Saskatchewan’s union for thousands of health-care workers will vote on potential job action in September after years of bargaining with its provincial employer.
CUPE Local 5430 represents more than 14,000 health-care workers in facilities including hospitals, long-term care homes and other medical facilities. It serves workers in clerical, technical, nursing, support and plant operation roles.
The union said the strike vote, set for September, is due to increasing workloads, staffing shortages and “years without meaningful wage improvements” in its announcement of the vote on Wednesday.
“The biggest problem we have in the health care system in Saskatchewan is the short staffing. We do not have the staff to do the job,” Bashir Jalloh, CUPE Local 5430 president, told Global News in an interview.
Retaining and recruiting new health-care workers should be prioritized, as opposed to shifting employees to fill constantly appearing gaps in the system, he said.
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“They do not want to address the elephant in the room, which is the low wages. And if you don’t do that, this problem we have is going to keep compounding. People are going to leave,” the union president said.
Jalloh said he knows health-care workers who left Saskatchewan to work in Alberta and Manitoba in pursuit of better pay.
“We’ve been bargaining. We thought this bargaining would be completed by now,” he continued.
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The union has been negotiating with its employer, the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA), since its last collective agreement expired in 2023.
“We have been bargaining for over three and a half years now, and we have been extremely patient trying to work with the employer. But recently, what they are telling us is that they have key priorities (and) until those key priorities are met, we cannot conclude — (or) it’s going to be very difficult to conclude — this round of bargaining,” he said.
The key priorities identified by SHA include free movement of work and employees, which will pose an issue for union members. In past situations where workplaces or jobs were moved to other communities, they did not return to the original location, Jalloh said.
“(The government wants) to be able to move people around to fool the public so people don’t know there (are) vacancies, but that cannot work,” he said.
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Another one of the employer’s priorities is the union allowing contracted workers to be “freely” brought into workplaces, according to the union president.
“That is going to be a problem for us because nobody is going to allow contract workers to come in and just take their job. There will be no job security when it comes to that,” he said, describing why the union takes issue with allowing contractors.
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Potential job action will be determined by a vote of its members this fall.
“This is not something that we want to do. We have waited for that long. We know the effect of the current situation. Our members do not want to go on strike,” Jalloh said.
He called on the province to work alongside the union and resolve the situation at the bargaining table this round.
“Come with a commitment to do that. Stop your shenanigans or trying to move people around, your bandaged situation. If you think you’re going to move people around just to solve that problem, you are not solving the problem,” he said.
In a statement from Saskatchewan’s Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill, he said the union’s employees “play an important role in our health care system.”
“Our government knows the best deals are reached at the bargaining table and we continue to ask that employers and unions sit down and work together to find an agreement that works for health care workers, employers, patients, and communities,” Cockrill said.
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The province’s bargaining body with its health-care unions, the Saskatchewan Association of Health Organizations, has offered proposal packages to CUPE — which the union tabled in response, he added.
“Our government continues to focus on finding administrative efficiencies in order to reinvest in front-line health care workers,” the minister’s statement said, pointing to 26 senior leadership positions, worth $10.4 million, that were eliminated in June of 2025.
Cockrill said the province will continue its work strengthening the health care system and growing its workforce.
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