No raises for SLGA staff, but stores will stay public

REGINA Employees working at government-owned liquor stores have a new contract in place that won’t provide any salary increases, but it will ensure the remaining 75 public stores stay that way.

The roughly 650 employees it covers, who also work at a Saskatchewan Gaming and Liquor Authority (SLGA) warehouse and at SLGA’s head office, have three years now in place, all coming with zero-per-cent increases.

The Saskatchewan Government Employment Union’s (SGEU) employees working at SLGA stores ratified the deal, which is retroactive to April 1, 2017, and runs until March 31, 2020.

Bob Stadnichuk, chair of the bargaining unit for SLGA, noted the privatization of 40 previously publicly owned stores has been “pretty hard” for employees.

Given that, he said the No. 1 priority going into negotiations with the province was ensuring employees stayed employed.

“That’s what we went to bargaining for, was job security,” he said. “What we were looking at was something that would benefit everybody, so we decided let’s try something unique.”

The “something unique” was a proposal to the provincial government: leave employees alone to save the stores and keep them public.

Saskatchewan’s government agreed to keep the store’s publicly owned — at least until the contract expires in 2020.

But explicit terms of that agreement are not present within the text of the actual collective agreement. Instead, the commitment from the Saskatchewan Party government not to sell the remaining publicly owned liquor stores came in a letter.

“We felt confident enough … that this letter had some backing to it, that the province was serious about what they were doing,” Stadnichuk said.

Finance Minister Donna Harpauer noted the province is still in a deficit and there are a lot of uncertainties — notably around natural resources and access to world markets — that can affect Saskatchewan’s finances adversely.

“We still have a deficit, we’re still committed to getting back to balance and I think our collective bargaining tables understand that. We want a fair deal, and we respect the process, but our fiscal situation is still tight,” she said.

With about 63,000 public sector employees still without a contract, Harpauer said she hopes the SLGA deal “sends a signal that we can settle.”

She said the province recognized there was no appetite from unions for a previously proposed 3.5-per-cent wage reduction, and said she hopes different tables can find bargaining areas they are willing to move on.

“Each and every table you have to remember is unique, they’ll have not just wages but other considerations that they want to discuss at these tables.”

Contract negotiations with several employee groups have stalled, in part because of summer holidays, but Harpauer said she is expecting more regular meetings to take place come the fall.