Security guards losing out on work because Manitoba too slow to renew licences: union

Some security guards in Manitoba are temporarily losing their jobs due to a licence renewal process bogged down by inadequate staffing and a spike in applications, the head of their union says.

Since they cannot legally work without an active licence, the security guards have to stop working while they wait for the renewal.

And once they finally do get their licence renewed, they've sometimes been replaced at their former worksite, says United Food and Commercial Workers Local 832 president Jeff Traeger.

"By the time they've been off work for a month and a different guard has been posted to that site, most of those clients will not want to change" their security staffing, he said.

"What we're finding with a lot of those guards, they get their licence back … they go back into the regular queue and they get regular, lower-paying security jobs."

Well over 100 security guards have lost work because their licences expired within the last year, Traeger said, in spite of applying for renewals in what they thought would be plenty of time to prevent a disruption in their work — in some cases, months ahead of their expiry.

"They're not happy," said Traeger, whose union represents more than 2,500 security guards in Manitoba.

"They feel as though it's a red-tape scenario that's preventing them from doing their job."

The province didn't answer a question from CBC about how many licences have expired while waiting for renewal.

The province's justice minister says shortly after the NDP took office last fall, he was getting letters from security guards saying they were waiting more than three months for a renewal.

The average time for a licence renewal has now dropped to around eight weeks, but the department is aiming to cut the wait to four weeks, Matt Wiebe said.

"We heard that frustration," he said, while blaming the previous Progressive Conservative government with failing to act.

"We were frustrated this had been left to this point that ultimately, people weren't getting their applications renewed." 

His department beefed up staffing at the Private Investigators and Security Guards Program, which handles annual licence renewals, shortly after last October's election, Wiebe said.