Sobeys wants wage freezes for 7,500+ workers

Earlier this week, Local 401 of the United Food and Commercial Workers published an update on their website regarding negotiations between Safeway workers in Alberta and their employer, Sobeys Capital Incorporated.

Negotiations are for 3 collective agreements: retail workers, meat and deli workers in the northern region, and meat and deli workers in the southern region.

Retail workers include those working in Safeway stores in Brooks, Calgary, Camrose, Canmore, Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie, Hinton, Lethbridge, Lloydminster, Medicine Hat, Red Deer. and Wetaskiwin.

As far as meat and deli workers so, the northern region includes Camrose, Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Grand Prairie, Hinton, Red Deer, and Wetaskiwin; the southern region includes Calgary, Canmore, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, and Brooks.

Collectively, this represents about 7,500 workers, as of August 2020, when the current agreements came into effect. All 3 agreements (here, here, and here) expire next August.

Sobeys has proposed crappy wage increases for the new contract, which would run for 4 years.

For example, if they got their way, workers who are still within their pay scales for their classification, they’d get wage freezes in every year of the contract.

Workers who are at their top-rate or over-scale, would get freezes in the first 3 years, followed by 1.5% wage increase.

Here’s it is an easier-to-read format:

	In-scale	Top & over scale
10 August 2025	0.00%	0.00%
9 August 2026	0.00%	0.00%
8 August 2027	0.00%	0.00%
13 August 2028	0.00%	1.50%

Instead of increasing the base salary for these Safeway workers, Sobeys has proposed giving them lump sum payments.

	In-scale	Top & over scale
10 August 2025	$250	$0
9 August 2026	$250	$0
8 August 2027	$250	1.5%
13 August 2028	$250	0%

So, to be clear, in-scale workers will receive no wage increases, but they’ll get 4 lump sum payments of $250 each. Top-rate and over-scale workers, on the other hand, will get a single lump sum payment worth 1.5% of their base pay for all our worked in the third year and a 1.5% increase to their base salary in the final year.

The problem with lump sum payments is that they don’t increase base salary.

Let’s take the in-scale workers for example. If the worker is making $30,000 at the end of the current contract, they will get $30,250 in the first year with their lump sum payment.

However, their income doesn’t switch to $30,250 in the second year. It resets to $30,000 and their income ends up being $30,250 once again. This repeats for each year of the contract.

And by the end of their contract, their base salary will still be the same as it was at the start of the contract: $30,000. Any raises they might get in a subsequent contract will be based off that $30,000. None of the lump sum payments will factor into future raises.

I’ll just point out that $250 is only 0.83% of $30,000, so that won’t even be enough to cover the increase to inflation, which has nearly hit 3% this year.

Oh, and keep in mind that $30,000 at full-time wages works out to under $15 an hour, so a $250 increase will end up being even lower than 0.83% for full-time workers.

The workers’ bargaining team, however, is proposing far larger increases than this, what they’re calling “fair wages”.

They want the contract to be for only two years, expiring no later than 1 September 2027, and they want a 10% increase for all classifications and scales in both years, for a combined 20%.

They also want a yearly cost of living increase based on the change in the consumer price index.

As well, they proposed a minimum of $17 an hour for all start rates.

Beyond wages, the employer has proposed simply extending the contract for 4 years, basically keeping everything where it is now. The union, of course, is proposing several improvements, including increased hours for part-time workers, removing caps on hours, and improved health benefits.

There is a huge gap between what Sobeys has proposed and what the workers have proposed.

Unless Sobeys starts taking things seriously and come back to the table to bargain in good faith, these 7,500 workers may not have a new contract by the time this one expires next summer.