HEALTH CARE BARGAINING UPDATE #19, August 5, 2022
August 05, 2022 at 4:13 PM
CUPE continues to negotiate your collective agreement with the goal of leaving no health care worker behind.
Your negotiating team continues to meet with the mediator, Arne Peltz, including on July 28th and 29th as well as August 3rd and 4th in the evenings. Mediation will continue August 10th, 29th and 30th. We will most likely get additional dates between August 10th and the 29th.
On August 3rd, CUPE tabled all our remaining proposals. The Employer is working on a comprehensive response for next week. We are seeing some movement at the bargaining table on our issues, so we are working hard to continue fighting for improvements to the collective agreement.
We have made great progress on more monetary proposals such as shift premiums, shoe allowance, and uniforms, as well as numerous letters of understanding.
Outstanding issues are vacation, training and education, how STAT days will be taken, sick time for pick-up shifts, and letters of understanding around hours of work. There are a few monetary items still outstanding as well, such as northern isolation/retention allowance, benefits/pensions for community groups, responsibility pay, and wages. The remaining language proposals are important and will affect your day-to-day job, so we are fighting for these improvements.
CUPE has also requested market adjustments for several classifications. A market adjustment is adjusting the salary scale to match other similar jobs in the province. Most often the need for an adjustment comes from not being able to hire and retain employees. CUPE and the MGEU are discussing forming a multi-union table to discuss the market adjustments with the Employer.
MGEU has reached a tentative agreement in Prairie Mountain and the Interlake regions. The reason they reached an agreement before our table is because they simply did not have as many collective agreements to merge.
With so many groups in CUPE we want to make sure none of them are left behind. That is why our table is taking longer. The Bargaining Council is fighting very hard to get a good collective agreement that addresses all members concerns including the general wage increase.
Please make sure we have your most recent contact information, including cell phone number and personal email. We do not use work contact information to reach you for union business.
To provide updated contact information, please visit the online forms page on the Local 500 website.
