For Immediate Release November 30, 2005
UNA calls for public inquiry
into Labour Relations Board
Board’s conflict of interest was
real not just apparent
Documents made public in news reports today show that the Labour Relations Board was in a real conflict of interest when it was administering Bill 27, says the United Nurses of Alberta.
“What has come out is that the Board collaborated with law firms who represent health employers and with the government in drafting Bill 27,” notes David Harrigan, UNA’s Director of Labour Relations.
“Then the same Board chaired the hearings and made the rulings on how to interpret that law. It was a blatant conflict of interest,” he said.
“The Labour Relations Board is supposed to be an impartial referee that fairly resolves disputes, but when they are obviously collaborating with employers, it makes the whole process a farce,” he said.
The provincial government’s appointed Health Regions are the employers for the vast majority of the province’s health workers.
Bill 27 made massive restructuring in the labour organization of the Health Regions, a process that hurt the interests of many of the province’s unionized health workers including Registered nurses.
“We have had concerns for years that the Board is biased toward employers, now we have what you can call smoking gun evidence of it.” Time after time, with the Lakeside dispute, with the recent Finning dispute and in past UNA cases, the Board has taken the employers’ side.
“It’s been a long time since we have gone to the Labour Relations Board with any expectation of a fair hearing or a just ruling,” he said.
“We need a public inquiry into the system problems with the Labour Relations Board,” David Harrigan says. “To have a cozy club of employers, government and the Labour Relations Board pretending to fairly administer the province’s labour laws should offend everyone’s sense of fairness and natural justice.”
UNA was one of the labour organizations that forced a judicial review of the Board’s Bill 27 ruling. Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act at that time, showed the Board had been communicating with the government on Bill 27. But the Board had also refused to release and blacked out many of the documents. The judge in the case ruled there was not enough evidence to conclude there was an “apprehension of bias” on the part of the Labour Board.
“This further evidence shines more light on these problems,” says David Harrigan. “Now we need a full public inquiry that gets all the details out and fully examines the functioning and impartiality of the Labour Relations Board,” he says.
Download Documents of the emails between government and the Labour Relations Board
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