CBC employees have made great sacrifices in the past few years as the corporation continues to address its fiscal challenges. CBC’s unions have worked with management to try and ensure programming and jobs are maintained in an environment that is constantly under pressure.
Now the CBC has arbitrarily decided to make employees pay more for their pensions. This is your money earned as part of your salary compensation, and it will reduce your take-home pay. It’s not fair for CBC to unilaterally change how you are paid, and the unions at CBC regard the move as a violation of our collective agreements.
Right now the CBC and employees make contributions on a 60/40 basis. Management confirmed at the latest Consultative Committee on Staff Benefits (CCSB) that increases in employee contributions will be phased in to bring us to a 50/50 split by July 1, 2017.
Under management’s plan, your contribution level will increase from 40 per cent to 43.33 per cent on July 1 of this year. It would increase by similar amounts over the next two years until you are paying 50 per cent of the cost from July 1, 2017 on. Looked at another way, this translates into a 25 per cent increase in employee contributions by July 2017 – That’s money coming out of our pockets.
Management estimates the change will save about $3 million in the first year, $6 million in the second and $9 million in the third; it says it’s doing this to comply with a federal government directive to Crown Corporations to move to a 50/50 pension contribution split by July 1, 2017. CBC management’s approach is a cash grab because even if the corporation has to satisfy the government’s directive by 2017, the CBC is gaining about $9 million by starting the increases this year instead of waiting until 2017.
CMG and the other unions will be fighting the corporation’s unilateral changes to your pension plan through the processes in our collective agreements and by any other means available to us.
Your representatives at the April 1, 2015 CCSB:
Michael D’Souza
Annick Forest
Eric Foss
Marc-Philippe Laurin
Michael Robert
Jon Soper