Refinery workers get 12.5% raise

Earlier this month, the Mediation Services department of Alberta Jobs, Economy, and Trade published the July 2024 Bargaining Update.

This monthly report provides information about the unionized workforce, primarily in Alberta. Last month, Mediation Services received settlement information regarding 26 private sector and 10 public sector bargaining settlements, covering 2,032 and 6,698 workers respectively.

One of those settlements was for nearly 200 workers employed by Imperial Oil at the company’s Strathcona refinery.

Through their labour as technicians and mechanics, these workers help the refinery process over 200,000 barrels of crude oil every day into fuel products, industrial lubricants, and asphalt. They are represented by Local 3000Ca of Unifor.

They had been without a new contract since their previous one expired in January 2023. The workers and the employers finally settled on a new contract just this past February, over a year later.

The new 3-year contract is retroactive to the beginning of 2023 and will expire in January 2026 and includes wage increases, the first two being retroactive.

1 February 2023	5.0%
1 February 2024	3.5%
1 February 2025	3.5%

That works out to a combined increase of 12% per year, or 12.48% if you account for compound increases. The annual average is 4.16%.

This is much better than the increases they received in their previous contract, which averaged 2.94% per year.

1 February 2019	2.50%
1 February 2020	2.75%
1 February 2021	3.00%
1 February 2022	3.50%

These new increases will help these workers respond to the rising cost of living as they try to support themselves and their families.

The consumer price index in Alberta in February 2018 was 139.7. By January 2023, it had increased 20.8 points to 160.5, a 14.89% jump.

That left the workers with a cut to real wages—wages adjusted for inflation—of 2.61% by the end of their last contract. The increases in the first two years of the new contract will help make up for that real wage cut, as well as cover inflation over the last two years, which has increased 5.55% in the year and a half since January 2023.

Hopefully the final 2 increases will cover inflation the rest of this year, as well as the final year of the contract.

Here are a couple of highlights of other changes in the new contract.

The specialty products plant schedule in the previous contract has been entirely removed. This was a variety of shifts that varied from the regular schedule in starting and ending times.

The new contract adds National Day for Truth and Reconciliation as a recognized holiday, but it removes Strathcona Day from the list. Workers will still have only 12 recognized paid holidays.