Last month, the Mediation Services department of Alberta Jobs, Economy, and Trade published the June 2024 Bargaining Update.
This monthly report provides information about the unionized workforce, primarily in Alberta. Last month, Mediation Services received settlement information regarding 30 private sector and 11 public sector bargaining settlements, covering 2,728 and 1,181 workers respectively.
One of those settlements was between the City of Calgary and Local 38 of the Canadian Union of Provincial Employees.
Their previous contract expired at the end of last year. Both the City of Calgary and the workers approved this new contract back in June.
This new contract applies to about 4,200 so-called “inside workers” employed by the City of Calgary. At the start of the previous contract, they were employing about 4,900 inside workers.
Mediation Services hasn’t released the entire contract, so I can’t comprehensively compare the two contracts; however, they did publish the wage increases in the new 3-year contract.
| 1 January 2024 | 3.00% |
| 1 January 2025 | 3.25% |
| 1 January 2026 | 3.25% |
That’s a combined 9.5%, or an annual average of 3.17%.
Their previous contract gave them just 5% over 2 years, or 1.67% per year, so this raise is higher. In fact, it’s the highest raise they’ve received since at least 2018, according to Collective Agreement Wage Table – Municipalities report for June 2024.
| 2018 | 0.00% |
| 2019 | 0.00% |
| 2020 | 1.50% |
| 2021 | 1.50% |
| 2022 | 1.50% |
| 2023 | 2.00% |
Between January 2017 and January 2024, the consumer price index in Alberta increased from 137.0 to 165.9. That’s a rise of 28.9, or 21.09%, over the course of the last two contracts.
Meanwhile, these workers received a combined increase of 6.5% over the last two contracts, or 6.66% if you account for compound increases.
That means that these workers ended up with a cut to real wages—wages adjusted for inflation—of 14.43%. They were already nearly 14.5% behind inflation coming into negotiations.
This new increase of just 9.5% will get them closer by the end of the contract, but it won’t be enough to completely erase the cut to real wages, especially when you consider that we still have inflation this year, next year, and in 2026, the last year of the contract. And that’s going to erase some of the gains they made with this new increase.
For example, inflation between just January and June of 2024 has already increased 2.11%.
It’s also shy of the 10.5% the workers originally asked for but higher than the 8% the City of Calgary proposed in their first counteroffer. As of June, the best the City of Calgary could offer was 9.0%, and that was after the workers had rejected two other offers.
But even that wasn’t enough, and the workers held a strike vote in June, with 89% of those who participated voting in favour of striking.
The workers never ended up striking, but I guess the threat of one was enough for the City of Calgary to sweeten their deal just a little bit more, proposing 1.5 percentage points above their original offer, leaving the workers having to concede on 1 percentage point instead of 2.5.
