President’s Report
Public and Private Workers of Canada
Local 15
PO Box 250 Kimberley BC V1A 2Y6
Email Contacts at: www.ppwclocal15.com
Let me start by wishing you all Happy New Year. I hope that all of you had time to take in some cheer with family and friends. I am looking forward to what the next year will bring.
First up was the NEB meeting on December 7th and 8th in Vancouver. The theme from the pulp mill locals was definitely one of manpower shortages, railcar shortages and the inevitable chip shortages due to a lot of the sawmills taking downtime for various reasons. Kelly Johnson is very much a firm believer in education of all members so he has added to the agenda for NEB a labour school component. During that labour school, we had the privilege of having Cherolyn Knapp on zoom for a couple of hours, talking about conflict mediation through an informal process. As home work we had to print our workplace policies on harassment, bullying and such. I found Skookumchuck Pulp’s policy on one of the drives but was quite surprised that she had a different one given to her from Dan Kennedy?!? as Cherolyn is facilitating the meetings with our own DEI committee. Crofton then had another completely different one than these two. Go figure Paper Excellence can’t even get one policy across the entire company. Local 15 submitted 11 bylaw changes, 9 of those were passed and 2 were withdrawn. One of the withdrawn ones was for the initiation fee and the other was for basically the change for nominations/elections for JOHS committee and the number of trustees. There were 2 problems with this one, the first being the change to trustees was to go to 4 and by doing so it was going to make another section of our bylaws inconsistent. The other was in our bylaws where we quote a number for some of our committees but that number is dependant upon other factors and so we will just resubmit with some adjustments.
Next up was the Liaison meeting. I tried on more than one occasion to get this meeting scheduled and finally was able to accomplish the task. Barry, Art and Myself had many subjects for discussion from safety to payroll. We got several commitments from the Company, from no more timesheet changes by the company and for committees and meetings to get back on track to meeting consistency. Our next meeting will be in March. Just for your knowledge, the company was set to make about 75 million in EBITDA for the year, of course until the deep freeze happened so I’m not sure they achieved that projection.
December 17th was the kids Christmas party held at the Alliance Church. I should tell you now that the Local is the proud owner of a Santa suit! We will need suspenders to keep the pants on though LOL. There were about 45 kids that attended and after an absence of 3 years from this event it was great to see the families out having fun. I personally would like to thank brother Ryan Grier for his invaluable assistance in making tha party a great success for the children. I do look forward to next year’s event as my wife says I looked good in a Santa Suit LOL.
PS. I look forward to serving you, the members of this Local.
Your President
Gregory Ball