Earlier this month, the Mediation Services department of Alberta Jobs, Economy, and Trade published the April 2025 Bargaining Update.
This monthly report provides information about the unionized workforce, primarily in Alberta. In April, Mediation Services received settlement information regarding 20 private sector and 19 public sector bargaining settlements, covering 990 and 43,727 workers respectively.
Among those settlements was a contract for about 150 workers employed by Bee Clean Northern Alberta.
With head offices in Edmonton and Winnipeg, Bee Clean sells the cleaning services of its workers to commercial clients throughout the country.
The workers in this collective agreement help clean the University of Alberta in Edmonton. They’re represented by Local 2 of the Service Employees International Union.
Their previous contract expired in September 2024, and the workers ratified their new contract on 1 January 2025, about 2.5 months later, but Mediation Services only recently received it.
This is a 2-year contract, which is what they had in their last contract; however the contract prior to that was for 4 years.
This new collective agreement includes wage increases in every one of those three years.
| 1 October 2024 | 30¢ |
| 1 October 2025 | 30¢ |
That’s a combined 3.07–3.57%, depending on the position, over the life of the contract. This works out to an average of 1.54–1.79% per year.
This is better than the 20¢ raises they received in both years of their previous contract, which comes out to between 2.09% and 2.44% combined in that contract.
Even though the combined increase is better this time around, it’s less than what they got two contracts ago. Check this out.
| 1 October 2019 | 25¢ |
| 1 October 2020 | 35¢ |
| 1 October 2021 | 35¢ |
| 1 October 2022 | 20¢ |
| 1 October 2023 | 20¢ |
| 1 October 2024 | 30¢ |
| 1 October 2025 | 30¢ |
Between October 2018 and October 2023, wages for these workers have increased by between 7.39%% and 8.71%.
During that same period, inflation in Alberta jumped 16.87%. That’s more than double what some workers received in raises over two contract.
These workers were left with a real wage cut of 8.16–9.48% during the last two contracts. A raise of between 3.07% and 3.57% in this new contract won’t make up for those lost wages, especially once you factor in another two years of inflation under this new contract.
These workers are being paid less than $20 an hour, except for night shift lead hands, who’ll make $20.15 an hour in the final year of the contract.
That’s less than the living wage of $20.85 in Edmonton, as of 2024.
Here are some highlights of things that have changed in this new contract.
Four times a year, the employer will provide the union an updated list of workers covered by this collective agreement. Under the previous agreement, it was only twice a year.
In the previous agreement, payroll errors larger than $50 were rectified by a manual cheque within 48 hours. That has been increased to $100 in the new agreement.
The following two clauses were added to Schedule A, which outlines wages and wage increases:
*Wage Protection – If the provincial government increases the minimum wage by an amount that is greater than the wage increase in any calendar year of this agreement, the wage rates in this agreement will be adjusted by 60% of the difference between the wage increase in this agreement and the increase to minimum wage.
*Me Too – Where the Employer provides a wage rate to a newly hired employee that is higher than the rates set out in the minimum rates above, all employees within the same building in an equal or higher classification shall be entitled to that higher wage rate.
Also, all instances of “Company” have been replaced with “Employer”.
