Alberta meat-packing union workers reject Cargill contract offer
Posted Nov 25, 2021 12:05 pm.
Last Updated Nov 25, 2021 5:45 pm.
The union that represents Alberta workers at Cargill’s beef processing plant in High River says its members have rejected the company’s latest contract offer by 98 per cent.
The United Food and Commercial Workers union says is will share the result with Cargill and ask the company to return to the bargaining table.
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The union says its members will be on strike on Dec. 6 unless a deal can be reached before then.
The Cargill plant employs 2,000 people. It is one of the largest beef plants in Canada.
An analyst has said the possible strike is expected to have an effect on the price of beef, at a time when supply is already tight.
“It does tighten supplies further as demand is extremely strong,” Brian Perillat, a manager at CanFax, said earlier this month. “We’ve got export orders to meet, domestic orders to meet. So you know, it tightens up supply, and that certainly could have a slight impact on availability, and also put a little bit more upward pressure on prices in the short term.”
“Beef is a premium product and you do not want to give another excuse to consumers to not buy your product,” said Sylvain Charlebois, a professor of food distribution at Dalhousie University.
Charlebois says prices of certain cuts have already gone up a lot this year, and the lack of availability goes down because of the Cargill closure.
He adds with a lack of supply, it could lead people to simply switch off beef.
“We saw that during the pandemic, at the very beginning, people just explored other options if beef wasn’t there, or pork wasn’t there, or chicken wasn’t there,” he explained. “People can cook more, they’re more food literate, other options are not as problematic as they used to be.”
Perillat says just how much prices will fluctuate will depend on how many shifts are affected.
– With files from Saif Kaisar
