President’s Year End Message: 46 new agreements and 3 wage reopeners ratified in 2005
EDMONTON – The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees successfully completed contract negotiations at 45 separate bargaining tables in 2005, plus three wage-reopener negotiations, with members ratifying each one of those agreements, President Dan MacLennan reported in his Year End Message today.
MacLennan said that during 2005 AUPE staff negotiators and bargaining committee members were at 54 bargaining tables and the three wage reopeners, together affecting more than 80 per cent of the union’s 62,000 members.
Negotiations were concluded in each of the union’s four sectors — provincial government, health care, education, and boards, agencies and local governments — in this remarkable year of bargaining.
Agreements successfully concluded include the massive Master Agreement and nine subsidiary agreements negotiated by AUPE on behalf of all direct employees of the provincial government, more than 20,000 people in all.
That agreement, Alberta’s largest labour contract, saw members qualify for across-the-board pay increases of 9.9 per cent over its three-year term.
Negotiations continue at a few tables.
MacLennan noted in his year-end message that while 2006 will be a quieter year for bargaining, AUPE members will still be busy.
In addition to aggressively enforcing collective agreements, MacLennan said, AUPE members and staff will continue to fight hard for healthy and safe workplaces for Alberta workers — including a consistent, equally enforced, province-wide workplace smoking ban.
Many members will also take part in election campaigns, with the support and encouragement of their union, he said.
And members will begin work on a major campaign to change Alberta’s labour laws, MacLennan said.
At the 2005 AUPE Annual Convention — the largest in the union’s history — delegates passed a resolution to spend $1.5 million over three years to conduct an intensive lobbying campaign “to bring Alberta’s regressive labour laws out of the industrial relations Stone Age,” he said in the message.
Most of these funds will be used to train members to lobby the provincial government on a constituency-by-constituency basis for full collective bargaining rights for all public employees, first-contract arbitration that would force employers to bargain in good faith, and essential services legislation that would treat all employees according to the same standard.
For more information, contact:
Dan MacLennan, President, AUPE, 780-930-3301 or 780-232-8392 (cellular phone)
David Climenhaga, Communications Director, AUPE, 780-930-3311 or 780-717-2943 (cellular phone)