Last week, the Alberta Labour Relations Board published another new applications report for July 2025. In it was another union certification application.
Local 362 of the Teamsters filed the application on 16 July 2025 for transit workers employed by the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo.
Specifically, the application is for all workers who are operational supervisors in the municipality’s transit department who are not if office or clerical positions and are not already represented by the Canadian Union of Provincial Employees.
Local 1505 of CUPE has represented all Wood Buffalo employees except library and preventative social services personnel since 1995.
In total, this would include only 17 workers.
To apply for the certification of a workplace, a union must demonstrate that at least 40% of the workers to be represented support unionizing. In this case, that would be 7 workers.
The ALRB has scheduled a hearing regarding this application for tomorrow morning, during which the RM of Wood Buffalo can argue, if needed, as to why they think these workers should not organize with Local 362.
If the ALRB approves the application, they will hold a certification vote, during which time, the workers will be able to democratically choose whether to unionize.
Assuming the 7 workers previously mentioned vote in favour, they would need to convince just 2 more fellow workers to join them. That would give them the majority needed to win.
Should the workers vote in favour of unionizing and the ALRB certifies them as a bargaining unit, their first action will be to form a bargaining committee so they can begin negotiating a collective agreement.
Because the ALRB does not archive their new application reports, I have included a copy of this report below.
