For immediate release: Saturday, June 12, 2004

EDMONTON — Employees of Venta Care Centre Ltd. have overwhelmingly voted — for a second time — to be members of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees and to reject membership in the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC).

“This should put to rest any question of the kind of representation that the employees of this Edmonton continuing-care facility want,” said AUPE President Dan MacLennan today. “Clearly, they wish to be part of a real union.”

Venta employees voted to leave CLAC and join AUPE in June 2003. Since that time, a small group of employees who wished to continue their employer’s relationship with CLAC pressed for another vote.

They managed last month to meet the Alberta Labour Relations Board requirements for a second vote, but their Venta co-workers indicated emphatically that they want to remain part of AUPE in voting that took place Wednesday and was counted yesterday.

“This employer has been dragging its feet in negotiations,” said AUPE Labour Relations Manager Ron Hodgins. “Now that the wishes of their employees have been made clear — again — it’s time for them to get down to business and negotiate the fair collective agreement that their employees deserve.

“These kinds of private-sector health employers increase their profits by minimizing the salaries and benefits of their employees,” Hodgins said. “AUPE is going to continue to work with these members to reach a fair contract.”

CLAC has received wide criticism from unions and elsewhere in regards to some of its practices in labour relations. In the past, the Alberta, Ontario and Nova Scotia labour relations boards have all commented in rulings on the poor representation provided to members by CLAC. For example, the Nova Scotia Labour Relations Board has gone so far as to say that CLAC is not a trade union within the meaning of Nova Scotia law.

For its part, AUPE has fought hard for Venta employees since becoming their union in June 2003.
Last month, Alberta arbitrator Andrew Sims entirely upheld a grievance filed by AUPE when Venta terminated 11 nursing assistants during the certification drive by the union.

In response to AUPE’s arguments, Sims concluded that the terminations by Venta were not justified and ordered them to be set aside and the employees given back their jobs.

Sims wrote that Venta’s behavior supported AUPE’s argument that the terminations had more to do “than the employer cares to admit” with the rejection by Venta employees on May 28, 2003, of a tentative agreement signed by CLAC, and the fact that vote left the way clear for AUPE’s certification application five days later.

Venta’s actions, Sims wrote, all pointed “to a lack of good faith.”
“The circumstantial evidence to support the union conclusion that this action was a result of the failure to ratify the CLAC agreement, and AUPE’s organizing efforts, (is) compelling,” Sims wrote in ruling in favour of AUPE.

MacLennan said today that AUPE’s fight to get the employees their jobs back was one of the reasons Venta employees voted strongly to remain part of AUPE. “We proved that we were willing to fight hard to protect our members, and that came through in the vote.

“The employer now needs to get on with bargaining in good faith and sign a fair agreement with our members,” MacLennan concluded.

Click here to read AUPE’s May 12 story on Sims’s arbitration ruling.