Last month, the Mediation Services department of Alberta Jobs, Economy, and Trade published their April 2024 Bargaining Update, which includes details on recently settled collective agreements.
One of the agreements was between Local 1928 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the County of Lac Ste. Anne.
Local 1928 of CUPE represents about 30 workers employed by the county, including equipment operators, welders, and mechanics.
Their previous contract expired at the end of 2023, and this new contract was settled on 25 April.
Included in this new 3-year contract are wage increases in each year of the contract.
| 1 January 2024 | 3.0% |
| 1 January 2025 | 2.0% |
| 1 January 2026 | 2.5% |
That works out to 7.5% over the life of the contract, or 7.69% when you account for compounding increases. That amounts to 2.50–2.56% per year, on average.
This modest increase is more than they received in their previous contract, which gave the workers a wage freeze in the first year, followed by 0.75% and 1.5%.
In January 2020, the last time these workers received a wage increase prior to this latest contract, the consumer price index in Alberta sat at 144.7. This past January, however, it had climbed to 165.9.
That’s a increase of 21.2 points, or 14.65%.
So, while these workers were getting a wage increase of just 2.25%, the cost of living jumped nearly 15%. That means their real wages—wages adjusted for inflation—decreased by 12.75%.
These workers were already behind on wages heading into negotiations.
Because their wage increase will be a little more than half of the inflation over the last 3 years, they’ll still end up with a reduction in real wages of over 5%.
And remember, that assumes we don’t see any inflation this year, next year, or in the final year of the contract, which, of course, is extremely unlikely. As a result, real wages for these workers will be even more behind inflation than they are now, even with the wage increase.
This employer should have offered much higher wage increases than they did.
Mediation Services didn’t provide a copy of the entire new collective agreement, just the wages, so I wasn’t able to compare other changes between the old contract and the new one.
