A court case between Sodexo and the union that represented some workers on the Tata Steel project in Labrador has finally come to an end.
Sodexo and the local of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International union have been fighting in court for six years over money the union said was owed to camp workers at the site.
On Aug. 12, the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador upheld previous decisions in the case and ordered Sodexo to pay the union $7,440,548.59, plus legal costs.
The case initially went to arbitration in 2014, and the arbitrator found that Sodexo was subject to a collective agreement in effect between the Construction Labour Relations Association of Newfoundland and Labrador Inc. (CLRA) and the union regarding a unit of employees providing accommodations and food services at the camp.
The union was awarded $314,118.56 by the arbitrator for affected workers for the period between Dec. 18, 2013 and March 28, 2014. They were also ordered to make wage and benefits payments to employees on a continuing basis to the completion of the construction phase of the project.
That was then quashed by the courts, but brought back to life by a 2016 Supreme Court appeal.
Since then Sodexo and the union have been unable to agree on the total amount for compensation, going through further arbitration in 2017. Sodexo was ordered to pay the updated amount by March 11, 2019.
On April 2, 2019, the union applied to the Supreme Court to have the order enforced. Sodexo then filed a judicial review of the decision, which the courts have now dismissed.
According to the written decision by the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador, the issues in dispute related generally to payment, including payment for shift differential and overtime, and the period of time during which the collective agreement applied.
Justice Rosalie McGrath wrote a lengthy review of the arbitrators’ ruling, and said she found the 333-page decision reasonable on all issues.
Sodexo has argued a number of points, including that the collective agreement should have ceased to apply to the workers on April 1, 2015 when the project entered a commercial phase, since the original 2014 decision had specifically referenced the construction phase of the project as the basis for the compensation rates.
The arbitrator had said that since the workers were working on a construction site, they were covered under the same collective agreement as the other construction workers. Sodexo had argued they were not construction employees, but merely providing services ancillary to the industry.
Sodexo argued that "logic and fairness dictate that if the collective agreement is to apply to Sodexo employees when the predominant activity on site is construction, the opposite must be true when Sodexo employees are not predominantly catering to construction employees."
McGrath disagreed, saying the arbitrators’ finding that construction and production could occur at the same time and the collective agreement would continue to apply until construction ceased is "coherent and rationally supported."
Evan Careen is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter covering Labrador for the SaltWire Network
