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Canwest News Service

MVT Canadian Bus believes striking HandyDart workers, members of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), have every right to receive fair wages and benefits for the fine job they do providing specialized transit services to people throughout Metro Vancouver.

This belief underscores our commitment to our employees and our obligation to the community as a good corporate citizen. That’s why we provided a fair and reasonable wage and benefits package in our final offer to the ATU. Unfortunately, the ATU walked off the job and on October 30 rejected our offer. They continue to exercise their right to strike today.

MVT understands the strike is difficult for our customers and their families and we apologize for any inconvenience this labour dispute has caused them. Our business is about people. Everyone who works for our company — management and unionized employees — takes pride that our services help people, many of whom have disabilities or are seniors who have no other means of transportation.

As a Canadian subsidiary of MV Transportation Inc., the largest North American provider of specialized transportation services, MVT was selected by TransLink through a competitive process as the best possible service provider to improve the HandyDART system.

We were chosen by TransLink because of our experience, innovation, safety record and customer focused approach. MV Transportation won a Safety Achievement Award in 2007 from the American Public Transportation Association. That same year, we received a Corporate Citizen of the Year award by the Conference of Minority Transportation Officials.

Contrary to what the ATU and BC Federation of Labour claim, MVT came to B.C. to provide TransLink a solution, not to tear up union contracts. TransLink’s review of HandyDart found changes were needed to improve timeliness and overall service quality, and to provide a seamless regional service better integrated with the overall transit system.

Before MVT, there were eight different contractors running independent HandyDart systems throughout Metro Vancouver. Employees were represented by the ATU, CAW and BCGEU — under five different collective agreements.

Since we began operations last January, numerous changes and improvements have been made to HandyDART. Many of the changes respond to requests made by customer groups in TransLink’s review. Today the system is more efficient and passengers enjoy seamless travel across Metro Vancouver, extended service hours and better on-time performance and reliability. That’s good news for our 4,500 riders and good news for taxpayers who are being asked to pay more for transit services.

One of the first things MVT did after it took over the system last January was raise the wages of more than 60 per cent of our drivers — some up to 16 per cent. We are now proposing to increase our employees’ wages by 3.7 to 22 per cent to bring all drivers to $21.25 per hour. This comes at a tough time in the economy, when major collective bargaining settlements are seeing average annual wage increases of only 1.9 per cent.

Over the three-year contract, HandyDart drivers would see their wages climb by a further 12.6 per cent to $23.64. Employees will also receive 7.5 hours of guaranteed work per day.

The benefits package before the ATU includes 15 to 35 vacation days, along with full employer coverage of medical service plan, extended health and employee assistance premiums.

But the main sticking point is the Municipal Pension Plan (MPP). Presently, 241, or 46 per cent, of MVT’s 525 unionized employees are part of the MPP. More than half therefore have no pension plan.

With our current offer, all employees would have an RRSP. MVT would contribute six per cent of the employees’ wages to a self-directed RRSP. If matched by the employee, we would increase it to seven.

The MPP recently lost $720 million in three months and like other employers who are unwilling to take on the risks of a defined benefit plan, MVT is not prepared to pay an unknown and increasing amount to fund the MPP in the future. We feel the RRSP will provide a secure future our employees can count on.

The ATU is now calling for binding arbitration, despite the fact it signed an agreement not to. Progress has been made through collective bargaining and we believe we need to get back to the table and reach an agreement, for everyone’s benefit.

John Siragusa is vice-president, operations at MVT Canadian Bus.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 4:30 am and is filed under National Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.