Grievances

The purpose of a grievance procedure is to provide an orderly method of reviewing and resolving workplace conflicts involving contractual issues. See the contract for a detailed description of those areas applicable to grievance procedures.

It is important to follow grievance procedure timelines. Failure to do so can cause forfeiture of rights to proceed with the grievance. Your BCEA grievance representative can provide valuable guidance during this phase. A summary of the timelines follows:

1) Within 15 days of the alleged grievance you must notify the immediate supervisor.

2) If a satisfactory resolution is not reached with 5 days of the discussion with the supervisor the grievant has an additional 5 days to file a “Statement of Grievance” form. The Statement of Grievance form can be found on this web site, contract section, appendix F.

3) The supervisor has 5 days to respond to the Statement of Grievance form.

4) If satisfactory resolution is not reached at this stage the matter can be appealed to successively higher levels of authority, culminating if necessary with third party intervention (a hearing before an arbitrator).

Following timelines are critical. Failure to do so can result in automatic dismissal of the grievance. A detail description of the grievance procedure is in your contract.

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