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HomeMy WebLinkAbout1987-2508.Poole.88-09-27I OPUIRiO EMPLOYESJE ‘A C‘I!N!INNE CROWNEMPLOYEES DE L’ONIA”lO GRIEVANCE C$)MMISSIDN DE ;El..MENT REGLEMENT DES GRIEFS IN THE MATTER OF AN ARBITRATION Under THE CROWN EMF'LOYEES COLLECTIVE BARGAINING ACT Before I TliE GRIEVANCE SETTLEMENT BOARD # Between: OPSEU (N. Poole) and The Crown in Right of Ontario [Ministry of Health) ' Before: For the Grievor: J.W. Samuels Vice-Chairperson G. Nabi Member P.D. Camp Member C. Dassios Counsel Gowling and Henderson Barristers and Solicitors '* For the Employer: A.P, Tarasuk Counsel Central Ontario Industrial Relations Institute Hearing: June 17, 1988 2508187 Grievor Employer DECISION 2 -_--... Nancy Poole is a registered nurse, and works at the St. Thomas Psychiatric Hospital. She bid for the posted job of Hospital Educator in October 1987. She was not successful. She grieves that in chasing Ms. B. Tunks for the position, the Ministry violated Article 4.3 of the collective agreement. The posted position involved planning and presenting educational programs for staff and students at the Hospital, and staff of community agencies. It was to be an acting appointment, and for the first year the primary task would be to teach a two-day workshop to all 800 staff members on prevention and management of ‘disturbed behavior. The incumbent would give the t?yo-day workshop over and over again to small groups until. all staff members had the benefit of the program. The - purpose of the program was to make the Hospital environment safer for staff and residents. There are a-considerable number of violent incidents at the Hospital, given the type of resident it deals with, and the two-day urorkshop was intended to help staff cope with these situations. In order to find its teacher, management asked for applications from Hospital staff. Six candidates submitted detailed applications and resumCs, including the grievor. Ms. L. Stegne, the Staff Development Coordinator, under whose wing the teacher would work, went through the applications to see if all candidates were Registered Nurses. She found one who was not and screened this applicant out. Then the five remaining candidates were invited to be interviewed. At the interviews, a series of questions were asked of each candidate to elicit information concerning the candidatks qualifications and experience. And then the candidates were scored on these answers, without any regard to the information on the application forms, or information which might have been found in persorinel files, or information ,from the applicants’ supervisors al lhe Hosp!ral. 3 Apparently it is Ministry policy to base its decision entirely on the scores at the interview. If this is the Ministry’s policy, then it is absolutely incomprehensible to us why it should be so. This job competition had to be done according to the collective agreement. Article 4.3 provides: In fiIIing a vacancy, the Employer shall give primary consideration to qualifications and ability to perform the required duties. Where qualifications and ability are relatively equal, length of continuous service shall be a consideration. And this Board has explained in detail many tin&s what is required to fulfil the requirements of Article 4.3. The jurisprudence is of long-standing. In Marek, 414/83 (issued in early 1984), the Board once againreferred to the jurisprudence and set out the criteria by which a seleotion process is judged (at page 5): .see, for example, HdclelIdn an6 OeGrdnUis, 506/81. gO7/81, 690181 and 691/81; wherein the jurisprudence is SIJlTITIarized at pages~26 end 26:. The juriswudence of this Board hes established various criteria by whfch to judge d selection process: 1. Candidates must be evaluated on all the relevant qualifications for the job as set out in the Position Specification. 2. The various methods used to assess the candidates should address these relevant qualifications insofar ds is possible. For example, lntervi& questions and evaluation forms should cover all the qualifications. 3. Irrelevant factors should not be considered. 4. All the members of a selection committee should review the personnel flies Of all the applicants. 5. The applicants' supervisors should be asked for their evaluations of the applicants. 6. Information should be accumulated In a systematic'way concerning all the applicants. See Remark, 149/77; Quinn, 9/78; Hoffman, Z/79; Ellsworth et al, 361-d Cross, 3DiW. There must a full gathering of information concerning the qualifications and ability of the applicants. It is simply not satisfactory to consciously ignore information as was done here. For some reason, the grievor did not do well at the interview (we have a grea: deal of difficulty understanding this and we will have something to say about this in a moment) and the three members of the panel were left with the impression that the successful applicant had better qualifications and experience than ,j the grievor, fiut a look at their application forms would have confirmed that the grievor was a senior nurse with much experience in the very matter which was to be taught to the 800 staff members at the Hospital, while the successful candidate had just graduated from nursing school, and had no experience whatsoever in this area. In our view, the decision of the panel was simply perverse and this resulted from its profoundly flawed procedure. The grievor was the most senior applicant. If she was at least relatively equal to the other candidates, she was entitled to the position. In our view, the grievor was not just reIativeIy equal to Ms. Tunks, she far surpassed Ms. Tunks. The grievor received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 1977 and her certification as a Registered Nurse in the’same year. She had worked at the St. Thomas Psychiatric Hospital over three summers in 1974, 1975 and 1976, assisting nursing staff and helping out with patient activities. With her degree, she went to the Leamington Nursing Home as a team leader from October to November 1977. Then s!le took a job with the Metro-Windsor Essex County Health Unit as a public health nurse from November 1977 to March 1982. Her work there included teaching pre- 5 natal classes and maternal health classes. In 1982, she moved to full-time employment at the St. Thomas Psychiatric Hospital. She has worked on the addiction unit and is now a crisis nurse. She has counselled pre-discharge clients one-to-one about medication, post-discharge plans, and maintaining mental health. She has taught groups of addicts about the physical and emotional effects of addiction, assertiveness training, and impuIse control. In the crisis unit, she has taught c1ient.s anxiety management training, and health maintenance. In