Soaring inflation means tougher wage talks, Canadian unions warn
BNN Bloomberg
Canada’s largest private sector union has a message for the country’s employers: Prepare to share the burden of higher inflation.
Canada’s largest private sector union has a message for the country’s employers: Prepare to share the burden of higher inflation.
Jerry Dias, who runs the 315,000-member-strong Unifor trade union, says the era of sub-2 per cent wage gains that’s prevailed in collective agreements for much of the past decade will no longer do in the face of a sharp increase in consumer prices that is swelling the cost of living.
Workers “expect that their wages are at least going to pick up with the rate of inflation,” Dias said this week in a phone interview. “Things are changing. No question about it.”
It’s the sort of big talk expected from a labor leader, but the threat is beginning to ring increasingly true.
Pay is inching higher with average annual wage gains in collective agreements breaking the 2 per cent threshold in the third quarter for only the second time since 2012, according to government data. Wage increases have averaged 1.6 per cent over the past decade.
Recent deals suggest gains are only accelerating. Casino workers in Belleville, Ontario -- a small city between Montreal and Toronto -- just negotiated a 13 per cent pay increase over three years.
