Calgary LRT cleaners get 70¢ raise

Last month, Alberta Mediation Services published their bargaining update for June and July of 2026, which covers all the collective agreement settlement information received by Mediation Services in those two months.

This information included 69 bargaining relationships encompassing 21,384 workers. Of those, 42 were private sector and 27 were public sector, with 6,229 and 15,155 workers respectively.

One of the private sector agreements was for workers employed by Bee Clean Building Maintenance Inc.

These 125 or so workers are members of Local 92 of the Construction and General Workers Union, also known as the Laborers’ International Union of North America, or just LIUNA for short.

With head offices in Edmonton and Winnipeg, Bee Clean sells the cleaning services of its workers to commercial clients throughout the country.

In this case, these workers are employed in Calgary, where they clean C-Train stations, bus shelters, and bus and train depots. They also include service lane drivers, fuelers, and fleet night drivers.

Their most recent collective agreement expired in July 2025. This new agreement was ratified in August 2025 and took effect that same day. Mediation Services received the new contract only recently however.

The workers received a wage freeze in the first year of the contract, followed by a 35¢ raise in each of the next two years.

1 August 2025	0¢
1 August 2026	35¢
1 August 2027	35¢

This works out to a increase of between 3.22% for service lane drivers and 3.89% for C-Train cleaners, which sucks, because inflation since August 2024—their last wage increase—has been 5.64%. And that will increase even more given that there are still two more year before the new collective agreement expires.

By the end of the agreement, LRT cleaners and the bus and shelter operators and cleaners will still be making less than $20 an hour. Everyone else will still be under $23 an hour.

For reference, the 2025 living wage for Calgary was $26.50.

The new collective agreement included an article on layoff and recall, something that was missing in the previous agreement. Basically, it outlines that layoffs, if they occur, will be done in reverse seniority, beginning with probationary workers. Recall will happen in the opposite direction, with the workers having most seniority being called back to work first.

Under the previous collective agreement, Bee Clean paid $1.70 per hour worked by each worker toward Local 92’s health benefit plan, which provides health care coverage for these workers. Effective this past January, it increased to $1.80 per hour. It then increased by another 10¢ last month, and it will increase to $2.00 an hour next August.

New hire benefit contributions shall commence after 3 months of employment, something that was missing in the previous collective agreement.

As well, new workers will start at a rate of $17.50 per hour for their first year, after which, they will move to the regular pay rate fro their classification. This was not in the previous agreement.