Alberta Pension workers offered 5.5% raise

Earlier this month, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees published an update regarding contract negotiations for workers employed by Alberta Pension Services.

Alberta Pensions Services Corporation guides the pension experience on behalf of Alberta’s public sector pension plans by providing administrative services to over 500 participating employers across Alberta.

The most recent collective agreement for these roughly 200 workers expired back in March.

According to the release, the workers’ bargaining team met with employer representatives back in July. Negotiations actually began in April. During last month’s meeting, they signed off on several non-monetary items and exchanged wage increase proposals.

The employer wants a 4-year contract with the following increases:

Year 1	2.00%
Year 2	2.00%
Year 3	1.75%
Year 4	1.75%

Keep in mind that even though the contract would be effective April 2024, the first wage increase wouldn’t kick in until ratification, so it would’t be retroactive.

And I’ll just point out that their most recent contract didn’t settle for almost a year and a half from the date that the previous contract expired.

That being said, this is a better offer than what the workers got in their last contract:

1 January 2021	0.00%
1 January 2022	0.00%
1 January 2023	1.25%
1 January 2024	1.50%

Plus, they got wage freezes in the contract before that, too. In fact, here are the wage increases for the last two contracts:

1 January 2018	0.00%
1 January 2019	0.00%
1 January 2020	1.00%
1 January 2021	0.00%
1 January 2022	0.00%
1 January 2023	1.25%
1 January 2024	1.50%

That’s a combined 3.75% in the 7 years since January 2017.

During that same period, the consumer price index in Alberta increased 21.09%, from 137.0 to 165.9.

So, while these workers were getting 4 years of wage freezes and increases under 2% when they did get a raise, inflation was increasing at a rate that was nearly 6 times as fast!

As a result, they are heading into negotiations with a cut to real wages—wages adjusted for inflation—of 17.3%. No wonder the workers’ negotiating team is asking for a 13% increase for the first year of a 3-year contract.

That alone won’t be enough to help them make up for these lost wages, which is why they’re proposing another 13% over the next two years. This should get them back up to inflation, as well as cover inflation this year, next year, and in the final year of the contract.

Remember, their most recent raise was back in January, and inflation has already increased 2.11% since then.

Now, a 26% wage increase sure sounds like a lot at first glance, but this is what happens when you give workers wage increases that are less than the rate of inflation, or give them no raises at all, for that matter.

Over time, that wage–inflation gap wides, and the cut to real wages gets larger and larger.

We shouldn’t frame this as the union asking for so much, we should frame it as the employer underpaying their workers for so long.