Hopefully I can get some insights from someone who has gone through this:
The backstory is that I work for a unionized company and we have not had a wage increase in ten years, in fact the company has cut our wage twice by axing our overtime pay in one way or another. And has used excuses such as low oil prices and covid to keep us away from the bargaining table. Now a couple months ago we received a new collective bargaining agreement which was a 7% total increase in wage over the next three years. But since our wage was stagnant for so long and we had already lost a percentage of our wage, and oil prices are soaring we voted down the offer stating that we wanted a ten percent raise. They’ve just responded with a new potential agreement of a half percent more. Which would be +7.5% over three years. They say that it’s this or it will go to arbitration. Now we are led to believe that an arbitrator would be a bad thing for us since the provincial government is anti union.
Has anyone gone through the arbitration process or have any experience they could share?