In a merger, the employer should take a position on the seniority list

When a telecom operator buys a cable company, the integration plan usually has workstreams for systems, networks, brands and billing. The workforce stream tends to concentrate on culture, communication and retention. In a unionised company I think the most consequential people decision sits somewhere else: in the seniority list. Who bids first for day shifts, who is offered overtime in a storm, who chooses vacation in July and who is laid off first if work disappears are all settled by that list. My position is that the employer should state, early and in writing, how it believes the lists should be merged, and that the fairer default is to merge them by actual service, with temporary protections for the people who lose ground.

Employers often prefer to stay out. Seniority is the union's business, the argument runs. The union owes a duty to represent all its members fairly, and an employer that takes sides invites a complaint or a split membership. I take the legal point seriously. The union decides how it represents its members, and the employer has no vote in its meetings. But the employer created both lists by hiring the people on them, and it bought the company whose employees are now being ranked. Staying neutral is itself a position, and it usually favours whichever group is larger.

Why the employer cannot stay neutral

At Keswald in 2023 the question arrived quickly. We had acquired Bracewood Cable Systems in January, and in March the union representing our 1,840 craft employees applied to the Canada Industrial Relations Board to bring Bracewood's 610 technicians into the unit. We decided not to contest the application. That left the terms of entry to bargaining, and the hardest term was service.

There were three broad options. Endtailing would place every Bracewood technician below every Keswald technician, however long they had worked. Dovetailing would merge the two lists by date of hire. A blended method would interleave them by formula. Some long-serving Keswald members argued for endtailing, and I understood why. They had earned their place over twenty or thirty years, and new colleagues arriving above them on a shift-bid list felt like a loss. Some Bracewood technicians, meanwhile, had twenty-five years of service at a company that had never kept a list at all.

Endtailing is simple, and it teaches the acquired workforce a lesson the employer will spend years trying to unteach: that the acquisition was a conquest. A twenty-year Bracewood technician ranked below a Keswald hire of eighteen months would be the first laid off, the last to choose a shift and the least likely to stay. We needed those technicians. They knew the coaxial network in Nova Scotia better than anyone we employed.

Dovetail, then protect the people who lose

We proposed dovetailing by Bracewood service date for vacation and shift bidding, and we tabled the proposal ourselves rather than waiting for the union's internal process to produce an answer. We paired it with three protections. For the first bid cycle, Keswald technicians kept the shifts they already held. For thirty-six months, no technician from either company could be laid off because of the integration. And nobody's base pay fell when the Bracewood technicians moved onto our scale; where an individual's old rate was higher, it was held until our scale caught up.

The protections cost money. Together with the move away from per-installation pay, the transition added about C$7.1 million a year to our labour cost. They also bought something we could not have bought otherwise. The union's executive, which had been divided, voted seven to four to accept a list ordered by service date. No seniority dispute from the integration has reached arbitration. Voluntary turnover among former Bracewood technicians fell from 23% to 8% by 2025, and they have bid for and won day shifts and storm overtime in proportion to their service.

I do not claim dovetailing is always right. Where one group's service was earned in materially different work, a blended method may be fairer, and where an acquired company's records are unreliable, service dates can become their own dispute. The principle I would defend is narrower. The employer should state its view on the merits before the lists harden, explain it to both groups and pay for the protections that make it bearable for the people who lose ground.

What the supervisors lost

One group had no list to protect them. Bracewood's forty-eight field supervisors had assigned work by judgement: who was best at a difficult install, who needed a quieter week, who was ready for a harder job. Under our agreement much of that became a matter of seniority and posting rules. They lost no pay. They lost a large part of what had made the job theirs, and nine of them left within a year.

That is the cost integration plans most often miss when they move a non-union workforce into a unionised one. The people who managed by discretion find that their discretion has been bargained away, often by people they never met. I would now treat supervisors in an acquired company as a group with its own transition: early involvement in the rules, training in managing within an agreement and a clear written account of what they still decide. Some of that discretion can survive. Our agreement leaves supervisors to decide who mentors a new technician, how a difficult installation is staffed within the posting rules and when a crew stops work for weather. Bracewood's supervisors would have kept more of their confidence if someone had told them so in the first week.

A board approving an acquisition that brings a second workforce into a bargaining unit should ask management one question before closing: what is our position on the seniority list, and who loses under it? If the answer is that the union will sort it out, the board has been told that the company will accept whatever outcome the larger group prefers, and will find out what that was from the grievance file.