There is a clear difference in opinion when it comes to an arbitrator’s decision surrounding wages paid to Saint John firefighters.
The decision, among other things, gives firefighters a 15 per cent raise over a five-year contract, retroactive to 2014.
The city had offered two per cent per year. Firefighters will also start working 24-hour shifts as requested.
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Mayor Don Darling says he has grave concerns over the decision. He calls the arbitration system broken across the country and wants it to be an election issue here in 2018.
“That you can have inflation be under two per cent, that you can have other public sector workers getting zeros and ones and that you can turn around and can get an arbitrator to award 15 per cent raises over the next five years,” said Darling.
The firefighters association says it respects the decision and rejects the mayor’s notion the system is broken.
“This is the kind of rhetoric that we hear from people that feel like they should have got better,” said Peter Alexander, president of the association.
The city was offering firefighters two per cent increases but Alexander says the decision was a fair one.
“Our numbers that we received were totally in line, one hundred per cent in line with what our true comparables have received in our region, that’s professional firefighters within our region,” he said.
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Deputy Mayor Shirley McAlary says the decision was better than she expected and says she hopes it sends the police commission back into negotiations with the police department before it heads to arbitration in February.
“In the history of arbitration deals normally police make higher than fire so you can look at the history of that and prove that always the police departments get a little bit more than fire departments do,” said McAlary.
Darling says consideration is being given to challenging the arbitrator’s ruling.
In a statement, New Brunswick Labour Minister Gilles LePage says “decisions by an arbitrator might not satisfy everyone, but to balance the rights of both parties during bargaining, this is the system which is currently in place.”