Medicine Hat ed workers reject 12% raise

Earlier this week, the Alberta region of the Canadian Union of Public Employees published a bargaining update for education support workers in Medicine Hat.

These workers employed by the Medicine Hat Public School Division are represented by Local 829 of CUPE and include custodians, administrative assistants, library workers, bookkeepers, educational assistants, early childhood educators, and shop technicians.

Their last collective agreement expired last August, and it was only a 1-year contract.

According to this week’s media release, the school division had offered the workers 12% over 4 years for a wage increase; however, the workers recently rejected that proposal.

Over a period of two days earlier this week 235 workers (out of 274 who were eligible to vote) participated in a ratification vote, and just shy of 80% of them (79.1%) said no.

Now, 12% might seem like a lot on the surface, but there’s some context you should know.

Here’s a look at their wage increases since 2018:

1 September 2019	0.00%
1 September 2020	0.00%
1 September 2021	0.00%
1 September 2022	0.00%
1 September 2023	1.25%
1 February 2024	1.50%

So, the school board—or rather the provincial government, through the secret mandate they’re forcing onto the school boards—gave them 12% after 4 years of wage freezes and a combined increase of 3.75% in their last contract.

That works out to an average annual increase of just 1.64%, if we include the proposed 12%!

Tracy Hensel, the superintendent of MHPSD, called this offer “fair and competitive”.

Let’s check to see if that’s true.

In September 2018, the last time these workers got a raise prior to their previous contract, the consumer price index in Alberta sat at 141.1. By the time, September 2023 rolled around, it had shot up 24.9 points to 166.0. That’s a 17.65% increase.

So, during the time that inflation rose 17.65%, these workers got a single raise of 1.2%. Even if we throw in the 1.5% increase they got 5 months later, they’re left with a real wage cut of 14.9%.

Even with a 12% raise, they’d still be behind inflation by nearly 3 points!

And that’s not even counting the fact that we still have to account for all the inflation between September 2023 and when the proposed collective agreement would expire in August 2028, so real wages would drop even more.

Inflation in Alberta between just September 2023 and September 2024, for example, increased by nearly 2%. If that rate of increase continued for this new contract, we’d see an increase of an additional 8%.

These workers would be out nearly 13% in real wages by the end of the proposed contract, even with the 12% raise offered by the province through the school division.

Well, no wonder they rejected it. The school division should go back to the province and tell them to increase the secret mandate to a 15% increase in the first year, followed by 10% over the next 3 years.

Anything less than that is disrespectful to the workers who keep schools running in Medicine Hat.