When management needs someone to fill in for a shift, the Collective Agreement between Local 4800 and HHS spells out how it has to be done. The Agreement calls for management to ask the most senior employee if s/he is available.

In this case, a supervisor made a mistake and "forgot" to ask the senior employee to take the shift. The senior employee filed a grievance, claiming about $140 in lost wages for the shift.

Management was plainly wrong in the case. But the supervisor refused to agree to the senior employee's claim. Under the terms of the Collective Agreement, the grievance goes up the line to higher levels of management, all of which refused to pay the $150 claim.

Under the terms of the Collective Agreement, the senior employee is entitled to take the case to arbitration. Arbitration is like a court case; it only happens if the company and the union cannot agree to settle a case beforehand.

Why would HHS take a case like this, where management is plainly wrong, all the way to arbitration? While the union generally uses a staff representative to argue its case, management almost always uses high-priced Toronto lawyers - sometimes more than one in a case - at a cost of $400 per hour and up. In addition, each case requires both union and company to appoint a nominee and to split the cost of an arbitrator for the three-person panel. So an average arbitration case can easily cost management $10,000 and often more.

In this particular case, Local 4800 won in a walk and the senior member was awarded the lost pay. As for management, it's a lot of money to pay to be proven wrong on a very small point.

Local 4800 sees management's tactics as a war of attrition. By constantly obstructing and needlessly taking dozens of cases to arbitration, management is not just abusing the industrial relations process. It is fostering an abusive and negative culture in the workplace.