June 4th, 2014
Our seventh vignette is on flexible working schedule
Another round of negotiations with Treasury Board is now under way and you will recall that we issued a survey between December 2013 and January 2014 to know what your priorities were.
Compensation, job security and sick leave came out as your top priorities in the survey.
We also received many comments and input and we thank you for this. We've read those comments and much of this information will be very useful.
We did however notice that there were some misconceptions as to what is subject to collective bargaining and what is not. The confusion is generally understandable, especially when Minister Clement keeps on comparing the public and private sectors whenever it's convenient for him to do so.
With this in mind, we are sharing a series of vignettes on some of the myths and misconceptions about what can and cannot be bargained.
Our seventh vignette is on flexible working schedule.
Did you know that...
*...the collective agreement recognizes the importance of a flexible working schedule allowing lawyers to balance personal and professional obligations? However, this flexibility must be reconciled with the employer's legislated right to manage hours of work. As a result, such flexibility is subject to operational requirements and managerial approval. Lawyers may enter into alternate work or flexible work hour arrangements with the approval of their manager, who is expected to exercise their discretion in a non-arbitrary, discriminatory or bad faith manner. That said, lawyers in question must work an average of 37.5 hours per week over a 4 week period. What a lawyer can't do is to take it upon himself or herself to set his or her own schedule without management approval.
More vignettes will be published in the coming days. Please stay tuned.