Dairy workers asking for 10% annual raise

Earlier this month, Local 401 of the United Food and Commercial Workers posted an update on their website regarding contract negotiations for workers employed by Agropur Dairy Cooperative.

Based out of Québec, Agropur is the largest dairy cooperative in Canada and one of the leading suppliers of dairy products in the retail, food service, and industrial sectors in North America.

Agropur has locations throughout Canada, including one in Edmonton, where workers process raw milk into pasteurized milk, creamers, yogurt, and sour cream products.

Local 401 represents about 100 workers at this location in various locations, including receivers, palletizers, shippers, operators, janitors, pasteurizers, engineers, and lab technicians.

Their most recent collective agreement expired this past May. According to this month’s update, the workers’ bargaining team met with the employer at the end of July to begin bargaining on the replacement agreement.

At the meetings, the two parties exchanged their initial proposals.

The employer’s initial proposal was pretty sparse, being just 2 pages long.

One proposal is to change the unscheduled work to no longer consider seniority when assigning such work. Another is to increase the probationary period from 360 hours to 480 hours.

All other proposals were unspecified. For example, they proposed annual wage increases but did not indicate what those increases were.

The workers’ initial proposal was much more comprehensive, being nearly 80 pages long.

They want new workers to be able to join the union on their first day of work, rather than within the first 30 days of being hired.

They proposed a 12-hour maximum for scheduled work for each employee.

They want to increase the meal allowance from $7.50 to $25.00 for workers who work more than 2 hours of overtime.

They want to add National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to the list of paid holidays, which increase the total number of paid holidays from 11 to 12. As well, they want workers to have the option to transfer Good Friday and Christmas Day to other holy days if they observe a non-Christian faith tradition.

They want to increase call-in pay to double time. Currently, it is just their base rate of pay. It would still be a minimum of 4 hours.

They want to increase prior notice of shift change for full-time workers from 60 hours to 72 hours; otherwise, they would get paid double time for the first shift.

Wage rates for new job classifications would need to be negotiated with the union, something that was not required in the previous agreement.

Workers want to improve shift premiums but did not provide details on their targets in their initial proposal.

They want in introduce a new freezer premium for workers who have to worker in refrigerated or freezer areas. It would be $1.50 an hour.

They want to adjust vacation entitlements, as follows:

Entitlement	Current years of service	Proposed years of service
2 weeks	1 years	1 year
3 weeks	3 years	3 years
4 weeks	8 years	6 years
5 weeks	13 years	10 years
6 weeks	18 years	15 years
7 weeks	23 years	20 years

They want to increase the vacation selection period from 24 hours to 72 hours.

Under the previous agreement, workers who are laid off or reduced to part time have up to 80 days to exercise their seniority over the most junior full-time worker. The workers want to increase this to 120 hours.

They want to change severance pay. Here is what it was in the previous agreement.

Severance	Years of service
1 week	up to 2 years
2 weeks	2 years
3 weeks	3 years
4 weeks	4 years
5 weeks	6 years
6 weeks	8 years
8 weeks	10 years

They want to replace that with a simple 2 weeks per year of service.

Regarding temporary layoff, the workers want to increase the notice time from 5 working days to 14 working days.

The union wants 30 minutes to present to new workers their orientation. The previous agreement gave them 15 minutes.

They want to increase parental/adoption leave from 37 weeks to 62 weeks.

They want to add stepchildren and wards to the definition of immediate family for bereavement leave purposes. They want to increase bereavement leave from 1 week to 2 weeks for spouses, parents, and (step)children and from 1 day to 5 days for piblings and niblings. In all cases, they want the option to take leave consecutively or incrementally, but within 12 months after the death of the family member.

They want to change compassionate leave to 27 weeks. It was previously “dealt with on an individual basis”.

They want to increase the boot allowance but did not specify what they want to increase it to. Plus, they want boot allowance to include insole replacement.

They want their health insurance plan to include gender-affirming care.

They want to double the rate of sick leave accumulation from 4 hours per month of employment to 8 hours per month. Sick leave would still cap at 208 hours.

They want to remove the maximum on sick note fee coverage and make sick notes required after 5 days instead of the current 3 days.

They want disciplinary actions to be wiped from employee records after 12 months. Currently, it is 18 months.

Finally, regarding wages, the workers are asking for market wage adjustments for certain job classification levels but did not specific what those increase were or which jobs they would apply to.

They are asking for a wage increase of 10% per year during the life of the agreement, which is substantially more than what they have seen in quite some time. They averaged 2.05% per year in their last agreement and 1.85% per year in the agreement prior to that.