October 9, 2026
Dear Members,
On October 4th and 5th your Bargaining Committee met with SAHO in Regina. Actual bargaining did not begin until the afternoon of October 4th, when SAHO presented a comprehensive package. It differed very little from the last package they presented on September 28th and failed to address our key priorities:
· They stuck to their proposals on the movement of work and workers. They still want to be able to move work outside the bargaining unit, to make people travel a lot more without notice or any limit, and to bring workers in from other bargaining units to do our work. If you put them all together these proposals are wholly unacceptable.
· They made no change to their proposed funding rate for your health and dental plan. We reminded them that their proposal is not to maintain the plan. They know this as well as we do. We get the same information as them and the plan actuaries are warning that a shortfall is coming and a fix is needed. The Employer are willing to use you family’s health as a bargaining chip. As stated in our last bargaining update, maintaining your health and dental benefits is one of our bottom lines.
· They still say that an employee will no longer have the right to say “offer and accept only” for call-in. They want to change call-in so that you won’t be offered any shifts according to your availability unless you can also be scheduled outside the posted and confirmed according to your availability and you have to provide detailed availability to get anything. No.
The only notable difference in this week’s Employer package was that they offered wage bumps (called “market adjustments”) to seven more job classifications. That’s good news and it’s a constructive step but it came with strings attached. They propose that anyone that gets a market adjustment is no longer eligible for a market supplement – they’re separate, parallel processes. They give with one hand but take away with the other. Also, market adjustments only provide relief to some classifications – not everybody. When they bumped their lousy wage offer with $2.00 for the bottom 12 classifications it was the same thing. Not for everyone and also with no retro on it.
SAHO said that the market adjustments they have offered to some classifications in their last two proposals are fair, even generous. We asked them for details and examples of the methods they used to calculate these increases. They refused to provide that information. Without it, your bargaining committee can’t properly assess or recommend the Employer’s offer. The way they are acting is not the way to resolve bargaining.
We responded on October 5th with a comprehensive package of our own. We made progress on the list of outstanding items and, to give them credit, the Employer had made some concessions as well. So bit by bit we have less outstanding and the real dispute is getting clearer.
We maintained our wage proposals; a $5.00 increase to all wages at the start and 4% a year for the rest of the contract, and we maintained our position on call-in; fine tune it but no big changes, and we maintained our position that we will not bargain provisions to bring workers from other bargaining units into our bargaining unit to perform our work.
We told the Employer we would take another hard look at their proposals on moving work (electronic or remote work), contracting in and more ability to work at multiple locations but only inside our bargaining unit boundaries and we will try hard to find a way to get past some of those obstacles. But we can’t concede on bringing other workers in. We would eventually have no bargaining power at all and we’re trying to get power back, not lose more. We’ve lost so much through changes to the law that even a strike vote is just noise the Employer can ignore.
On October 9th representatives of your bargaining committee met with our legal team to discuss filing an unfair labour practice complaint against SAHO at the Saskatchewan Labour Relations Board Stating that the Employer is bargaining unfairly by holding up bargaining to get us to give up the boundaries of our bargaining unit. We believe the law is clear: there are legal limits on an Employer’s ability to use bargaining pressure to force us to allow members of other unions to do our members’ work.
Our next bargaining sessions with SAHO are scheduled for October 28-30. Your Bargaining Committee is next meeting October 20th and 21st in caucus. As stated above we have promised the Employer we will take a hard look at the positions we can amend in order to get some real movement. We plan to come to the table with a way forward but also some bottom lines. We have agreed with the Employer and our coalition partners that we will bargain monetary provisions at the same time as we bargain to resolve our outstanding issues in order to move toward a resolution faster and to maintain solidarity. We are working with our coalition partners to ensure we use all the resources we have to make a fair wage settlement.
We will post further updates as soon as we have news, including any announcements that we need to make before our next dates.
Thank you for your patience and support.
If you have collective agreement questions or issues, contact the Member Resource Centre at 1-888-999-7348 ext 1, email [email protected], or complete the Contact Us form on our website, www.seiuwest.ca.
In Solidarity on behalf of the SEIU-West Bargaining Committee,
Lisa Zunti
President
SEIU-West
Click here for a printable version of this bargaining update.