Taber Co-op Bargaining Update

Dear Co-Operative UFCW Members,

We have recently finished another round of Union Negotiations with your Employer on August 13, 14, 15, 2019.

We are scheduled to meet again with your Employer on August 27, 2019. Negotiations have been moving along at a decent pace and we just wrapped up most of the non-monetary items. We are now entering into the monetary issues and your Employer has an unusual high number of concessions that they are proposing. This gives us real concern if they are serious in trying to achieve even a small percentage of them and the ramifications it will have to your income and job security.

Your Employer has made a presentation concerning the costs of maintaining the store physically and financially. They are looking to try and recover some of these costs through rollbacks to you the employees. Some of their concessionary demands are:

• two new exclusions to the bargaining unit,
• deletion of overtime for part-time employees after five days of work in a week,
• deletion of double time for all employees working on their days off,
• deletion of double time for working on Holidays,
• reducing the maximum amount of vacation accrual to 6 weeks from the current 7 weeks.

These are just some of their demands and we have not even started to look at wages and benefit adjustments or increases.

Your Bargaining Committee is very concerned about being able to reach a recommended agreement for you to vote on. We fully expect to be applying for mediation to try and get assistance for a decent offer.

Although we are still hopeful your Employer will move on some of these outstanding issues, we want to caution you to be prepared to support your committee should we end up coming to you with a request to turn down any offer that does not resolve the more serious issues that you, the members, have asked your Union to try to resolve.

As we continue negotiations we will keep you informed and may request your assistance to help bolster our position. Please watch for further updates and check the UFCW401 Web-site often. (GoUnion.ca)

If you have questions or concerns please do not hesitate to contact your Union Representative.

Sincerely,

Your Bargaining Committee

Posted on: August 15,2019