The rules that shape a telecom technician's working day

Keswald is a federally regulated employer, so our bargaining runs under the Canada Labour Code, and any dispute about who belongs in which unit goes to the Canada Industrial Relations Board. I lead bargaining for two agreements: one covering 2,450 craft employees and one covering 1,520 clerical and customer-care employees. I build each mandate with finance and operations before the first meeting, costed clause by clause, and take it to the chief executive and the board's human resources and compensation committee for approval. At the table I spend more time on scheduling, standby, overtime distribution and posting rules than on wage percentages, because those clauses decide how a storm is staffed. I also settle with the union, well before any deadline, which work would continue during a stoppage to protect public safety. Since federal restrictions on replacement workers took effect in 2025, that conversation has changed. Neither side can assume the network would be kept running by people brought in from outside, and both of us plan accordingly.

Most of our craft work is done by one person in one truck, often beyond cellular coverage, for five months of the year in snow and ice. I treat lone work, fatigue during storm restoration and aerial work near power lines as the three hazards that most deserve board attention. Our check-in devices raise an alert when a truck stops for forty-five minutes away from a work order without a check-in. Our storm-duty rules require eight hours' rest after sixteen hours worked, and after dark during a declared storm, pole and aerial work needs two people. I lead the employer side of our policy health and safety committee, which federal law requires of an employer our size, and I take its unresolved disagreements to the board's health, safety and environment committee rather than settling them quietly. Our lost-time injury frequency was 2.9 per 200,000 hours worked in 2017 and 1.3 in 2025. The price shows in restoration times, and I report those alongside it.

I have run contact-centre HR as an outsourcer and as a client, so I know both sides of a decision to move calls. Keswald's centres in Moncton, Saint John, Sydney and Corner Brook employed 960 agents at June 2026. My work there covers schedule design, attrition, time to proficiency and the sourcing question itself. When finance models an outsourcing proposal, I add three numbers it usually lacks: the share of our technicians and network staff who started in a contact centre, what replacing that route would cost, and the repeat contacts created when a queue is split between providers. I do not argue that every call must be answered in Atlantic Canada; we send our overnight queue and simple billing chats to an outside provider. I argue that repair and technical calls belong close to the field crews, and that the ladder from headset to truck is an asset a sourcing model should price.

Our fibre network outgrew our splicing workforce faster than the market could supply people. In 2021 we employed ninety-four splicers with an average age of fifty-one and spent C$21.4 million a year on contractors, many of them flown into Labrador. With the craft union and our network leaders I designed a twenty-four-month paid apprenticeship on a jointly written curriculum, and negotiated community-based positions posted first to residents of the area they serve. In Indigenous communities we work through community-run employment and training organisations, ask them how recruitment and training should be arranged, and report back to them on retention as well as hires. Redwillow taught me that an entry-level role with no route to a full trade does not keep people, so a community-based apprentice follows the same curriculum and certification as one in Moncton. We report this work alongside our federal employment equity reporting and do not treat it as a substitute.

When Keswald acquired Bracewood, we combined a unionised workforce paid on hourly scales and assigned by seniority with a non-union one paid partly per installation and assigned by supervisors' judgement. I treat that kind of integration as a set of rules to reconcile in a known order: which unit people belong to, how service is counted, how pay steps are matched, who bids for which shifts, how storm overtime is offered and what supervisors may still decide. I take a position on each before a union executive or an adjudicator decides it for us. In 2023 that meant not contesting the union's application to include Bracewood's technicians in the craft unit, counting their full service for vacation and shift bidding, and placing them on our scale without reducing anyone's base pay. Afterwards I watch whether people from the acquired company are bidding for, and getting, the work they want, which tells me more than an engagement score.