When Renfrew Town Council went to a Committee of the Whole format, standing committees were made a thing of the past, and one of the casualties of that decision was the loss of a designated individual to handle the contract identification and enforcement duties usually undertaken by an HR person.
What this makes necessary is the appointment, or designation of such an individual, someone who can take on the role of Council HR Liaison. As the name suggests, it’s a position requiring a liaison between council and administrative staff when it comes to the area of workers and the contractual conditions under which they toil for the town.
This designation is especially important as such a person would be involved in the grievance process. Currently, there are three internal steps to any grievance procedure before the arbitration stage is reached.
First is an employee making an approach to their immediate supervisor or supervisor-designate. The second stage involves the department head or their designate. The third step would have been to the Committee of Council or their designate, but the cessation of standing committees threw this step out of whack. It’s this third step that’s been compromised and requires the designation of a Council HR Liaison to make things whole again.
Four options were presented for review:
- Have the CAO, Department Director, and the Renfrew County Human Resources Support handle all matters concerning the union contract.
- Have the CAO, Treasurer, and the Renfrew County Human Resources Support handle all matters concerning the union contract.
- Have the Council HR Liaison (or another member of council), the CAO, the Department Director, and the Renfrew County Human Resources Support handle all matters concerning the union contract.
- Have the Council HR Liaison (or another member of council), CAO, Treasurer, and the Renfrew County Human Resources Support handle all matters concerning the union contract.
Neither of the first two options has an allowance for a Council HR Liaison, which I thought was the purpose of the entire exercise, but often this council stuff mystifies me, and maybe this is just another example of that.
To me, anything involving the Department Director at the third stage is problematic because that person has already been involved in Stage 2 of the process, and whoever the Department Director is may be part of the origin of the grievance to begin with. To me, when the grievance escalated to Stage 3, it moved beyond the purview of any administrator involved directly with the department in which the employee grievance originated.
So that leaves me with Option 4, although from the sound of things at the meeting, the favourite horses were embodied by options 1 and 3.
It’s interesting how the first two options involved only three individuals, while the last two featured four.
How about an Option 5 that cuts out the Treasurer? The CAO indicated in her remarks that having more people involved in the process leads to more process to be involved in. So cut the Treasurer out of there. If three people can handle things in Options 1 and 2, they can handle things in Option 4 as well.
There was some talk around if it was even necessary to have a member of council serving as the Council HR Liaison. The argument was that everything has to come back to Council for approval anyways, so why the need for an elected representative to be part of the process?
Okay, fair enough as an argument. But then what would be the point of having councillors sit on boards and committees, other than to possibly collect enhanced renumeration to supplement their councillor stipends?
Having an elected representative present in all aspects of committee and board work is vital to the proper running and operation of municipal departments and areas of jurisdiction. This is no different.
You cannot have solely bureaucrats in charge of important processes as these, as it’s a statement of the importance of democracy and of transparency. Maybe the admin types will quote their industry standard arguments once again, but staff and admin fingerprints all over the Ma-Te-Way thing kind of makes a case that, despite industry standards, these standards don’t mean a thing if they’re abused, circumvented, misrepresented, or ignored.
That’s a terrible thing to say, yes, and I truly wish it didn’t need to be said. We’ve already had more than our fill of when the horses get out of the barn when everyone thought everyone else was “handling it.”
Sometimes, when we’re looking at what position might be created to make things work a bit better, we might look at hiring a wrangler and a collie, just to bring some sense to the herd.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 