Safeway threatens to reverse pay raises

In 2020, over 7,000 Alberta workers employed by Sobeys Capital to work in the company’s Safeway stores settled their most recent collective agreements.

Sobeys Capital owns Safeway stores in Calgary, Banff, Brooks, Camrose, Canmore, Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie, Hinton, Lethbridge, Lloydminster, Medicine Hat, Red Deer, and Wetaskiwin.

The workers are represented by 3 collective agreements.

In these collective agreements, the workers and the employer included a wage reopener, which would allow either party to initiate negotiations as of February 2023 on wages for workers who were at the top of their pay range or above it.

These negotiations could be for pay increases, lump sum payments, or to keep things as is.

According to a bad faith bargaining complaint filed by Local 401 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents these workers, the workers’ bargaining team notified the employer that they wanted bargain wage increases.

The two parties scheduled negotiations for the beginning of June, and when those negotiations didn’t result in an agreement, they met again at the end of the month.

When the second round of negotiations failed to produce an agreement, they went to final offer selection interest arbitration, which would result in a binding settlement.

The workers proposed a 5% increase in each of the last 2 years of the collective agreements. The employer offered a 1.5% increase in the second to last year and a 2% increase in the final year, as well as a $1000 lump sum payment for 2023.

Remember, these would be increases to just the workers who had already topped out at their pay scales.

Mia Norrie, the arbitrator, selected the workers’ offer in her final offer arbitration decision, which she released in November 2023.

The employer wasn’t too happy with that, so just a few weeks later, in the first week of December 2023, they applied for a judicial review of Norrie’s decision. They were granted a review, which was scheduled for this past September.

The month before, the employer began circulation memos to Safeway workers, telling them that there were several errors in Norrie’s decision and that she had relied on inaccurate information when she released it. They didn’t say what the errors or inaccuracies were.

This, of course, paints the union as being dishonest in their negotiations, while presenting themselves as victims. As well, their rhetoric in the memo was trying to undermine solidarity among the workers by trying to pit workers against each other.

For example, they said that the decision “rewards only top-rated teammates”, which then “creates future risks for all teammates”. They then went on to claim that the decision has made Safeway “extremely uncompetitive” and that “several of our stores [are] unprofitable”. Finally, they ominously warned that they “may have to make difficult choices to address this situation”.

In a follow-up email, Tom Hesse, the president of Local 401, asked for a list of stores that are now unprofitable because of this decision. The union claims they have yet to receive such a list.

G.H. Poleman, the justice who over saw the judicial review, released his decision on 18 October 2024, siding with the employer and granting an order to quash Norrie’s decision.

In a letter to Hesse, dated 3 November 2024, Andrew Follwell, the vice-president of labour relation and shared services with Sobeys Capital, stated that they intend to “revert wage rates and collect the overpayment from team members” but that they were prepared to postpone it until January 2025.

They wanted to meet with Local 401 to discuss the results of the judicial review, as well as an “extension to the collective agreement”, which expires next August.

Sobeys included a copy of that letter in an email they sent to Safeway workers that same day.

In their bad faith arguing complaint, Local 401 points out that the employer should have brought up any concerns they had with financial pressure from the wage increase during negotiations, or at least during arbitration, but they had failed to do so.

They also had no access to the financial information Sobeys was using to base this claim.

This, in turn, robbed the union of a chance to adapt their offer to that scenario.

Local 401 claims in their complaint that the employer’s communications were presented in a way that purposefully interferes with their ability to represent their members, as well as the right of those members to receive that representation.

They said in their report that the employer’s communications also “pitted union members against each other, threatened union members’ hours and jobs as well as store closures, and derided the union and the arbitration decision.

According to the complaint, Local 401 believes that all of this combined amounts to interfering with the union and its members and violates the Alberta Labour Relations Code.

In their complaint, the union is asking for the Alberta Labour Relations Board to declare that Sobeys has violated the Code, that they must cease what they’re doing, that they must withdraw their threat to revert the wage increases and make the workers who received them to pay them back, and to pay the union and its members monetary damages.