The member-driven Phoenix Escalation Working Group was created to strategize, escalate political pressure, and take action to address the Phoenix pay crisis, including finding ways to quickly resolve issues and to help secure a new damages agreement.
To win justice on Phoenix, there is a need for creative strategies forged from the ground up, and participatory campaigns that tap into every union’s real source of strength: rank-and-file members working together to defend their rights in their workplaces.
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Background
Since the launch of the Phoenix pay system in 2016, federal public sector employees have continued to suffer the impacts of its catastrophic failure.
Every two weeks, the employer is breaking CAPE members’ collective agreements and failing to ensure they are paid the wages they have earned. Thousands of CAPE members are being impacted on a regular basis, and thousands more live with the anxiety and uncertainty that they will be next. There are too many individual stories of stress, precarity, mental anguish, and trauma – all a result of this one huge structural failure.
That is why, on February 27, 2024, CAPE joined PSAC and PIPSC to call on the extension of damages.
But beyond being granted compensation, CAPE members deserve better.
The need for collective action has never been greater. The formal mechanisms the employer has offered are failing:
- The Public Service Pay Centre’s backlog is at an all-time high, with 430,000 outstanding cases and an average processing time of two years. Fewer than 25 per cent of cases are being resolved within service standards.
- CAPE members have not had a damages agreement in place since the first one expired in March 2020. There has been no claims process in place for any of the hundreds of thousands of Phoenix issues over the last four years.
- Formal grievance processes for having pay corrected remain unacceptably slow.
It’s time to organize to raise the temperature on the employer and force them to come to the table in good faith. This means escalating CAPE members’ cases, demanding resolutions for the people impacted by longstanding employer abuse, and working with fellow unions to bring the employer to the table.
It’s time for a new negotiated damages agreement, much more complete than the last, to provide some compensation and justice for what has been endured since the last agreement expired.
And it’s time to insist on measures to make sure that this never happens again, by ensuring that all future pay simplification processes come to the bargaining table where they belong.
The Phoenix Escalation Working Group will offer opportunities for members to unite and organize to push for accelerated changes.
It’s time.
