"We are pleased with this progress and believe that our CUPE employees should have the opportunity to consider the Universities' offer," said Barb Daigle, Associate Vice President, Human Resources University of Saskatchewan. "We want a Collective Agreement. We want to have our employees back at work. We want to ensure the continuation of our students' academic programming. We were faced with two choices: non-binding mediation or a vote by the members. We chose the democratic process of taking this to the members for a vote because mediation has the potential to continue indefinitely and does not meet our goal of reaching an agreement as quickly as possible."

The offer is an overall increase to the average CUPE member of 16.5% plus one-time money. The difference from the first offer (17%) is in the 0.5% of payroll offered to the benefits funding if the Union committed to discussions about benefit plan design. The Union would not agree to those discussions. As a compromise the Universities have offered unique solutions for each university. At the U of S the offer includes adding $100,000 in one-time benefits money to the existing plan surplus.

"The total one-time money over the life of the agreement is now over $2,000,000," Daigle added. "We hope that our CUPE employees will review the information on our website to understand how the offer affects them on an individual basis and exercise their democratic right to vote."

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Please refer to the HR website for our complete proposals at http://www.usask.ca/hrd/

For more information contact:

Lori Auchstaetter
Human Resources
University of Saskatchewan
(306) 792-7274