Earlier this week, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees published an update on their website regarding contract negotiations for Edmonton long-term care workers.
AUPE represents about 60 workers employed at the Wild Rose Retirement Residence, which is operated by Yarrow Limited Partnership.
Owned by the Vancouver-based Optima Living, the facility offers accommodations for independent living and assisted living for seniors.
Yarrow is a partnership between Optima Living and Axium Infrastructure, a Montréal-basd investment fund manager focused on profiting off what they call the “infrastructure sector”.
These workers include licensed practical nurses, health care aides, cooks, cook helpers, dishwashers, servers, housekeepers, activity aides, and dining supervisors.
They have been waiting since November 2022—nearly 4 years—for a new collective agreement; that is when their most recent collective agreement expired.
That agreement was the first collective agreement they have had with Yarrow, having unionized in April 2021.
Their last wage increase came in November 2021, which means that it has been nearly 5 years since they have seen a raise. The starting wage for some of these positions is still stuck at under $16 an hour, and only two positions have a starting wage of over $20 an hour.
Meanwhile, inflation since their last wage increase has risen by over 18%. Wages for these workers were already ridiculously low, but having a real wage that is 18% lower than it was nearly 5 years ago is pathetic.
Bargaining on the new agreement did not begin until September 2023; although they were supposed to begin the month before. Even that is several months after the last agreement had expired.
According to this week’s update from AUPE, the negoiating team has filed a bad faith bargaining complaint.
You might think it is because 3 years have gone by and they still do not have a negotiated contract. However, it is actually because the employer has not attended the bargaining meetings.
They instead hired someone to negotiate on their behalf, so technically, the workers do not even get to negotiate a new agreement face-to-face with the people who employ them.
Meanwhile, the bargaining team for the workers includes 3 of the workers themselves.
At the bargaining meeting this past July, the workers’ negotiating committee presented a full monetary proposal, including comparisons with other employers.
For example, they highlighted how other workers in nursing care and general support services have been getting 12% wage increases over 4 years, plus market adjustments on top of that.
The freelance negotiator that Yarrow had hired told the workers’s bargaining team that he would get back to them by 9 September with the employer’s response to their proposal.
Yet that still has not happened, plus the spokesperson denies having said that, so the 9 September meeting never happened.
Maybe Yarrow is not meeting in person with these workers because theyr are too busy unionbusting or not implementing several promises from the last collective agreement.
The application is now in the hands of the Alberta Labour Relations Board, so it now up to them to determine if this even gets dealth with.
Meanwhile, the bargaining team plans to meet with workers in person during the first week of October, joined by AUPE’s president, Sandra Azocar, as well as several AUPE organizing staff.
