President’s Message: Keep up the pressure

It’s been six months since the Secretary of Cabinet’s return to office edict—and the same six months since AMAPCEO members responded by exercising our collective agreement rights and submitting alternative working arrangement (AWA) requests. 

Those requests have been met with silence. 

It has been more than eight weeks since AMAPCEO walked away from the AMAPCEO-Central Employee Relations Committee table when it became clear that the Employer had no plan, no intention, and no motivation to review our requests.

The Employer has still not moved on a single AWA request. 

Clearly, their intent is to not only deny by delay and deferral, but to demoralize their own employees to the point they relent.

Remote work works. Hybrid work works. 

AMAPCEO is going to continue to keep up the pressure—at the Ontario Labour Relations Board, the Grievance Settlement Board, in the media, and in the workplace. 

This kind of unilateral decision-making in violation of our collective agreement rights will be all too familiar to AMAPCEO members. Only a few short years ago, AMAPCEO was faced with Bill 124, the government’s unconstitutional wage-capping legislation. 

Over the past six months, it’s become clear that it’s the intention of OPS leadership to pursue the same delay and litigation tactics that the government employed with Bill 124 and the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (NDTR) in relation to AWA requests. 

It’s one thing to follow the direction of government and quite another to emulate its behaviour. 

As the government did with its implementation of unconstitutional legislation and its steadfast refusal to recognize NDTR, the OPS Employer has chosen to willfully ignore the well-founded requests of its employees, in favour of arguing them via litigation.  

In the case of Bill 124, we stood strong and stood together with our fellow unions and fought the government’s legislation in court all the way to appeals. We knew we were right, we refused to back down, and we won. 

AMAPCEO is taking the same approach to the fight for remote and hybrid work. We have already filed five union policy disputes—including one arguing an unreasonable delay in processing our AWA requests. We also have hundreds of members represented by individual or group disputes. 

But while we were limited to the courts in the fight against Bill 124, because the decision-makers were elected officials to whom most of us did not have access, that is not the case in the fight for remote work. In this case, the decision makers are your managers, Directors, ADMs and Deputy Ministers, people many of you interact with on a regular basis. That is why we are keeping up the pressure on a “local” level—and we encourage you to do the same. 

Earlier this year, AMAPCEO sent letters to each Deputy Minister, urging them to take action on our AWA requests—to empower Directors to consider in good faith those forms of flexible work that have worked for 15 years. We received identical form letter responses—a clear indication that Deputy Ministers are happy to abdicate their responsibility in the workplace and a sad commentary on the state of the public service.  

We encourage you to ask your manager, Director, Assistant Deputy Minister and Deputy Minister why they aren’t speaking up for their employees, or for themselves, in reinstating what we all know to be true: that hybrid work works. It is important that everyone at every level of decision-making feel the pressure of accountability for the actions and inactions of the greater management team. 

We encourage all of you to take part in our campaigns in the workplace. Display your AMAPCEO Remote Work WORKS! swag in the office. Wear blue and participate in our workplace actions, like our upcoming Blue Valentine’s Week action. Talk to your Workplace Representative and consider filing an individual or group grievance. 

Every action you continue to take makes it clear to the Employer that we will not be dissuaded, demoralized, or worn down and that we will continue to fight – just as we did with Bill124 and NDTR. 

Stronger together,