CN makes new offer to engineers union
Canada’s House of Commons is scheduled to debate back-to-work legislation today in an effort to bring an end a strike by engineers on the country’s largest railroad the Montreal Gazette reports.
Canadian National Railway said Tuesday that it has made a new offer in an effort to break the impasse with the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference and end the locomotive engineers strike that began on Saturday.
CN said it was offering to agree to binding arbitration on wage and benefit issues, and rollback of a 4,300-mile monthly cap for locomotive engineers to 3,800 miles, on the condition that the Teamsters withdraw work-rule demands from the bargaining table.
The union, representing about 1,700 striking locomotive engineers, said, “the company isn’t interested in negotiating a new contract.”
“This is far too obvious; CN has never had any intention to negotiate and is simply waiting for government intervention to settle the issues,” said Dan Shewchuk, the company’s union president.