Following four days of mediation, mediator/arbitrator William Kaplan issued an award today, Wednesday, August 8, 2018, which finally establishes a collective agreement for more than 6,000 employees in the Health Care Bargaining Unit at the NSHA and the IWK. The process leading to this arbitration award began in October 2016 when the Council of Health Care Unions began negotiations on a province-wide collective agreement. The council – made up of bargaining committee members from NSGEU, CUPE and Unifor – was required by legislation to negotiate 16 collective agreements down to one each for the IWK and NSHA. The council held more than 50 negotiating sessions with employer representatives over almost two years. With your support, the parties had agreed in May 2018 that any outstanding issues would be sent to Mr. Kaplan to decide. Today, Mr. Kaplan issued his award completing the process and establishing new collective agreements for the … Read more…

Are you attending the All Committee’s Conference this year in Truro ? Thursday October 18, 2018 at 7:00pm CUPE Nova Scotia will proudly be hosting a workshop called ‘the KAIROS Blanket Exercise’. The KAIROS Blanket Exercise is an experiential teaching tool to share the historic and contemporary relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada. The exercise builds awareness and understanding of our shared history as Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada by having participants literally walk through situations that include pre-contact, treaty-making, colonization and resistance. Hope to see you there! “I found the Blanket Exercise to be a very unique and personal way to experience key moments in the history of Indigenous people in Canada. The way that historical facts about the Indigenous experience in Canadian history were personalized for the participants was truly profound. By engaging the participants in this way, the challenges, losses and triumphs of Indigenous people in … Read more…