By Thia James

City reaches 3-year deals with CUPE locals

Apr 13, 2015 | 9:47 PM

The City of Prince Albert and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) locals 160 and 882 have finalized new three-year collective bargaining agreements.

Under the agreements, wages will increase by 2.5 per cent in 2014, 2.5 per cent in 2015 and three per cent in 2016 for all employees belonging to the local. The term of the new agreement runs from Jan. 1, 2014 to Dec. 31, 2016.

“It’s reasonable,” said Mayor Greg Dionne. “It’s above cost of living, so it’s not only moving, keeping them ahead with cost of living, it’s moving their salaries a little ahead, so we’re keeping with … in market.”

The current sick payout benefit will be grandfathered in for all employees hired before March 23. All new employees hired after that date will not have access to this benefit.

Dionne said the end of vested sick leave for future employees is a source of “big savings” for the City. He said that, over time, it was a $3 million liability for the City.

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The agreements with the locals were pre-ratified on March 23, but they received their final approvals from city council at Monday’s meeting.

Dionne said the negotiations took place over a period of time and both sides began to exchange articles early in the process. However, council has also determined that new contracts with unions have to be negotiated before the existing ones expire.

He said he doesn’t believe in retroactive pay, so six months before a contract expires, a new one has to be negotiated.

“The next round will be done on time,” he said. “Well, it’s important also as we do our budgets … The biggest challenge in our budget is labour, whether it’s the two locals or police or fire, it’s labour. And when we want to keep our tax increases down, we have to deal with the labour issue.”

The same wage increases will also apply to out of scope City employees, excluding those with the police and fire departments. Out of scope employees are generally those in managerial positions.

This particular point led Coun. Lee Atkinson to voice his objection to the motion on the table during the meeting. He disagreed with the same formula used for the unionized employees applying to the out of scope employees.

“I believe there needs to be separation, and our of scope employees need to be looked at on their own initiatives and come up with a salary that’s comparable,” he said.

In a companion report to the two collective bargaining agreement documents, corporate services director Steve Brown made note of the cumulative financial impacts of the new contracts.

In 2013, the total estimated payroll affected by the CUPE local 160 agreement was $9 million, and the cumulative cost of the agreement is more than $1.4 million. In 2013, the total estimated payroll affected by the CUPE local 882 agreement was $3.1 million and the total cumulative cost of the contract is about $489,000.

Out of scope staff had a total estimated payroll of $5.09 million and the total cumulative cost of the increase is $803,695.

The City is also working to reach agreements with the unions representing the police and fire departments, the Prince Albert Police Association and the Prince Albert Firefighters Association, respectively.

“Fire, we’ll soon have a resolution, whether we’re moving forward or we’re going [in] a different direction. And police, we’ve just started negotiating. But again, they have a deadline date of June 30 to have that completed. It’s looking positive.”

tjames@panow.com

On Twitter: @thiajames