Ken Lew, Labour Relations Manager

Receiving our recent certificate from the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB), which authorizes Local 793 to represent the skilled workers at TWD Roads Maintenance Inc. in eastern Ontario, keeps our perfect record intact.
Local 793 is now a perfect four-out-of-four. Since March 2007, Local 793 has filed five applications for certification against TWD throughout southern Ontario. One by one we have dealt with each application with strong legal representation
at the OLRB in order to allow the ballots cast by employees to be counted.
Following each ballot count, the results have been both clear and consistent — the majority of highway maintenance employees at TWD want Local 793 as their union. As a result, the OLRB has issued bargaining rights certificates
to Local 793 covering TWD employees working in
1) southwestern Ontario,
2) the Bancroft, Lindsay and Peterborough areas,
3) the Burlington, Toronto and Vaughan areas, and
4) eastern Ontario. Our fifth and last application for certification covering the Barrie area is still being litigated at the OLRB with hearing dates continuing in October.
One by one, as the official bargaining agent of the employees at TWD, Local 793 has worked quickly to form employee bargaining committees to negotiate fair and reasonable first collective agreements.
To date, collective agreements have been successfully ratified by TWD employees working in southwestern Ontario and the Bancroft, Lindsay and Peterborough areas. For the other two areas which were recently certified, negotiations with TWD are currently under way.
TWD is no stranger to Local 793. Its parent company is Carillion Canada, which I’m sure many members know is a longstanding unionized contractor in Ontario’s construction industry.
Local 793 has built a positive working relationship with Carillion and its predecessors over the last several decades. Our intention is to carry this forward to immediately benefit the highway maintenance employees at TWD.
Carillion’s venture into Ontario’s highway maintenance industry was a direct response to the privatization policies brought in by the former PC government led by Mike Harris. As part of his “cost-cutting” and “anti-union” changes put in place starting in the mid-1990s, the Harris government privatized all highway maintenance work in the province. As a result, hundreds of public sector unionized jobs were lost to low-bid private contractors hired to do the same work.
TWD is among the largest companies looking after Ontario’s highway maintenance work.
With our current and future successes in organizing TWD’s employees at the OLRB, we hope to return the province’s highway maintenance work to a fully unionized sector represented
by Local 793.