Alberta Health Services is finalizing plans to contract out retail food services in Alberta’s hospitals. Doing so will eliminate approximately 300 AUPE members’ jobs throughout the province. Members fought bravely to save their jobs, but the AHS and the UCP government—who are responsible for this—did not change their minds.
Below is important information for Retail Food Services workers who will be affected by contracting out. Please read this to help you move forward. Please also share this information with any fellow staff member who you know may be affected.
Severance period
If you lose your retail food services job and receive severance, you cannot be rehired during your severance period. Your severance period is two weeks per year of service. For example, if you worked for five years, your severance period will be ten weeks.
If you are unable to find a new job, you may wish to apply for Employment Insurance (EI) benefits. Your severance period may also affect your EI benefits. For example, EI qualifications would be different for members who worked in retail food services for a short time and a long time.
If you are unable to find a job and apply for EI, please ask Service Canada to give you advice on your best steps moving forward.
If you have more than one AHS job
If you have another job within AHS that is not affected by retail food privatization, AHS says they will not give you severance. AHS will say that you must resign from your other AHS job if you want severance. AUPE disagrees with AHS on this.
AUPE’s advice is: do not resign from your other job, unless you want to. Instead, keep your other job and file a grievance. There is no guarantee that the grievance will be successful, but it is likely a better course of action than losing all your jobs at AHS.
If this happens to you, you can file a grievance by contacting your Membership Services Officer (MSO) through the AUPE Member Resource Centre.
To contact your MSO to file a grievance or ask any questions, please call the Resource Centre at 1-800-232-7284, Monday to Friday, 8:30 am to 4:30 pm.