Agreement Ratification Process

The root of the current ratification practice of negotiated agreements can be found in Equity's bylaws, which stipulate that changes to a negotiated scale agreement must be put out for ratification by the members who have worked under the expiring agreement.

This approach has been in place for many years, and it predates anyone currently on Council or staff. It was already in place when the bylaws were compiled into their current format in 1988, and was ratified by a referendum of the whole membership on January 17, 1989. Since then, it has received regular attention by Council, since no year goes by without the ratification of one or another of our negotiated agreements.

In 1996, the bylaw was modified to allow the ratification pool to be expanded, first at the discretion of Council, and then at the discretion of the Executive Director. The change was intended to allow members who would imminently be represented by an agreement, such as fight directors under the CTA, to vote on it. In the 30 or so ratification votes since then, Council has faced that situation only twice.

Here is what I understand to be the rationale behind the current process:

• The existing bylaw is designed to provide equal ratification rules across all of our negotiated scale agreements. Creating special rules for the CTA alone (as proposed by some) would suggest that some agreements are "more equal" than others.
• The list of members who have worked under any given agreement in its most recent incarnation is relatively stable, whereas the list of members who used to work under the agreement expands with each passing year. Costs would escalate endlessly for each successive ratification vote, were we to expand the pool along with the list.
• The purpose of the ratification vote is to determine if, on balance, the membership working under the agreement finds the proposed changes to current rules to be acceptable. Since the agreement changes with each round of negotiation, the members in the best position to compare the old and the new rules are those who have most recently worked under them. Importantly, the negotiations are also driven by input coming exclusively from those with current work experience.
• In the 2012 CTA ratification, for instance, the pool will include roughly 2700 members, which gives a margin of error of somewhere around ±2%, providing a very high degree of confidence in the results. It’s worth noting that, historically, these votes tend to pass by enormous margins (85-95%). Even the most recent CTA, which was quite contentious, passed by 74%, well within the margin of error.

In summary, the current approach exists to ensure: equal rights across all negotiated agreements, a ratification processes within our financial resources, a decision made by members with most current knowledge and who largely shaped the negotiations, and a ratification pool providing for a very small margin of error.

This is not to say that the bylaws can’t change going forward to formally redefine the ratification pool to something larger, and a request has recently gone in to do that. Council will be examining this in the new term.