[1997] OLRB REP. MARCH/APRIL 279
3854-96-U National Automobile, Aerospace, Transportation and General Workers Union of Canada (CAW-Canada) and its Local 35, Applicant v. Siemens Electric Limited, Responding Party
BEFORE: Bram Herlich, Vice-Chair.
DECISION OF THE BOARD; April 29, 1997
This is an application filed pursuant to section 96 of the Labour Relations Act, 1995 (the "Act") wherein the applicant (the "union") alleges that the responding party (the "employer") has violated section 70 of the Act.
The employer asserts that the application fails to make out a prima facie case and ought to therefore be dismissed.
The Board has reviewed the parties' pleadings (including the applicant's additional particulars) and is persuaded that we ought to exercise our discretion to not inquire into this matter any further. Consequently, and for reasons which we shall now briefly articulate, this application is hereby dismissed.
The application arises essentially out of the fact that a voice mail message left for a union official by a grievor and witness at an ongoing arbitration hearing appears to have been forwarded to the voice mail of the employer's Senior Human Resources Administrator, John Evangelista.
The message in question has now become part of the evidence in the ongoing arbitration proceeding. Indeed, the arbitrator appears to have heard evidence regarding the receipt of the message and has even taken a view of Mr. Evangelista's office for that purpose.
One may readily conclude the union may have or had a security problem with respect to its voice mail. There is, however, nothing in the union's pleadings which leads inexorably to the conclusion that the employer is responsible for that security difficulty, let alone that it has set out to deliberately create it or benefit from it.
In the circumstance where the union's pleadings, even if accepted, do not clearly point to any prohibited conduct on the part of the employer and where all of the circumstances regarding the transmission and receipt of the message in question are already part of the record in a related proceeding, we do not see that any labour relations purpose would be served by generating a further layer of litigation.
Whatever the outcome of the arbitration proceedings, the parties, or at least the union, may well have a continuing problem regarding voice mail security. But that problem is one which we would have hoped can be easily resolved (in any number of ways) and, in any event, is not, at its heart, a labour relations problem.
This application is dismissed.