yeah. Okay. So, final question here. What, in your opinion, is the most overlooked aspect of

Speaker 2: bargaining preparation? Implementing your ideas. If you get where you want to get with your proposal, how are you going to implement it? So, have you done everything to make sure that your payroll team isn't going to be upset with you or your workforce administrator team? Can your systems do it? So, we are constantly asking those questions during the bargaining prep. You know, while we may have this great idea, can we actually implement it? And are there any systems, HRIS systems, whatever that system may be that you and your organization uses or if you're bargaining on behalf of someone and you're not familiar with the organization, you need to make sure that they can implement it. So, it will be really important to have people at the table who or at least access to them as you're creating those ideas in your head around, is it really an issue or you know, can we implement it? The other one would be, is this a union issue or is this our management issue and we just think we have an issue? You know, you do get circumstances where someone, you know, you put something on the table and they're like, well, you have all kinds of management rights around this. Like, why did you bring this up? And then you're like, oh, you know, well, okay. You know, maybe, maybe that's just our issue and we need to do more training with

Speaker 1: our leaders. But it's still a good conversation to have. But thanks, Jodi. I've had quite a bit of exposure to bargaining, but I learned a fair bit here. I did the general LR episode and that link is right here. Thanks for watching and see you next time.