Grievance & arbitration strategy
Which ones to settle, which to run, and what a loss actually costs you the next time the same language is tested. Including the unglamorous part: whether the record you have supports the position you want to take.
— The practice
On your side of the table.
Labour Relations advice for Ontario employers — grievances, bargaining, investigations, and the decisions that come before all three. Two decades inside the work, not adjacent to it, across unionized Hospitals, Long‑Term Care and Retirement Homes.
When people call
Nobody goes looking for “advisory services.” They pick up the phone because something specific has landed on their desk. Usually one of these.
- A grievance came in that could set a precedent we’ll live with for years.
- Bargaining opens in a few months and we don’t have a strategy yet.
- We need an investigation done by someone outside the reporting line.
- I’ve inherited a file nobody documented, and a hearing date.
- Our policies haven’t been touched since two rounds ago.
- We’re going to arbitration and I want to know what we’re walking into.
What that looks like as work
Four things, mostly. They overlap more than the headings suggest — a bargaining round is usually also a grievance strategy, and a policy rewrite is usually the aftermath of one.
Collective bargaining support
Preparation, costing, and language — plus the mandate conversation that should happen before anyone sits down. I have been on the employer side of that table for twenty years, and most rounds are won or lost in the eight weeks before they open.
Workplace investigations
Independent, documented, and built to survive being read back to you under cross‑examination. Done by someone with no stake in the outcome and no place in the reporting line.
Policy & compliance frameworks
The documents you will be judged against. Written so they say what you actually do, in language that holds up when an adjudicator reads it back to you a year later.
Where a file is actually decided
Most of the leverage in a grievance is spent long before anyone books a hearing room. This is one file at seven points, and how much room you still have at each.
-
Before it’s filed
Whether the decision is defensible, documented, and consistent with the last three times you made it.
Everything after this is built on the record you make here — the cheapest point in the file, and the one most often skipped.
-
Step 1
Whether to hold the position or fix it now, and what your written response commits you to.
That reply gets read back to you at arbitration. So does the one you didn’t send.
-
Step 2
Settle or run — and whether the record actually supports the position you want to take.
The last point where settling costs you this file and nothing else.
-
Referral to arbitration
Who hears it, how the case is framed, and what a loss would mean across the rest of the bargaining unit.
The framing you pick here is the case you are stuck with.
-
Mediation
What the file is worth, and whether it can be resolved without creating language you then have to live with.
The last exit before somebody else decides for you.
-
Hearing
Nothing new. You present the record you already have, with the witnesses who are still there.
Preparation is the only variable left, and most of it was set at step one.
-
The award
Not yours to decide.
The language now means what the arbitrator says it means — for everyone it covers, until you bargain it back.
A typical path. Steps, timelines and language vary by collective agreement.
How an engagement works
No discovery decks and no six‑week onboarding. You tell me what is in front of you, I tell you what I think, and we agree what I am actually doing before I start.
A single matter
One grievance, one investigation, one arbitration. Scoped and priced before it starts.
Retainer
A standing call for the things that come up weekly. For organizations without an LR function of their own.
On‑call through a round
Bargaining, from preparation through to ratification — at the table or behind it, whichever you need.
I also build the software this runs on
Every system on this site exists because I needed it at the table first and nothing on the market did the job. That is not a sales pitch for the software — it is the most honest thing I can tell you about how well I know the work.
What this isn’t
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Labour Relations advice and legal advice are different things, and the difference matters most exactly when it is least convenient.
There is a point in most difficult files where you need counsel. Part of what you are paying me for is knowing where that point is and telling you when you have reached it — rather than discovering it together at a hearing.
Tell me what’s in front of you
A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether I am the right person for it. If I am not, I will say so.
Bargaining support books up ahead of a round — if your notice‑to‑bargain window is coming, talk to me early. You’ll hear back the same day.