2015
Kiewit employs a number of persons under the government's Temporary Foreign Workers Program. Such workers all come from abroad to work, initially for a year, with an employer sponsor under the plan. Kiewit has not viewed these Temporary Foreign Workers as eligible for the "living out" allowance except when they were sent from their Edmonton workplace up to do work in Fort McMurray. Initially, at least, the bargaining agent, the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC) took no issue with this. It was later discovered that the Employer brought in some additional employees from Eastern Canada to work on an urgent project and paid these persons the living out allowance while they were here. This appeared to CLAC to be discriminatory, in that persons whose principal residence was in Eastern Canada were receiving the allowance while Temporary Foreign Workers, whose principal residence was in a foreign country, were denied that allowance.
Grievance dismissed. The allowance was payable where an employee had a normal place of work but was temporarily assigned to work elsewhere and where the employer needed short-term employees that it could not attract locally, for a duration too short or too unpredictable to justify an employee's setting up a local residence. The Eastern Canada employees fell into the latter category. The TFW employees had residences in Edmonton. They were not eligible for the allowance unless they were sent to Fort McMurray.
Alberta Grievance Arbitration
the judge found the policy used by Kiewit was not discriminatory, the situation of the Eastern Canadians significantly different from the Temporary Foreign Workers. There is clear evidence before me that the Temporary Foreign Workers had residences in Edmonton, while the Eastern employees did not. The Eastern employees were not here for a sufficiently long or certain period to expect them to establish such a residence.
living allowance
Alberta
