Members deserve a fair and equitable collective agreement now!
On April 12 the negotiating committees for Glenmore, Sagewood and Sunrise Gardens met with negotiators and agreed that arbitration is the only answer.
The Employer slow-played negotiations for years, only to table offers that are below provincial standards in health care. Many other members working in health care are compensated for their hard work much better than Agecare members.
Timeline
Beginning in 2019, Glenmore, Sagewood and Sunrise Gardens negotiators and organizing teams met with the employer for collective bargaining.
The Employer concentrated their bargaining efforts on the distribution of casual pick-up shifts, changing the operation, making schedules more flexible, and allocating available hours from vacant positions.
The Employer’s position was to distribute more hours to casual employees and eliminate the criteria of seniority from the part-time employee pick up shifts and block shifts.
To this day, the employer is pushing for collective agreements that favour casual employees, which only make up 30 percent of staff, by using casual employees to work pick-up shifts. This is unfair to part-time and full-time regular employees who make up 70 percent of staff.
The employer also has not moved from their monetary position for wage adjustments of 1/2%- 1/2%- 1/2% in each year of 3-year collective agreement. The Employer's monetary offer is less than those in AgeCare sites in Columbia, Lethbridge and Valleyview.
In 2019, the employer filed for informal mediation to avoid discussions about the Employment Standards Act. Negotiators and the employer met several times throughout the spring and summer of 2020, but were unable to achieve a settlement.
During mediation, the negotiating team proposed the employer consider having an informal mediator’s report, as negotiators believed that members should be able to vote on a third-party conclusion about what the mediator believed would be a fair and reasonable report, with recommendations based on the labour market. The employer rejected our proposal.
In May 2022, almost a year after the employer refused voluntary informal mediation recommendations, the Labour Relations Board declared that this dispute be resolved by compulsory arbitration if the parties couldn’t reach an agreement. Your negotiators pushed for formal mediation, where a mediator can make recommendations to achieve a renewed collective agreement, but the employer continued to push back, and we were not able to come to an agreement.
So, this has left us with no choice but to go to compulsory arbitration.
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The employer’s approach at various bargaining tables has focused on fragmenting and dividing the AgeCare workplaces. For example, the top rates for Health Care Aids (HCAs) are different at every AgeCare site, in some cases by pennies. Fragmented lump sum payment percentages, fragmented shift and weekend rates, fragmented sick leave, fragmented overtime rate, fragmented benefits entitlements are all included their collective agreements.
The employer is not interested in valuing and compensating each AgeCare employee with a fair, standard rate of pay or compensation in the collective agreement.
Throughout these lengthy negotiations, members waited too long to renew their collective agreements. Clearly our members have continued to be disadvantaged by the extensive period it has taken to renew their collective agreements.
This is not acceptable. Your bargaining committees clearly understand that accepting an inferior agreement will set the trend for substandard offers from this employer in future rounds of bargaining.
The employer has continued to delay the bargaining process in the hopes that we may accept an inferior offer, but your negotiating committees agree that enough is enough.
We encourage our members to review the information below and ask questions, so there is no-misinformation being circulated. Please watch for future updates, information sessions and rallies, we need your participation, together we are stronger, and we will send the message, a fair and equitable collective agreement is what we deserve!
AUPE NEGOTIATING TEAM - AGECARE GLENMORE, SAGEWOOD AND SUNRISE GARDENS
Glenmore - Calgary
Ekhlas Elibaid
eelibaid75@gmail.com 403-671-9125
Rebeca Johnson
pacocha684rj@gmail.com 825-437-6675
Zenaida Hermogela (alt)
b.hermogela@gmail.com 403-969-2157
Wennie Fallorin
wennie.m.f@gmail.com 403-542-7805
Sagewood - Strathmore
Lisa Rikstad
lisajoanrikstad@yahoo.com 403-324-7040
Shaunalee Curwin
slcurwin@gmail.com
Sunrise Gardens - Brooks
Tyffany Freimuth
tfreimuth@hotmail.ca 403-793-7799
Narcy DelaCruz-Cagen
delacruz45@gmail.com
Malaina Dyck
dyckmalaina71@gmail.com
AUPE RESOURCE STAFF
James Mitchell, Negotiations
j.wevers@aupe.org
John Weavers, Negotiations
j.wevers@aupe.org
Christine Yargeau-Becker, Organizer
c.yargeau-becker@aupe.org
Communications
co@aupe.org