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April 05, 2021 – 7:00 a.m.
A union in British Columbia that refused to accept female apprenticeship membership and then blocked her when asked why was ordered to join.
Kelowna-based Alicia Ferri filed her lawsuit against the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the United States and Canada’s Plumbing and Plumbing Industry No. 170 seven months after denying her membership application and then refusing to give her a statement give why.
Ferri made numerous requests for an explanation, but was repeatedly ignored, according to a decision by the BC Labor Relations Board on March 29.
“The union decided to ignore Ferri in the hope that it would go away quietly,” the board decided.
According to the decision, Ferri was a plumber and union member from July 2007 to 2015 before resigning for discrimination and harassment, mainly based on her gender.
In 2019, however, she decided to apply for another profession after learning of a program with LNG Canada that offered teaching-free training for women and eventually saw her work on the LNG property near Kitimat. Being a union member was a condition of training, so Ferri reapplied to join her old union.
She turned down her application, however, and had to pay Ferri $ 1,200 for training that the union would normally have paid.
The union also said it did not have to give a reason.
The labor authority disagreed.
“Unions are no longer seen as private clubs that can accept or exclude members on arbitrary or otherwise discriminatory grounds,” the decision said.
It was only when the labor authority was involved that the union offered an explanation.
The union said Ferri’s work was “weak” with “many feathers disheveled”, had “bad trading experiences” and was “very frustrated” with the industry.
Those excuses didn’t go well with the referee.
“She had a difficult and frustrating experience when she was previously a member of the union due to gender discrimination and harassment,” the decision said. “I note that the union did not refute or otherwise address (Ferri) ‘s claim that she experienced gender discrimination and harassment while training to be a plumber and that was one of the reasons she quit the trade in 2015. ”
While Ferri tried to get an answer to why the union said no, several documents dating back to her days as a plumber that Ferri was unaware of were revealed.
According to the decision, Bill Qually, who at the time was a manager at a plumbing company assigned to Ferri, wrote to the union in 2013 or 2014 that she was slow at her job and not sending her back on site. Another company also wrote a similar letter to the union.
These letters were then used by the union as reasons not to grant Ferri membership.
However, the Labor Authority notes that in 2013 and 2014, when the original letters were written, the union did nothing to prevent it from using them as evidence against them.
The ruling states that Ferri was never disciplined or taken other action against her during her membership.
According to the decision made in March 2020 when Ferri applied for union membership, the application fell on Qually’s desk, who now worked for the union.
She had an interview with him, and he didn’t mention the letter he’d written years earlier. Nor did he write anything on the form that she was not eligible for membership.
However, the union said the “knowledge” Qually had was one of the reasons Ferri would not be a member.
“Given the circumstances of this matter as a whole, including the union’s lack of response to (Ferris) repeated requests for explanation for its decision to refuse membership and the reasons it ultimately gave in response to the request, this is obviously Die The union had no reasonable basis for its decision and acted arbitrarily, unreasonably and therefore discriminatory “, judged the board of directors. “I find it discriminated against (Ferri) by selecting her for different treatment in relation to her application to join.”
Ultimately, the union’s board of directors ordered Ferri to become a member and pay $ 1,203 to cover the cost of tuition.
– This story was corrected at 3:49 p.m. on Monday April 5, 2021 to say that Alicia Ferri was molested because of her gender. A previous version said she was sexually molested.
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