Earlier this week, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees published an update on their website regarding negotiations on behalf of Lethbridge postsecondary education support workers.
The workers are employed at Lethbridge Polytechnic, which changed its name from Lethbridge College this past summer.
These more than 350 workers fill a wide variety of positions at Lethbridge Polytechnic, including research assistants, kitchen workers, tech support, caretakers, administrative assistants, cashiers, accounting, lab technicians, communications, and tradesworkers.
Their last collective agreement expired this past June, but it was nearly two years after the previous one had expired before this one was finally ratified.
Bargaining with Lethbridge Polytechnic for the new contract began in June, just before the last contract expired.
According to AUPE, at the latest bargaining session, on 15 October, the employer rejected all monetary proposals put forward by the workers’ bargaining team, including wage increases.
Instead, they want these workers to take a 7.5% wage increase spread out over a 4-year contract.
| 2024 | 2.00% |
| 2025 | 2.00% |
| 2026 | 1.75% |
| 2027 | 1.75% |
That comes to an average of 1.88% per year.
Here’s what these workers have received over the last decade:
| 2013 | 0.00% |
| 2014 | 2.50% |
| 2015 | 2.50% |
| 2016 | 1.90% |
| 2017 | 0.00% |
| 2018 | 0.00% |
| 2019 | 1.00% |
| 2020 | 0.00% |
| 2021 | 0.00% |
| 2022 | 0.00% |
| 2023 | 2.75% |
These workers have received 6 years of wage freezes between 2013 and 2023. They have received a combined 10.65% during that period, which works out to 1.07% per year, on average.
So, this new raise is better than they have received in any of their last 4 contracts. But those 6 wage freezes means wages for these workers have fallen behind inflation during the past decade.
In July 2012, the consumer price index in Alberta was 126.8 but had risen to 166.0 by July 2023, an increase of 39.2 points. That’s a jump of 30.91%.
When you put that together with the 10.65% wage increase the workers received in their last contract, they ended up with a cut to real wages—wages adjusted for inflation—of 20.26% heading into this new round of bargaining.
To put that into perspective, for each $1000 these workers made in July 2012, it would be the same as getting paid $797.40 in July 2023, when accounting for wages and inflation.
In other words, for every $1000 they spent on goods and services in July 2012, it would’ve cost them $1,202.60 to buy the same goods and services last summer. Either that, or they’d be able to afford only $797.40 of those goods and services.
Lethbridge Polytechnic’s proposal of 7.5% isn’t even half of what is needed to address this reduction in real wages. And that’s not even addressing the inflation this year, next year, and in the final two years of the contract.
And make no mistake: this is not Lethbridge Polytechnic’s proposal; this the proposal forced on them by the UCP provincial government, the same proposal being forced onto employers of care home workers, nurses, researchers, and paramedical workers.
The workers’ bargaining team countered this ridiculously low offer with 26.5% over just 3 years.
But even that isn’t enough. It would allow them to get caught up on the 20.26% cut to real wages over the last decade, but it’d leave only 6.24% to cover inflation over the next 3 years. And inflation for the first year of this theoretical contract—July 2023 to July 2024—was 2.65%, more than a third of the remaining increase.
Because the employer refuses to budge off the mandate pushed on them by the UCP government, the two parties remain far apart on wage increase proposals—to say nothing of the fact that they’ve rejected all other monetary offers proposed by the workers.
As a result, they have agreed to file for mediation.