October 1987, she was the only volunteer to teach a program of smoking cessation to staff. She attended a seminar on the program and then implemented it among staff. In short, the grievor has had a great deal of experience dealing with clients of all sorts at the Hospital, in particular those in crisis who are often paranoid and very upset, and has had a great deal of experience counselling and teaching both clients and staff. All of this was obvious from her application form and could have been confirmed by the selection panel if it had consulted her personnel records. Insofar as her personality and skill as a communicator is concerned. we were very impressed by her manner as a witness. The grievor is charming, alert, responsive, well-spoken, and organized. She was subjected to difftcult cross~xamination by the skilled and tenacious counsel for the Hospital, and the grievor remained unflappable. In our view, she would make an excellent teacher. We don’t understand what happened at the interview. Apparently her answers were too short and did not contain sufficient information, and some of the members of the panel were bothered by her failure to maintain eye contact. Perhaps the grievor might have .done better at the interview if she had taken the coaching which is available at the Hospital. But these problems at the interview should not have affected the selection panel’s grasp of the grievor’s qualifications and experience. The informatic.n was in their hands or readily available if only the panel had done its job according to the procedures long-established by this Board. Indeed, apart from the jurisprudence, it is hard to understand 6 why the panel would ignore the mass of information it had in the application forms. Some concern was raised about the grievor’s back because the teacher would have to demonstrate how to deal with disturbed behaviour, and this is physically demanding. Ms. Poole hurt her back at work in 1986 and was off work for awhile. But she came back to full-time work with no restrictions other than no heavy lifting and no jerking motions (which .are generally common-sense limitations on am). She has been working in the crisis unit since she came back to work, dealing with the very type of patients who are the subject of the course she would teach, and she has had no difficulty. 4 We find that the grievor had excellent qualifications and experience for the posted position and her merits ought to have been readily apparent to the selection panel if the panel had not put on the blinders as it did. What about the successful applicant, Ms. Tunks? She had graduated with her Bachelor of Science in Nursing in June 1987. She had some part- time experience at the Hospital in the summers of 1985 and 1986, working in admissions and as an attendant. From September 1986 to the date of her application for the job, she had been a member of the Hospital’s part-time float pool. Her duties had included charting, observation of patients, physical assessments, patient care and vital signs. In short, she had virtually no experience, having just graduated in nursing. Incredibly, after the interview, among its other conclusions, the pane1 scored Ms. Tunks 34 out of 40 points for mperience, and Ms. Poole 13.3 points for experience. And then the panel based its decision on this assessment. This is absolutely bizarre. t A brief glance at the application forms, which the panel members had at their disposal, would disclose that there was something absolute!y and profoundly wrong with the interview results. Indeed, even in the absence of a competition, it’s hard for us to understand how the panel could have concluded that Ms. Turks ought to I teach a program to 800 staff members on a subject which cries out for practical experience. For one year, the sudcessful applicant would teach the staff at the Hospital how to prevent and manage disn:rbed behaviour, and Ms. Tunks had virtually no experience in this whatsoever. One doesn’t learn how to cope with disturbed behaviour in books alone, one has to face it, On the other hand, Ms. Poole had considerable experience in this. Ms. Turks was at our hearing, though she did not give evidence. She participated briefly. She .appears to be a bright young woman. But she simply h2s virtually no experience as a Registered Nurse. What is clear is that Ms. Tunks knows how to handle an interview. In sum, we find that the selection process was entirely inadequate. The ultimaie total reliance on the interview as an information-gathering and scoring tool resulted in an assessment of the relative merits of the candidates which had no real basis in fact. Jn particular, the panel failed utterly to see the grievor as she was, in spite of the fact that the information was in its hands or readily available. In our view, it ought to have been absolutely clear that the grievor had much better qualifications and far greater experience to perform the required duties than the successful applicant.. In these circumstances, we have no hesitation ,in finding that the Ministry violated Article 4.3 of the collective agreement. In most cases, once this Board has found that the competition was not run properly, a new competition is ordered. But in this case, we find that the grievor should have been the successful candidate. She had the required qualifications and experience to perform the job, and she was the most senior applicant. Therefore, we order that she be placed in the posted position and that she be compensated for any financial loss she suffered as a r~sul! of the violation of the collective agreement. We G!l remain seized to deal with any issue which may arise between the parties concerning this order. Don% at London, Ontario, this 27th day of September , 1988. G. Nabi, Member "Idis;ent" (Dissent attached) P. Camp, Member , This member cannot .join rnv colleagues in this award. I cannot substitute my Judgement in this matter to override the Ministry in its decision based on the results of a detailed interview to avard the posted position to Ms. Tunks. It should be noted that the results of the interview were: MS. Tunks. 34 paints out aof 40. -N. ‘Poole. 13.3 points out of 40. These are the results arrived at by the well experienced interviewers and do not point to the conclusion of this board. It is this member’s opinion that the other documents such as: Per~~x~nel files and applications should be once again reviewed (I am sure they must have been reviewed during the selection process). Based on this review, a point score should be established for both applicants. This point score when coupled with the points resulting from the interview would clearly establish the most qualified candidate. For the foregoing reasons this member must dissent this award. P.D. CAMP.