The UCP Has Kneecapped Alberta Education Workers’ Strike Rights

On October 24, around 3,200 education workers from Edmonton defied government intervention and rallied at the Alberta legislature. Joined by union supporters from across the labour movement, workers engaged in a one-day wildcat strike to protest the United Conservative Party (UCP) government’s interference with their right to strike.

These workers are members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) local 3550, which represents education support staff, and CUPE 474, which represents custodial staff. Workers have been without a new collective agreement since August 2020.

In early October, education support workers entered a two-week “cooling off” period, after talks and mediation aimed at securing a new contract with the Edmonton School Division broke down.

As the date on which the union could call a legal strike approached, the government granted the employer’s request for a “disputes inquiry board” (DIB), effectively kneecapping the unions’ ability to strike for an additional 30 days. By sending the parties to a DIB, the union’s right to strike and the employer’s ability to impose a lockout are halted until the inquiry process is completed.

No DIB has yet been imposed on CUPE 474, but the prospects for a fair resolution look no better for custodial staff at Edmonton public schools.

According to CUPE 3550 president Mandy Lamoureux, the union has been attempting to bargain for a new contract for four years and to address the cost-of-living crisis faced by members. Education support staff are some of the lowest paid public sector employees in Alberta, and the government apparently intends to keep it that way.

At present, salaries range from $27,000 to $30,000, according to the union. Rather than meaningfully increase these insultingly low salaries, the employer informed the union that it would adhere to the government’s bargaining mandate of 2.75 per cent over the first four years of a new contract. As Lamoureux relayed in a union media release, this would amount to a raise of just 70 cents per hour in total across the entire contract.

In their last contracts, education support workers and custodial staff only received total wage increases of between 1.25 and 1.5 per cent over three years. Workers’ wages have thus been outstripped by inflation by double-digits since 2016.

According to the Edmonton Social Planning Council (ESPC), the living wage for the city in 2023 was $22.25 per hour, or a little more than $46,000 annually for someone working full-time. By this measure, the salaries of educational assistants would need to increase by nearly $20,000 per year just for them to earn a living wage, which the ESPC defines as “the hourly wage that a primary income earner must make to provide for themselves, their families, and reach basic financial security.”

As with so many other underpaid and overworked public sector workers, burnout and staff retention are pressing issues for education support workers in Edmonton. Addressing punishingly low salaries is thus a prerequisite for solving staffing issues. “We know our membership needs to see more, given the years of rising cost-of-living, increasing workloads, and understaffing they have been enduring. Our bargaining committee is very committed to achieving a fair deal,” said Lamoureux.

Custodial staff also received the same lacklustre offer as their support staff colleagues. CUPE 474 president Barry Benoit explained in the same communication released with the two union locals that “health, safety, and respect for the work it takes to keep schools running are important to custodial staff, but the overwhelming issue is wages having fallen so far behind.” He added, “Members are also concerned our benefits are at a lower level than any other staff group in Edmonton Public Schools.”

On October 16, CUPE 3550 held a strike vote, which indicated an overwhelming majority in favour of strike action. With 92 per cent of eligible members voting by 97 per cent to walk out, picket lines were set to go up on October 24. The custodial staff union was not far behind. But following the UCP government’s heavy-handed intervention, both are now left in limbo.

Edmonton education workers are not the first to have this government interfere with their collective bargaining and right to strike. In September, education workers in Fort McMurray also voted to strike, only to have the government utilize the same DIB tactic.

Although the school board bargains directly with the unions, it’s the government that ultimately sets the funding model, and it’s also imposing strict bargaining mandates capping how much workers’ wages can increase. As the Alberta Teachers’ Association has pointed out, Alberta ranks dead last among provinces when it comes to education funding per student, according to data released by Statistics Canada in February.

Government officials may seek to deflect and absolve themselves of responsibility for education workers’ extremely low pay, but its own program of austerity and bargaining mandates are the primary reasons the school board refuses to budge. It’s within this context that the unions and their members have sought to directly confront the government’s education program.

“The (provincial) government has imposed that the school boards cannot give us more than 2.75 per cent, so they’re offering us the first year zero per cent, second year zero per cent, third year 1.25 per cent, and the fourth year 1.5 per cent, where the cost of living has gone up by 30 per cent in that amount of time, so 2.75 per cent is not going to cut it,” Lamoureux told the Edmonton Journal.

Although the government’s imposition of a DIB only temporarily impedes the union’s strike action, how long the delay will ultimately last remains an open question.

The board itself will have 30 days to issue a report, but additional steps will then follow. First, the DIB will issue a recommendation for settlement to the minister of Jobs, Economy and Trade, which will then be forwarded to the union and school board. Both sides have 10 days to inform the minister about their decisions to accept or reject the deal. If one or both decline the recommendation, the Alberta Labour Relations Board will conduct a vote of the membership of the side opting to reject. If this vote fails, the union regains its right to issue a 72-hour strike notice and, eventually, have members walk off the job.

If that all sounds labyrinthine, that’s because it is. The challenge for the union is that this prolonged interruption quashes member mobilization and may weaken workers’ resolve to fight back, which I’m sure is precisely the government’s intention.

Like the federal Liberal government, the UCP has sought to frustrate workers’ right to strike through bureaucratic manoeuvring. There may be very little on which Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party agree, but when it comes to undermining workers, they seem to be largely of the same mind.

Yet, the UCP’s labour woes will only continue. With tens of thousands of public sector workers seeking new contracts, and the government remaining steadfast in its commitment to impose its now not-so-secret bargaining mandates, more class conflict is all but inevitable. In recent days, for example, nurses rejected a mediated collective agreement and may soon begin a partial strike. Expect more of this as workers come up against the province’s anti-union agenda.

How will Alberta’s labour movement respond? Given the large number of workers set to bargain, there is huge potential for organized resistance across the province, if unions choose to strategize and collaborate. The only way to stop the agenda of an anti-labour government is through mass resistance.

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