Collective Agreements Now Searchable
Many years ago, when I was a mere Masters’ of Industrial Relations student at U of Toronto, I had a summer job working for John O’Grady (shout out to John!), a labour researcher and economist. John hired me to search collective agreements, coding specific collective agreement language into a spreadsheet. I grabbed my coffee and headed down each morning to the Ministry of Labour’s Collective Agreement Library on University Avenue, where I manually leafed through dozens of paper collective agreements.
Those days are long gone. The Collective Agreement Library still exists. Collective agreements are still required to be provided to the Ministry of Labour, and the Ministry still makes them available to the public.
However, recently the Library published an on-line, searchable collective agreement database!
Here is the link to the collective agreement searchable database.
There are a variety of ways to search. Looks like hours of fun. The most current agreement is not always there in my experience (because there’s a delay in getting them to the library often), but still this is a very useful database for anyone interested in collective agreement language and trends.
2 comments
What if CBA is not published? As per LRA 1995 it should have been published, maybe because is not ratified?
I live in BC where in 2019 legislation passed establishing a union floor. Collective agreements are now required to meet or exceed the ESA. There is also a searchable database of collective agreements.
It would it be interesting to see how many changes occurred as a result of this legislation.
If you look at some UFCW contracts for example, there are some provisions that do not seem to have adapted to the change. For example, one collective agreement combines Ontario’s first and last rule with B.C’s requirement that 15 out of 30 days prior to the stat must be worked. It literally combines two different provincial standards for a higher standard. Other collective agreements require a twenty hour average work week to be eligible for a stat. Under such a condition a worker could lose out on over six hundred dollars a year if he or she regularly works four days a week, for four hours a shift.
Should not the introduction of a union floor prevent such outcomes? At the very least, a searchable database allows people to look and ask these questions.