As of Thursday morning, 85 workers have been locked out by their employer Heritage Inn Hotels in Saskatoon and Moose Jaw.
UFCW Local 1400, which represents the workers, has been attempting to negotiate a collective agreement with the company on and off again since 2019, but failed to reach agreement.
“Heritage Inn Hotels are demanding unreasonable and unfair concessions from their workers,” a press release from UFCW 1400 said.
“They demand that benefits and protections in current agreements be removed entirely. The workers have negotiated for many years to earn these benefits, like vision, dental and sick pay, and do not deserve for them to be removed.”
Workers locked out include housekeepers, front desk staff, banquet servers, cooks and others.
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“These locked-out workers are the same workers that were asked to risk their health and safety during the COVID pandemic, and now the employer wants to put them on the street,” said UFCW 1400 president Lucia Flack Figueiredo.
Figeuredo also outlined the problems with wages, saying Heritage Inn Hotels is tying wages to the Saskatchewan minimum wage, with wages starting at minimum and the only increase coming from government-mandated minimum increases for the next seven years.
Outside of the minimum wage increases, they have offered only the most nominal of increases to the members, in specific classifications, ranging from $0.09 to $0.83 per hour over the almost seven-year term that they are proposing for the new collective agreement.
“We are asking for the public’s support by not crossing the picket line and ensuring that these workers can protect their benefits,’ Figueiredo said.
“The workers at Heritage Inn are hard-working members of their communities and love their jobs. They deserve a better deal than this disrespectful treatment.”
She said at the end of the day, the two sides need to actually sit down and get something down.
“The members want to be working,” Figeuredo explained. “I want the employer to sit down at the table and I want them to sit with me, face to face, and go through what they need but I want there to be an actual discussion, an actual set of negotiations.”
Global News reached out to Heritage Inn for comment on the negotiation and the locked-out employees, but did not receive comment by the time of publication.
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