LOCAL 048 CHAPTER 033 EVANSTON GRAND VILLAGE – ALL STAFF
Work under way to move to formal mediation
Bargaining with your employer, Golden Life Management Corporation, has been a hard slog, with your negotiating team facing resistance to almost every reasonable request made on your behalf.
It has been three years since we filed notice to bargain a new collective agreement. While some of the delay has been caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, much of it can be blamed on your employer.
Our first meetings with the employer’s team were in November 2019. Since then, we have had meetings in December 2019, March 2020 and September 2020.
At that stage, we applied for informal mediation in the hope that a third party might help talks progress. The first meeting in mediation was postponed because the employer was not prepared.
Informal mediation meetings were held in February and March 2021. At that time, we advised the employer that we would not accept a new collective-bargaining agreement that simply maintained that status quo in our previous agreement and enforced a three-year wage freeze.
With talks at an impasse and informal mediation having failed to produce progress, we are now working on negotiating an Essential Services Agreement (ESA).
An ESA is the contract that AUPE and an employer negotiate to determine which services are essential services and must continue during a strike or lockout. Alberta labour law requires this to be in place before negotiations can be sent to formal mediation.
The bargaining issues that remain unresolved include many of those you identified in the survey we carried out in March 2021, including:
- Improvement to shifts;
- More full-time positions;
- More flexible vacation scheduling;
- Workload and staffing concerns;
- The use of staffing agencies to do bargaining unit work; and
- Increases to wages, shift differentials and weekend premiums.
While we work on filing the Essential Services Agreement so we can move to the next stage of formal mediation, please remember that the terms of the previous collective-bargaining agreement remain in place.
If you have any questions, please contact a member of your negotiating team.
AUPE NEGOTIATING TEAM – EVANSTON GRAND VILLAGE
Varinder Ghangas
587-716- 0152 or balveen2011@gmail.com
Manisha Patel
403- 826- 7666 or chrishpatel@yahoo.ca
Uche Ezeigbo
587- 975- 4540 or ucheezeigbo@ymail.com
AUPE STRAFF RESOURCES
John Wevers Negotiations
780-238-4767 or j.wevers@aupe.org
Jaime Urbina Organizing
587-599-7557 or j.urbina@aupe.org
Terry Inigo-Jones Communications
403-831-4394 or t.inigo-jones@aupe.org