The first thing would be the idea of starting bargaining a year before the expiry. I'm not sure why that's being done. I don't necessarily regard that as an improvement. My guess would be that not a lot of serious bargaining would take place in the first six months of that. Bargaining tends to heat up as you get closer to the expiry date. I'm not a fan of that one, I would have to say.
The second point is absolutely critical. What you're referring to there is the concept of what's called total compensation, so that you don't simply compare the wages in the bargaining unit to the private sector or to other types of jobs; you compare the pay, the benefits, the pension, the total compensation package. That's something that is really lacking from the point of view of interest arbitration cases, where arbitrators focus on issue by issue and they don't look at it in totality. Quite frankly, in the private sector, if we give somebody a dollar on benefits or a dollar on wages, it's still a dollar. We have to find a way to generate that dollar. Depending on the business we're in, it could mean we have to generate another $2 or $3 in revenue to provide that dollar. The line between a dollar on wages and a dollar on benefits or on pension is an artificial line, so I really believe in the total compensation model.
Prior to our panel, there was an individual who talked about the heavy-duty mechanic with PSAC in Moose Jaw versus the private sector equivalent. She noted that the PSAC heavy-duty mechanic was paid less than the private sector mechanic down the road. As a matter of fact, if you look at total compensation, my guess is the PSAC person is doing far better than the private sector person. That's one of the reasons there's no recruitment/retention problem in the private sector. So I'm a big fan of those changes for that reason.