No, sir, it's not.
In our May 2008 collective bargaining, we reduced paid vacations by about 40 hours, or a week—we lost a week of paid time off. And then in this contract, which we just tentatively reached yesterday, we reduced vacation time again, by another 40 hours.
We have two types of vacation. One is the traditional vacation that you take when you're able to schedule it. The other is a kind of scheduled vacation. That's what you call the SPA. I want to emphasize that it doesn't mean our members go to a spa and have a manicure and sit in a hot tub. That's how some of the commentators have described it. It's basically a different way of delivering vacation time.
So our vacation time has been reduced by two weeks.
Our effort, over the years—it was part of our productivity strategy, in fact—was to capture some of the gains of technological improvements and productivity growth in the form of time off, the reason being, first of all, that it allowed for healthier workers. We have much lower absenteeism in Canada than we have in the U.S. plants, and that's part of our time off strategy. But it was also to preserve the number of jobs in the industry as we move forward, so that technological change didn't result into a continual downsizing of the industry until there was only one person left pushing the start button.
There was method to our madness on the “time off” issue.