OPSEU and the Government of Ontario have agreed that evidence due this month from Court Reporters will not be required until 2011.
The parties have agreed that evidence will be due once Vice Chair Abramsky has ruled on whether, based on the evidence provided by the three (3) witnesses, there is a sufficient basis to determine the remedy in the current proceeding. Although a specific date is currently not available, Court Reporters are encouraged to continue to collect relevant information regarding their hours of work in the preparation and certification of transcripts. The current arbitration is hearing evidence regarding the evenings, weekends, vacations and long hours that Court Reporters spend on transcript work.
Court Reporters have been paid by an outdated per page rate for decades which goes against a previous Abramsky ruling that transcript work is work of the bargaining unit which is covered by the Collective Agreement. For many years, and up to the present Court Reporters have not been able to benefit from collective agreement provisions such as overtime, conversion to full-time classified status etc., because the government has refused to apply the Collective Agreement to transcript work.
Once Abramsky rules on the current hearing, it is anticipated that Court Reporters will need to quickly forward their own individual information to OPSEU. Relevant information relates to income earned (through T4As or invoices) from transcript work and the best possible effort to determine at which hours/days of the week this work was performed.
Transcript records/information and questions should be forwarded to Marg Simmons at msimmons@opseu.org.