Last week, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees published an update on their website regarding contract negotiations for workers in St. Paul.
These 160 or so workers are employed by the St. Paul Abilities Network.
Based out of, well, St. Paul, SPAN is a non-profit supporting people of differing abilities with home living options and day programming.
The workers represented by AUPE include disability support workers, programmers, administrative assistants, outcome facilitators, health care aides, maintenance workers, production workers, and finance assistants.
Their most recent collective agreement expired nearly a year ago, at the end of September 2024. This was their first collective agreement since the Alberta Labour Relations Board certified them as a bargaining unit in September 2022. It took almost a year and a half to negotiate and ratify that agreement, 7 months before it expired.
The bargaining team for the workers met with SPAN’s bargaining team back in May for negotiations.
At that meeting, they asked for improvements to on-call and overtime pay, vacation days, personal wellness days, family illness leave, and pension contributions. They also proposed wage increases, a new health spending account, and changes to how SPAN schedules and distributes shifts for caregivers.
SPAN responded to these proposals by saying they needed time to develop their own proposals.
The two parties met earlier this month, on the 11th. Unfortunately, that meeting brought some bad news, as SPAN claimed they did not have the money needed to provide raises. However, they did indicate that they are discussing increased funding with the Alberta government.
As a provider of level 3 supportive living, SPAN receives provincial funding to making that housing possible. Much of their funding comes through the Persons with Developmental Disabilities programme.
Bargaining for non-monetary items has not been completed yet, so there is still time to negotiate those while waiting for a decision from the provincial government.
The workers’ bargaining team had offered to return to the negotiating table next month but had yet to hear from the employer.
