LifeLabs and Its Unionized Workers Come to Tentative 3-Year Agreement After Less Than 48 Hours from Legal Strike Position

Urian B., Tech Times 25 October 2021, 03:10 am

LifeLabs and its own unionized workers have now come to a whole tentative three-year contract agreement. This was done just less than 48 hours after the said union had entered an actual legal strike position.

Union Workers and LifeLabs

While unions amongst workers are meant to help the workers get better environments and defend them, there are instances where unionizing has not been able to obtain positive results. With LifeLabs, however, a contract agreement was finally made after just 48 hours of the legal strike position.

According to GlobalNews.CA, the BC General Employees Union started job action just recently and it consisted of an overtime ban as well as work-to-rule campaign. Both sides had returned to the bargaining table during the same evening as the job action.

BCGEU on Work-to-Rule Campaign

As of the moment, the details of what happened during the particular sitdown at the bargaining table has yet to be unveiled. The union notes that the agreement will be present to members soon who will still need to take a vote in order to ratify it.

The BCGEU notes that overtime ban as well as work-to-rule campaign will be suspended until the members are finally able to vote. This would mean a stalemate for both parties until members of the union would either accept or deny the final agreement.

Temporary Agreement with BCGEU

As of the moment, both parties have only reached a temporary agreement which will then be potentially changed depending on what the decision of the union would be. As per the details on what the union is voting for, not a lot of information was provided.

The union, however, notes that wages and benefits were the key points of the current dispute. The BCGEU now represents a whopping 1,550 LifeLab employees. They have all stated that they have been without a contract ever since March 2021.

What is LifeLabs?

For those that are unaware, LifeLabs is considered the largest provider of medical laboratory services to the province and was also reportedly deemed an essential service by the official BC Labor Relations Board as the contract dispute started to escalate. As per GlobalNews.CA, the story contained files from the Canadian Press.

According to the article by TimesColonist, the union was reportedly in a legal strike position just recently after it had issued a 72-hour strike notice before. The whole event reportedly held a rally with around 200 different union members all attending in Burnaby in order to promote their position together.

Vaccine Mandates

In other news, the vaccine mandate is now starting to stretch into multiple different sectors of business. Adobe announced that its employees should get vaccinated before December 8, 2021 or they will then be placed on unpaid leave.

Other companies, however, like Apple, will require unvaccinated employees to get daily COVID-19 tests. This would happen every time they report to work.

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Written by Urian B.