Contracting Out by Eva Henshaw

Hello CS Member,

I’m honored to give you the first report from the Contracting Out Portfolio for the CS AGM.

It was very clear to me that the creation of the Contracting Out Officer position was needed in order to ensure that our departmental employers were aware of our new wording under Article 30 of our collective agreement and to apply pressure for them to adhere to the article.  When I took on this position I created a Contracting Out Action Plan (COAP) and sought support from our president, Debi Daviau, who was in agreement to give us the resources we needed to carry out the action plan.   This action plan details the process of daily monitoring, questioning, analyzing and grieving tenders for contracts.  It involves a key team (COAT) from the CS Executive, Stewards, Consultation Teams, EROs and other PIPSC staff to carry it out.

After taking a few months to get organized and work out the details of the plan, we were able to start the process in January 2018.  We were able to carry out three training sessions for stewards interested in placing individual grievances.  As well, we gave presentations to the Working Group on Consultation and some Consultation Teams.

Since the end of January, the COAT has looked at over 145 tenders.  I have sent out over 115 emails to departments asking them how the employer met the requirements of Article 30 before placing the tender.  The COAT has analyzed the responses from these emails and made decisions to grieve or to accept their response. As of May 1 2018, we have filed 56 policy grievances.  We have seen contracts that have paid out $1 million dollars for level 1 support per year.  We aren’t just seeing the waste of tax dollars to deliver CS work that belongs to our bargaining agent, we are acting on it and hopefully holding the departments accountable as much as we can.

The COAT has weekly teleconferences at which we discuss issues arising from this action plan.  Issues arising have mainly been around the feedback we are receiving from the individual departments.  They are not impressed that the CS Group is taking on a role of action; we are meeting with them to explain our position and to try to change the culture and mind set around contracting out.  I will not give up!

The responses that we are receiving from the departments are very valuable to our bargaining team.  These responses will be analyzed and be part of our supporting documentation at the next round of negotiations!

I want to thank Stan Buday, Pierre Touchette, Robert Tellier and Dean Corda for their efforts on the COAT.  This work is not a one person job and I truly appreciate the work they are doing.

Another part of my portfolio is participation in the talks with DND, ESDC and SSC on the Memorandum of Agreement on Contracting Out Guidelines.  The Team that meets with the employer includes myself, Stan Buday, Robert Tellier, Pierre Touchette and Lucille Shears as well as the Consultation Presidents for DND and SSC and Vice President for ESDC.  This has progressed slowly with our last communications involving us sending our documentation to them which outlined our expectations for guidelines.  We are currently waiting for our next meeting to be scheduled to discuss.  The documentation incorporated what we see as a process that departments should be going through before deciding to contract out IT work.

We have many struggles ahead as we see on the near horizon including the outsourcing of Cloud computing.

I’m available at any time for questions and comments, or if you would like to help in this endeavo

In solidarity

Eva Henshaw