Safeway wants to roll back worker benefits

Last week, Local 401 of the United Food and Commercial Workers posted an update on their website regarding contract negotiations for Safeway workers in Alberta.

These 7,500 or so workers are employed at Safeway stores in Brooks, Calgary, Camrose, Canmore, Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie, Hinton, Lethbridge, Lloydminster, Medicine Hat, Red Deer, and Wetaskiwin.

Their most recent collective agreement—technically 3 agreements (here, here, and here)—expired back in August; although bargaining began just last week, on the last day of September.

According to the workers’ bargaining committee—which includes 36 Safeway workers from stores in Brooks, Calgary, Camrose, Canmore, Chestermere, Edmonton, Grande Prairie, Hinton, Lethbridge, St. Alberta, Spruce Grove, and Wetaskiwin—the proposals the employer brought to the table included several rollbacks.

Sobeys Capital Incorporated—who is the technical employer—wants to reduce overtime pay from double time to time and a half, for example.

They also want to take away some of the work that their workers do. Under the previous contract, the employer could have up to 2 vendors per store stock their own product on the shelves, rather than have Safeway workers stock that product. Now, they want to expand that to 10 vendors per store. If third-party vendors are stocking their own products, Sobeys is taking work away from their own workers, which will give them justification to lay off workers.

Sobeys wants to take away seniority protections for the following unionized positions:

• Management trainee
• Floral operator
• Coffee bar operator
• Health and Wellness manager
• Fish department manager
• Chinese kitchen manager
• Head cashier
• Head file maintenance
• Variety operator
• Non-retail pharmacy assistant supervisor

That would more than double the number of positions that could be exempt from seniority protections.

Under the previous collective agreement, Full-time workers, qualified for WCB would, in addition to the amount received from the WCB, receive a top up from Sobeys that would max out at the worker’s regular contract rate, for the first 3 days and at 75% after that, if WCB does not pay the 75% of the employee’s regular contract wage. Sobeys wants to remove this WCB top up from the new collective agreement.

Up until now, Sobeys was covering 100% of health and wellness benefits for their Safeway workers. They want to reduce that to just 65%, taking the other 35% off the workers’ paycheques.

Finally, Sobeys wants to increase the probationary period for new workers by 60%, going from just 200 hours to now 320 hours.

Remember, this is the same company that wanted to reverse raises they had already paid to some workers and then freeze wages in the new collective agreement.

The next round of bargaining will begin on 21 October and end 2 days later.