I was recently reviewing the August 2024 Bargaining Update published by the Mediation Services department of the Government of Alberta.
This monthly report contains updates on collective bargaining agreement settlements that were filed with Mediation Services in August 2024.
I noticed that the report contained a table of wage settlements in Alberta by year, separated by private and public sector. Each year included a weighted average of the percent in annual change for the settlements from each sector.
I decided to comb through bargaining updates since 2013 to see how the average wage increase per sector has changed over the last decade.
Keep in mind, that this is for unionized workers only. And even then, it includes only those workers for whom a collective bargaining agreement was submitted to Mediation Services, which could be subject to change for the more recent years.
First, here’s the data in table form.
| Private sector | Public sector | Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2.8 | 1.7 | 1.1 |
| 2014 | 2.6 | 1.8 | 0.9 |
| 2015 | 1.3 | 2.0 | -0.6 |
| 2016 | 0.9 | 1.8 | -0.9 |
| 2017 | 0.9 | 0.6 | 0.3 |
| 2018 | 1.1 | 0.3 | 0.8 |
| 2019 | 1.0 | 0.4 | 0.6 |
| 2020 | 0.9 | 0.2 | 0.7 |
| 2021 | 1.0 | 0.5 | 0.6 |
| 2022 | 3.0 | 1.4 | 1.6 |
| 2023 | 4.3 | 2.2 | 2.1 |
That’s a lot to look at, so maybe a graph will make it a bit easier to digest.
What we notice is that for all but two of the years over the last decade, private sector pay increases, on average, have been higher than public sector increases.
The gap is even more obvious in the following graph.
Another thing that we notice is that midway through the decade—from 2018 to 2021—the difference between the private sector and the public sector remained pretty constant, varying between 0.6 and 0.8 percentage points.
However, during the final two years of this reporting period—in 2022 and 2023—private sector contract were getting huge increases, compared to their fellow workers in the private sector.
In fact, the gap between the two sectors in those two years—1.6 points and 2.1 point—was at its highest point during the entire decade.
In the final year, the private sector, at an average wage increase of 4.3% was virtually double that of the 2.2% seen in the public sector.
There have been only three times since 2013 that the gap between the two sectors has exceeded 1 percentage point: in the first year (1.1), and in the last two years (1.6 and 2.1).
As mentioned earlier, public sector workers—despite the common pro-capitalist framing of out-of-control wages—received average wage increases higher than the private sector just twice: 0.6 points in 2015 and 0.9 points in 2016.
The following year, in 2017, the gap reversed, favouring the private sector again, but it was also at its lowest level—0.3 points—making the two sectors nearly on par with each other.
