The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) is a Canadian trade union operating solely in the province of Alberta. With approximately 95,000 members as of March 2019, it is Alberta's largest union. AUPE is primarily a public sector union, with members employed in government, health care, education, boards and agencies, municipalities, and occasionally private companies.
As of 2022, AUPE has 33 locals and administers more than 120 separate collective agreements. Notable employers of AUPE members include the Government of Alberta, Alberta Health Services, Covenant Health, University of Calgary, Northern and Southern Alberta Institutes of Technology, Edmonton Catholic Schools, and ATB Financial.
As of 2014, the union had a staff of more than 100 employees at its headquarters in Edmonton and seven regional offices across Alberta, including Peace River, Grande Prairie, Athabasca, Camrose, Red Deer, Calgary and Lethbridge.
AUPE has its origins in the Civil Service Association of Alberta, founded in 1919 to represent "civil servants," as direct employees of the Alberta government were then known. It became a legal union with the power to bargain collectively in 1977. AUPE remains active in the union movement and in provincial issues in Alberta. In the fall of 2007, it undertook a major campaign to press for changes in Alberta's labour laws, which ban strikes by most AUPE members. Despite those bans, AUPE members have taken illegal strike action on several occasions to press their demands for collective agreements.
Membership
The vast majority of AUPE's members come under one of two pieces of legislation, the Alberta Labour Relations Code and the Public Service Employees Relations Act. One small unit comes under federal Canadian labour legislation.
AUPE categorizes its membership into four sectors for administrative purposes:
Government services: direct employees of the Government of Alberta, with approximately 25,000 members. Health care: employees of health care providers, including Alberta Health Services, as well as other public, private and not-for-profit facilities, over 55,000 members. Education: non-academic employees of universities, community colleges, technical institutes and school boards, more than 11,000 members. Boards, agencies, and local government: employees of quasi-independent boards set up by the government of Alberta, government agencies, and municipal governments, as well as ATB Financial (a wholly-owned provincial crown corporation) and Alberta Terminals Ltd., a private grain-handling company and division of Cargill that was formerly a government agency. Altogether this sector includes more than 4,000 members.
AUPE members pay union dues of 1.25% of their base pay. Members do not pay dues on shift or weekend differential pay, or on overtime pay.
Change over time
In the mid-1990s, AUPE saw its membership fall due to the privatization of some government-run services during the provincial leadership of Premier Ralph Klein. Membership fell to about 35,000 in 1995. However, under the leadership of Dan MacLennan, a Calgary jail guard who was elected in 1997, AUPE rebuilt itself and saw its membership surpass 60,000. MacLennan's efforts were aided by increasing moderation in the policies of the Klein government in the years after the cuts of the mid-1990s, as well as by rapid economic and population growth in the province of Alberta.
Doug Knight was elected president in a by-election in 2006 after MacLennan left the union to pursue a career in the private sector. Dramatic growth continued under Knight, with membership reaching 67,000 in June 2007.
Guy Smith has been president of AUPE since being elected in October 2009 and Jason Heistad has been Executive Secretary-Treasurer since October 2013. Under the current leadership, membership of AUPE has grown to 95,000 workers.
Affiliation
AUPE was a component part of the National Union of Public and General Employees until 2001, when it was suspended by that organization in a dispute over an organizing campaign involving members of another union. At its annual convention in 2006, delegates voted to formally disaffiliate AUPE from NUPGE, and by association the Canadian Labour Congress and the Alberta Federation of Labour.
History
The Civil Service Association of Alberta
AUPE began life on March 26, 1919, when a small group of Alberta government employees held a founding meeting in north Edmonton's First Presbyterian Church. They agreed to incorporate the Civil Service Association of Alberta (CSA), and elected Judson Lambe as their first president. They adopted a crest that declared: "Unity Strength Protection."