New rules for CTA ratification votes

During the 2012 ratification vote for the CTA, there was considerable member discussion on the eligibility criteria for voting. A bit of background: the voting pool for all agreements has historically been defined as members who have been engaged under the expiring agreement (typically the previous three years).

As mentioned at the time, the rationale for this approach was threefold: equal voting rights across all negotiated agreements; a ratification processes within our financial resources; and a decision made by members with the most current knowledge and whose input shaped the negotiations. Still, members made it clear that they thought it was time for a change, and Council has recently completed bylaw amendments to bring that about.

Going forward, the CTA will have a separate set of ratification rules. All members in good standing who have worked under any theatre agreement providing for minimum scale fees*, during the six year period ending with the expiry date of the agreement, will now be automatically eligible to vote. This change will increase the voting pool considerably. 

In addition, any member in good standing who is not automatically included in that six-year pool may also register to vote in the ratification. Registration will begin six months before the expiry date of the agreement, and extend until the anticipated date for close of negotiations. Advance notice regarding registration will be provided in plenty of time for members to get on the list.

Note that these changes do not affect the voting pool for the Stratford Addendum, nor any other agreement.

Council chose this dual approach as a way to balance greater automatic access with the increased costs of having a larger voting pool. We hope, through these changes, to provide voting access to our largest agreement to all members in good standing who may wish to vote. This change will be first applied to the ratification vote expected in 2015.


* This includes all current theatre agreements, except for the Festival Waiver and the Artists' Collective Policy.

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.