The head of Saskatchewan’s government union says a potential province-wide strike would be unlikely to affect critical services in northern Saskatchewan, such as airport workers and firefighters.
The Saskatchewan Government and General Employees’ Union announced Wednesday its bargaining unit has voted in favour of a strike mandate.
However, SGEU President Bob Bymoen says the union has never put northern communities at risk in terms of withholding public services and they don’t intend to start now.
“In the north, well some of the obvious ones would be airports, for example, we represent them, we’ve never taken out airports,” he says. “To my knowledge, we’ve never taken out firefighters either. We’re not going to put a community at risk, I guess.”
In the event that a strike does occur, he says it would likely be months away and it would be matter of sitting down with the province and determining which services are essential and which are not.
“It’s really too early to get into those types of discussions. At this point, right now, the bargaining committee’s main focus is to try to get to an agreement and work our way through who’s essential before anybody can go on strike.”
Bymoen says the union remains hopeful it can negotiate a new collective agreement with the province before strike action becomes necessary.
SGEU has been without a contract since September, 2016.
The union represents about 12,000 government workers in the province, including social workers, wildfire fighters, highways workers, lab technicians, administrative professionals, agrologists and corrections officers.
Bymoen would not say exactly what SGEU is seeking, but he did say the government’s offer of a four-year contract with no wage increases in the first two years, one per cent in the third year and two per cent in the final year is not acceptable to the membership.
(PHOTO: SGEU ballot box. Photo courtesy of sgeu.org)