Ontario Public Service Employees Union v. Guelph Services for the Physically Disabled
2716-99-R Ontario Public Service Employees Union, Applicant v. Guelph Services for the Physically Disabled, Responding Party.
BEFORE: Russell Goodfellow, Vice-Chair.
APPEARANCES: David Wright, Pat Honsberger, Lois Boggs, and Mary North for the applicant; Simon Mortimer, Samara Kaplan, Anne Waller, and Pam Polfuss-Schmidt for the responding party.
DECISION OF THE BOARD; February 18, 2000
1This is an application for certification.
2The issue is whether the applicant’s unit is appropriate. Although described, in essence, as an “all employees but office and clerical” unit “save and except Outreach Program staff”, there is only one classification of employees in the unit: attendant care workers. The employer does not object to the unit on that basis (because attendant care workers comprise essentially all of the non-managerial personnel), but it does object to the fact that not all attendant care workers are included. The employer maintains that a unit that excludes attendant care workers in the outreach programme is not appropriate.
3The Board agrees. In our view, a unit that would take only fifty-one (51) of the sixty-seven (67) attendant care workers in this workplace is not appropriate. While it is true, as the union maintains, that there is only a minimum of interchange between employees performing work in the apartment programme and those in the outreach programme, that is not the end of the matter; the overriding concern here is one of undue fragmentation.
4This is a relatively small workplace in a social service setting. The employer is a non-profit charitable organization funded by the government. While the union is certainly entitled to a measure of freedom in selecting the unit that it wishes to organize, there are limits. Those limits are expressed in such concepts as an aversion to fragmentation and classification-based or departmental bargaining units. These concepts reflect an accommodation between the goals of employee organizing, on the one hand, and the need for the organized group to have an appreciable degree of functional integrity and distinctiveness in the employer’s operations, on the other.
5It is the latter concern that is paramount here: this unit does not have a strong basis in the employer’s operations. In almost all material respects the terms and conditions of employment of the included and excluded groups are the same. The employees report up through the same management structure (with only the first level supervisor being different as between the outreach programme and each of the two apartments) and they do the same work (in clients homes rather than in two apartment buildings owned or leased by the employer). In short, we accept the reasoning in Sheehan’s Truck Centre Inc., Board File No. 0998-99-R, dated September 21, 1999, at para. 26, in which the Board refused to segregate the relatively small group of parts department employees from the employer’s more “natural” production unit. Balanced against this, we have no information as to why the union did not seek to represent (or, perhaps, organize) all of the attendant care workers.
6In our view, employer counsel’s analogy is more apt: the proposed bargaining unit is more akin to an attempt to create and certify a departmental unit than it is to organizing two retail outlets or plants operated by one employer in the same city.
7In the result, we find that the unit proposed by the applicant is not appropriate. Accordingly, the eleven (11) segregated ballots of the attendant care workers will be counted, along with the ballot of Dawn Martin (which the parties had agreed would be counted if the others were).
8This matter is referred to the Manager of Field Services.
“Russell Goodfellow”
for the Board