To: PSRC Date: March 15, 2001
From: Curtis Ballard PSRC Secretary
Re: TRIUMF P&S Minutes
Minutes of the P&S meeting held on March 15, 2001
Present were: R. Ruegg, R. Moore, A. Trudel, G. Jones, J. Yandon, C. Ballard
Vacation Carry-Over:
1) Reply from Jim Hanlon to our letter concerning vacation carry over. The meeting was opened and the first order of business was to discuss the letter from Jim Hanlon. This was management’s response to a letter from the PRSC concerning vacation carry-over issues. The discussion that followed was focused on the complaint that, in some cases, management restricted when an employee could take vacation and then became resistant to that employee carrying over the “missed” holidays. It was also brought up that management’s ambitious milestones encouraged conscientious employees to defer their vacations, yet made them feel guilty when they had to “use up” a backlog of days. The management has not designated a “good” time to take these days. It was also felt that supervisors were being wrongfully targeted for poor planning and lack of cross training. It was noted that management can dictate to an employee when to take vacation, however, it was also felt that a supervisor should let an employee know as soon as possible when there was a conflict. A possible stopgap was presented that could assist in long term planning and give the employee some assurance of requested time off. The proposed solution involved amending the current “Request for Time Off” form to have implicit approval if not denied by a given date. This would place the onus on management to resolve any issues and save the employee awkward last minute changes.
Personnel Policies & Procedure:
2) Review revisions to the “Personnel Policies & Procedure” manual. The following comments were made: General note on these Policies and Procedures: any wording in the documents should be consistent with the prevailing legislation and should be worded such that should the legislation change, these policies and procedures will not need to be revised.
Clarification of Policy No. 17: Employee Benefits – BAE vs. P & S plans. Employees should be given a guide to benefits that they are entitled to and not specify the differences in the P&P manual. Provincial Medical and Extended Medical: note that medical is 100% employee paid and extended medical is 100% TRIUMF paid.
Item 8 of Policy No. 15: indicate that the application will be treated as confidential from the supervisor if so requested.
Clarification of Policy No. 13: Equitable Treatment. Restate the applicability in the Applicability section rather than in the definitions. Complaint Procedure: why 31 days from incident, why not 30 or 60? Same sentence should contain the word normally “… but normally no later than thirty-one (31) working days…”. Under "Investigation Procedures" on (g) it is not clear what work history has to do with anything. Perhaps previous "behavioral" history?
Privacy Issues:
3) There has been concern expressed over two potential privacy issues. The first is that the ISAC building is under video monitoring. While this is also true of the Meson Hall, the activities in the two areas are much different. Furthermore, there are apparently more cameras to be installed around the site for surveillance purposes (anti-theft). After some discussion the PSRC decided that we would write a letter to Management noting the concerns and propose that a sign be posted on the gate and badge room door notifying people that the premises are under video surveillance.
The second concern is photographs of staff members (on the internal web site) that can be reproduced, without consent, by unauthorized parties. The PSRC believes that posting of photographs should be optional if a staff member so chooses.
Approach to the new Director:
4) The PSRC feels that we must make our concerns known to the new director, Alan Shotter, in a timely and effective manner. A list of concerns will be produced and given to Alan for his perusal, after which we anticipate that there will be informal discussion. We believe that these concerns need to be expressed in the near future rather than after Alan becomes director in September.