The president of CUPE Local 15 is crying censorship in response to an ongoing e-mail block preventing anyone with a City of Vancouver e-mail address from communicating with CUPE employees.

Paul Faoro’s local represents inside workers at City Hall. In a phone interview with the Georgia Straight, he confirmed that the block, installed before the 2007 civic-workers’ strike, is still in place. Faoro forwarded a “test” lunch invitation to Mayor Sam Sullivan as proof that he cannot e-mail anyone who uses an address that ends with vancouver.ca. This includes his own CUPE staff, who use vancouver.ca addresses in the workplace, and elected officials at City Hall and the park board. In return, city staff cannot e-mail CUPE local, provincial, and even national offices, according to Faoro.

“This is”¦hangover from the strike,” Faoro said. “The City of Vancouver cut our e-mail off while we were in negotiations prior to the strike. They did not like us responding to the mass propaganda that they were sending out to our employees while in negotiations.”

Added Faoro: “I believe this is Mike Zora’s directive.”¦It is effectively censorship. That is one way of calling it.”

Zora, the city’s general manager of human resource services, confirmed in a March 12 phone interview that he gave the order.

“It came through me,” Zora said. “The history is we have provided the union access to our e-mail for a number of years as a result of an agreement that we reached in 2002 around the use of the e-mail, and the union has continued to violate the e-mail policy that they agreed to abide by. Given the number of violations and the number of times it has become an issue between the parties, we did finally say that we were not going to enable them continued use of the e-mail system.”

The ban is not “blanket”, Zora said, adding that shop stewards have “general use” of the e-mail “in dealing with management issues throughout the system with respect to grievance and other matters that get transacted between managers and shop stewards as a result of normal interactions with the union”.

However, Zora claimed the union had leaked confidential information in the past and formed “e-mail trees” to disseminate information that was not city business.

COPE park board commissioner Spencer Herbert said he became aware of the e-mail block after he found his own correspondence with CUPE was being bounced back to him.

“I know there were some problems around the strike, but we have to keep the dialogue open,” Herbert said by phone. “Does this now mean that elected officials are officially banned from writing to the union? If I run into Paul Faoro out on the street, am I banned from talking to him?”

Service could be restored as long as CUPE agrees to “abide by the
corporate policy”, Zora said. He claimed the union has so far rejected those conditions.

Faoro said he encountered problems trying to sign up on the speakers list for the March 11 city council meeting.

“The first thing the clerk said to me was, ”˜Can you just send me an e-mail to confirm this message?’ ” Faoro said. “I said, ”˜I would love to be able to, but there is a little problem.’ So I actually had to fax over a letter to the clerk I was talking to. With this level of technology, the eight-track may come back at the City of Vancouver, you know?”

Faoro said he has informed Sullivan of the issue, adding, “He didn’t know about it.”¦If the mayor fixes it, I will say good for him. But if he doesn’t, I would have to say that the mayor concurs with this level of censorship. I could change my e-mail address and still e-mail in. I could phone every member. Is he going to block phone calls from our members? Is he going to block fax machines from our offices? Maybe I am going to have to be searched when I go in [to City Hall].”