RE 2019 AGM motion #3

RE AGM motion #3

WHEREAS a vital element of fairness and natural justice is that members will have the ability to contest denied promotions; and

WHEREAS the latest version of the RE Independent Recourse Mechanism was agreed to on the premise that both the Institute and the Employer would have oversight of and input to the pool of reviewers for said mechanism, but the Institute does not currently have such oversight and input; and

WHEREAS multiple judicial reviews of recourse decisions have had minimal effect on the quality of the implementation of the recourse mechanism and our career progression frameworks,

BE IT RESOLVED THAT the RE Group asks the President of PIPSC to assign resources to develop a proposal to encode the Independent Recourse Mechanism into the Public Service Employment Regulations, or other appropriate instrument, by the end of 2019.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT the RE Group asks the President of PIPSC to assign resources to lobby appropriate parties to implement that proposal.

Commentary

In the first version of the Independent Recourse Mechanism (IRM) developed between PIPSC and participating departments, each department was responsible to maintain its own list of reviewers.  This created multiple problems with the timely appointment of reviewers, agreement on acceptable reviewers, and the perceived independence of the reviewers (who almost always had some recent connection to the management of the department - and so arguable were not ‘independent’).

A compromise reached in the second version of IRM was that a pool of reviewers would be created and maintained with joint oversight.  PIPSC and the Employer would pre-agree on appropriate reviewers (to be nominated by either party) before they were placed into the pool, so there would be little or no delay in finding an agreed reviewer.  To our knowledge only one department actually obtained PIPSC pre-approval of the reviewers they nominated, and all of the PIPSC-nominated reviews are no longer accepting cases.  It is now unclear to us who maintains the pool, and there may be no pre-agreed reviewers remaining.  The independence and appropriateness of them therefore remains in substantial doubt.

Further, at least one department altered the IRM before having it signed by their Deputy Head, one sub-population still is under the first version of the IRM, and one department has just created a new version to go with their newly instated career progression framework.  It is unclear how a common pool of reviewers will handle the differences, at least without further training - and we are unaware of training happening in many years.  This lack of training may also contribute to the many times we have had to file for judicial review of recourse decisions.