Grievance Software for New Brunswick Workplaces

New Brunswick runs two parallel labour relations statutes: the Industrial Relations Act covers the private sector, and the Public Service Labour Relations Act covers the provincial public service. Both regimes are administered by the New Brunswick Labour and Employment Board, and binding grievance arbitration under each collective agreement resolves most day-to-day disputes. New Brunswick arbitrators cite the body of Canadian arbitration case law that counsel rely on across the country.

Sertus is built by the co-author of Canadian Labour Arbitration(Brown & Beatty) — the reference text Canadian arbitrators cite — so the platform understands New Brunswick practice at a structural level. Step timelines reference the collective agreement itself. Grievance types map to the categories New Brunswick arbitrators recognise. Deadline alerts fire before the clock runs out on an arbitration referral.

New Brunswick is Canada's only officially bilingual province, and a significant share of collective agreements and workplace correspondence is in French. Sertus parses and indexes collective agreements in both English and French, so a bargaining unit working across both languages can search, cite, and analyse the full record without switching tools.

The two-statute structure gives New Brunswick labour relations a distinctive shape. Private-sector bargaining units — in forestry, manufacturing, energy, and broader industrial workplaces — operate under the Industrial Relations Act, while the provincial public service operates under the Public Service Labour Relations Act. The New Brunswick Labour and Employment Board administers both regimes, which means counsel and labour relations staff regularly cross between the two statutes depending on the file. Sertus is built to hold that reality in one platform: each bargaining unit is tagged with the applicable statute, and grievance files carry the right procedural framework without requiring a separate workspace for each regime.

The public sector is a significant share of the New Brunswick caseload. CUPE New Brunswick is one of the largest public-sector unions in the province, with locals across municipal services, school districts, and the broader public service, and the New Brunswick Union of Public and Private Employees (NBU) represents additional bargaining units across the provincial public service. Horizon and Vitalité Health Networks operate multiple sites with nursing, allied health, and support staff under separate agreements — and Vitalité is francophone by design, so the bilingual parsing matters for day-to-day work, not just occasional translation.