Last month, the Mediation Services department of Alberta Jobs, Economy, and Trade published their May 2024 Bargaining Update, which includes details on recently settled collective agreements.
One of the agreements was between Local 898 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the Town of Peace River.
Local 898 represents about 50 workers employed by the Town of Peace River in various positions, including machine operators, lifeguards, aquatic instructors, facilities maintenance workers, recreation facilities operators, and general labourers.
Peace River is a town of about 7,000 people in northwestern Alberta, roughly 500 kilometres northwest of Edmonton and 200 kilometres northeast of Grande Prairie.
The previous contract for these workers, which was had lasted for 3 years, expired at the end of 2022. The new contract took almost a year and a half to come to fruition, having finally been settled on 7 May 2024. It is retroactive to January 2023.
Mediation Services didn’t provide a full contract, so I can’t comprehensively compare the new contract to the previous one. However, I can discuss wage increases.
Over the course of the new new 4-year contract, workers can expect to see 4 wage increases, 2 of which will be retroactive.
| 1 Jan 2023 | 2.40% |
| 1 Jan 2024 | 2.00% |
| 1 Jan 2025 | 1.75% |
| 1 Jan 2026 | 2.60% |
That combines to 8.75% during the full 4 years, which works out to 9.04% when accounting for compounding increases. That works out to 2.26% per year, on average.
This is a larger increase than they received in their previous contract.
| 1 Jan 2020 | 1.0% |
| 1 Jan 2021 | 1.3% |
| 1 Jan 2022 | 1.5% |
That was a total of 3.8%, or an average of 1.27% per year.
For additional context, in January 2019, the start of the previous contract, the consumer price index in Alberta sat at 140.5. By the time the contract ended at the end of December 2022, it had increased to 160.5. That’s a 20–point increase, or 14.23%.
So, while the workers were getting a 3.8% wage increase in their last contract, inflation was more than triple that.
This means that real wages—wages adjusted for inflation—for these workers actually had decreased by 10.43%.
In other words, if they had spent $1000 on goods and services in January 2019, those same goods and services would’ve cost them $1104.30 by the end of the contract. To put it another way, if they tried spending the same $1000 in January 2023, they would’ve been able to buy only $895.70 worth of the same goods and services.
So, they were already at a disadvantage heading into negotiations.
The wage increase of 9.04% in the new contract, while it seems significant and higher than what the workers received in the previous contract, still isn’t even enough to make up for the loss in real wages.
And that’s not even considering the inflation Alberta is sure to see throughout the new contract. For example, inflation in just the first year of the new contract—January 2023 to January 2024—was 3.36%. These workers still have 3 more years of inflation ahead of them.
Plus, some workers were still making less than $20 an hour by the start of the new contract.
The employer should have gone further in helping their workers to be able to support themselves and their families afford increases to the cost of living.
