Bargaining with North America’s largest health care employer

A hospital is a whirlwind of sound.

Beeps and hums from the mobile blood pressure monitor. Coughs and cries from a waiting family. Whirring whistles as a stretcher whips through wide open sliding doors, drowning out the click-clacking of keyboards as a chorus of staff admit Albertans as quickly as they can.

New sounds meet your ears once you cross through the ER and into an inpatient space. Porters wheeling patients to their MRI. Rustling trash as an environmental services worker empties a garbage bin and the wet slap of a mop as another wipes up the floor. Countless conversations between staff and patients, too.

For AUPE members working with AHS, many of those conversations now focus on bargaining.

Picture yourself as the average person needing to visit a hospital in the dead of night. Bargaining between AHS and AUPE would be the last thing on your mind. Many Albertans just don’t know how huge our health care system is, let alone the fact AHS’s tens of thousands of staff are members of several different unions.

But as AUPE members know, bargaining for most AHS employees is far from over.

“AUPE members are the backbone of Alberta’s health care system,” says AUPE Vice-President Darren Graham, himself an AHS General Support Services employee and member of Local 057. 

“Whether you provide services front-and-centre or keep things running smoothly behind the scenes, you deserve fair wages and a contract that reflects your contributions to AHS and this province,” he says.

AHS delays bargaining and ESA negotiations

Bargaining for AUPE members working in AHS General Support Services and Nursing Care started in February and March of 2024. We have made some progress—and some noise—at the table since bargaining began, but AHS refuses to hear our wage proposals.

AHS offered each of our negotiating teams just one monetary proposal throughout this entire process, which they refuse to amend at all. Trying to negotiate under these conditions is like listening to nails scrape down a chalkboard.

And yet, the General Support Services and Nursing Care negotiating teams are ready to get back to bargaining at any time. That's our goal, to get a good deal at the table.

The problem is that AHS insists we need a mediator’s help to continue bargaining. Given their lack of action so far, one may fairly ask: do AHS’s negotiators even want to bargain without a mediator or the government telling them what to do?

Whatever the answer is, it does not really matter. Because AHS refuses to negotiate further without a mediator, bargaining is delayed until we can finish our Essential Services Agreements (ESAs).

Of course, AHS is also doing everything it can to slow the tempo and prevent us from completing our ESAs any time soon.
“We take our ESAs seriously and AUPE is working hard to complete them,” says Graham. “Our ESAs are extremely important and need to be in place so that we can move forward to formal mediation, but we must also ensure our ESAs can be used effectively in a work stoppage."

AHS has been directed to complete the ESAs by working with AUPE collaboratively, but they refuse to budge on their positions, creating more frustration.

Ultimately, AUPE members working for AHS should know that their next bargaining meetings all depend on when their employer wants to get back at it. Until then, things may sound like the same song stuck on repeat, over and over again.

What’s next?

AUPE members are creative. We could even use these delays to cause some commotion of our own.

Did you know that creating a MyAUPE account is the best way to vote on a future contract? And participate in any strike votes? And collect strike pay? Did you also know that receiving AUPE emails does not automatically mean you have a MyAUPE account? That is one big item to take care of while we wait for bargaining to begin again.

We can also use the free time to dust off our megaphones and protest signs. Wearing red at the workplace is one thing, and wearing red to a Lunch ‘n’ Learn is another, but Graham believes the time is right for something louder.

“AHS will have a hard time ignoring the proud, united voices of tens of thousands of Nursing Care and General Support Services workers,” he says.

Imagine how AHS would feel if their employees—all decked out in red and loud as can be—started organizing info-pickets (sometimes called “practice strikes”) during the noon hour?

That would introduce another roar of sound to hospitals across Alberta. That would catch AHS’s attention. And it may well prepare members for the challenges ahead.

“Our fellow AUPE members working for the government held a historic strike vote, and Alberta’s teachers recently authorized one as well,” says Graham. “We don’t know if we’ll get to that point with AHS, but if they won’t hear us now, they’ll be forced to hear us then.”