Navigating Your First Collective Agreement
You have just gone through a union certification, and you may now be asking yourself: What’s next? The answer is clear: it is time to begin preparing for negotiations on your first collective agreement. In our experience, first agreements are extremely important as they set the baseline for future negotiations. However, they can be tricky and generally more complex and time-consuming than subsequent agreements. This is due to the fact that the parties are not building on a previous agreement but rather drafting an entire agreement from the ground up in most cases. In some instances, it may be less complex if there are close comparables from which you can establish the bones of the CBA. In other cases, there may be either no reasonable comparables or totally unreasonable comparables from the viewpoint of one of the parties. [This article also contains a first collective agreement negotiation checklist.]
