Bargaining Update Week 1 (March 24-28, 2025)
Greetings fellow members!
The Union Bargaining Committee has completed the first week of bargaining with the employer. We are still awaiting a provincial mandate to be established, but our meetings with the employer this week have focused on exchanging and reviewing each side’s proposals. As we continue this important work of bargaining, we wanted to take this opportunity to both refresh our members’ knowledge of the process and share what we can on our strategy for negotiations moving forward.
The initial step of the process began (as some of you may already know) before our 2024 Annual General Meeting in October of last year, where many bargaining proposals were put forth by our members and voted on to provide our Committee their mandate to bring to the table. With those resolutions in hand, the Committee met in December to organize our proposals and determine if any gaps existed that needed supplementing to our proposal booklet.
In addition, we reached out to members with a Bargaining Survey a couple of months ago to gather more information from our members that may not have had a chance to attend the AGM to help bolster our priorities at the bargaining table. We received an impressive number of responses and heard many great proposals and priorities surrounding flexible work, cost of living and benefits coverage that we have heard loud and clear. Included in the responses were many requests for specific benefits that are actually covered within the language of our current collective agreement, including medically prescribed braces, C-PAP or sleep apnea devices, and other health devices. If you have questions about what your benefits cover, there is a list of services and medical procedures covered under our Pacific Blue Cross plan on the employer’s InSite page, through the Pacific Blue Cross mobile app and on the Pacific Blue Cross website. If you have been denied a claim for any of the benefits listed, then please reach out to your local area representative or regional director and they can help you sort out any eligibility issues that may arise.
In our preparations for bargaining, we also developed a communication plan. As part of this plan our intention is to provide regular updates via email or our local website at the end of each week. Due to the nature of bargaining we won’t be sharing the minutia of all the proposals until we are at the stage to share a memorandum of agreement. We want our membership informed but we also don’t want to be fielding questions and concerns on items before knowing if they would even have the potential to form a part of the final agreement.
As expected, the employer has not yet received a mandate from PSEC (Public Sector Employer’s Council) to deal with cost items such as wage increases, which limited our negotiations in this first week to non-cost items in the collective agreement. With that being said, it was encouraging to be able to work together to agree on several of those non-cost proposals. Moving forward, in the absence of a provincial mandate from PSEC guiding the conversations surrounding wage increases, both sides have agreed to pause negotiations until mid-May in order to better tackle all remaining issues at the table.
In solidarity,
CUPE 1767 Bargaining Committee