Earlier this month, the Mediation Services department of Alberta Jobs, Economy, and Trade published the July 2024 Bargaining Update.
This monthly report provides information about the unionized workforce, primarily in Alberta. Last month, Mediation Services received settlement information regarding 26 private sector and 10 public sector bargaining settlements, covering 2,032 and 6,698 workers respectively.
One of those settlements was for 450 workers employed by Cargill at the company’s case ready meat plant in Northeast Calgary.
The workers include those employed in production, distribution, and maintenance. They are represented by Local 401 of United Food and Commercial Workers.
They had been without a new contract since their previous one expired at the end of 2022. The workers and the employers finally settled on a new contract just last month, over 2.5 years later. The two parties only started bargaining last summer.
The new 5-year contract is retroactive to the beginning of 2023 and will expire at the end of 2027. Mediation Services hasn’t provided a full new contract yet, so I can’t comprehensively compare it with the previous contract.
They did provide information on wage increases however.
| 1 January 2023 | 5.26% |
| 1 January 2024 | 6.25% |
| 1 January 2025 | 3.53% |
| 1 January 2026 | 2.27% |
| 1 January 2027 | 2.22% |
That works out to a combined increase of 19.53% per year, or 21.04% if you account for compound increases. The annual average is 4.21%.
Going into negotiations, some workers were making only $19 an hour, which is less than $40,000 a year for full-time work. By the end of the contract, that will have increased to $23 an hour. Keep in mind that as of July 2024, the median hourly wage in Alberta is $30 an hour.
This is much better than the increases they received in their previous contract, which averaged 2.01% per year.
| 7 January 2019 | 1.99% |
| 6 January 2020 | 1.68% |
| 4 January 2021 | 1.92% |
| 3 January 2022 | 2.43% |
These new increases will help these workers respond to the rising cost of living as they try to support themselves and their families.
The consumer price index in Alberta in January 2018 was 138.9. By Janaury 2023, it had increased 21.6 points to 160.5, a 15.55% jump.
That left the workers with a cut to real wages—wages adjusted for inflation—of 7.29% by the end of their last contract. The increases in the first two years of the new contract will help make up for that real wage cut, as well as cover inflation over the last two years, which has increased 5.55% since January 2023.
Hopefully the final 3 increases will cover inflation the rest of this year, as well as next year and the final two years of the contract.
