Negotiators need to emphasize Alberta’s economic differences, bargaining conference told
RED DEER – AUPE’s bargaining committee for direct government employees needs to differentiate between the Alberta economy, where inflation is soaring, and the economy of the rest of Canada, participants in the General Service Bargaining Conference were told this morning.
“There’s a dramatic difference between Alberta and the rest of Canada,” AUPE Research Officer Aaron Mireau told bargaining committee representatives from each of the nine Alberta Union of Provincial Employees locals that represent more than 20,000 direct employees of the provincial government.
“This is the information we need to emphasize with the employer,” Mireau told the bargaining conference, at which delegates will set out their locals’ bargaining priorities for the nine-member General Service Bargaining Committee.
“We need large base-rate increases to keep up with the effects of inflation,” Mireau said.
Increasingly, Mireau said, the Alberta and Canadian economies are on different tracks — with inflation, labour shortages, extremely high housing costs and economic growth all running well ahead in Alberta, with predictable results on the economic pressures faced by employees.
For example, he said, average year-to-date inflation from January 2006 to the present is running at 3.9 per cent, compared with a national rate of only 2 per cent. The latest figures from Statistics Canada show inflation in Alberta as of December 2006, on a year-over-year basis is running at 4.7% compared to a national rate of 1.6%
“A dollar doesn’t go nearly as far as it used to,” Mireau told delegates to the two-day conference, which was opened this morning by AUPE President Doug Knight, who is also chair off the General Service Bargaining Committee.
The shortage of workers, Canada’s highest average hourly wage and competition for employees from the private sector put the government as an employer under a different sort of pressure, Mireau noted. The employer will have to pay competitive rates in order to recruit and retain the employees it needs.
Knight said earlier that the province’s economy “puts pressure on both parties to reach an agreement that recognizes the economic concerns of AUPE members and that addresses the recruitment and retention challenges faced by the government as an employer.”
Mireau concluded his portion of the conference by noting that “there is no basis for the government to say ‘We can’t pay for it.’
“If they come back to us with that, it can only imply, ‘We don’t want to pay,’” he stated.
Mireau was one of several speakers to address the conference to help prepare the bargaining committee for upcoming negotiations with the government.
In bargaining, said AUPE Staff Negotiator Jim Petrie, the union will operate from the assumption that existing economic conditions will continue for at least five to seven years.
After the bargaining conference ends tomorrow afternoon, Petrie said, the GSBC will meet several times to determine the specifics of general proposals accepted in Red Deer by members of the locals’ bargaining committees.
It will likely be spring before AUPE sets out its position on wages or gives the government formal notice that it intends to commence bargaining, Petrie noted.
AUPE’s Master Agreement and nine Subsidiary Agreements with the provincial government expire on Aug. 31, 2007.
In addition to their work preparing for bargaining, delegates to the conference will join Red Deer-area Child and Family Services workers on a lunch-hour picket line to protest heavy caseloads and staff shortages.
Photo: AUPE President Doug Knight speaks to GSBC members attending a two-day conference in Red Deer Jan. 25, while AUPE Research Officer Aaron Mireau looks on.