Why Choose CUPE?
CUPE is Canada’s largest union with over 700,000 members across the country. CUPE represents workers across a broad range of sectors including airlines, child care and early learning, emergency services, health care, K-12, libraries, municipalities, post-secondary, social services, and transportation.
CUPE is a founding union of the Canadian Labour Congress, the umbrella organization for the Canadian labour movement. With dozens of affiliated Canadian and International unions, as well as provincial federations of labour and regional labour councils, the CLC represents the interests of more than three million workers in every imaginable occupation from coast to coast to coast.
In choosing CUPE, workers join a union where the members are in charge: each CUPE local decides its priorities for bargaining, when to settle a new contract, and how to manage funds. CUPE's strength comes from individual members working toward common goals.
More than 70 per cent of CUPE’s 3,946 collective agreements are with locals of 100 members or less. A union is like a team that works together to make sure everyone gets a fair deal at work and has a say in the conditions of their employment.
CUPE has more than 750,000 members across Canada, and approximately 2,363 locals and chartered organizations across the country, ranging in size from 20 to 20,000 members. More than 60% of CUPE's members are women.
Joining CUPE means being part of a collective voice that ensures your concerns are heard and addressed by your employer. Workers coming together to form local unions built CUPE. They did so to have a stronger voice – a collective voice – in their workplace and in society as a whole.
How do I get a Union in my Workplace?
1
We'll work together with interested workers to create an inside organizing committee of passionate and motivated workers who are supportive of unionization.
The inside committee will work with the organizer and develop a plan of action on how to identify and communicate with other like-minded workers about unionizing.
2
Through formal and informal networks, workers talk to their friends and co-workers about joining CUPE. The goal is to reach out and speak with as many workers as possible. Find out what their concerns are, educate them about how unionizing with CUPE can address those concerns, and of course, get them to sign a confidential union card.
You will need the majority of workers to sign a union card. Signing a union card officially indicates your support for forming a union in your workplace. All union cards are confidential, and your employer never finds out who signed a card.
3
When we are confident we have enough union cards signed, CUPE will file an application with the BC Labour Relations Board for certification of the union.
Once an application is submitted the Labour Relations Board will review the union cards we’ve submitted and will confirm the percentage of workers who have signed union cards.
There are two possible paths to forming a union depending on how many union cards are signed:
If more than 55% of workers sign union cards you qualify to automatically form a union.
If between 45% and 55% of workers sign a card, the application for certification is still valid, but a representation vote is also required. To win a representation vote (and have workers join CUPE) more than 50 percent of voters need to vote ‘yes’ to joining CUPE.
4
Once workers have either automatically formed a union or officially voted YES to joining CUPE, the Labour Relations Board will notify the union and the employer.
Prior to starting negotiations there are some procedural meetings that need to happen through the Labour Relations Board between the union and the employer.
Sometimes the employer may have an objection (or objections) to the union’s application and these need to be resolved before workers are officially union members.
5
CUPE will support you and your coworkers and will work with you to negotiate your first collective agreement. Local union members decide what you negotiate and bargaining priorities are democratically set by you, the membership.
Once the bargaining committee has reached a tentative agreement with your employer, the membership (all workers) get to vote on whether or not they want to accept that contract. This is formally called the ratification process.
If more than 50 percent of workers vote in favour of the contract, then it is ratified.
6
From here, CUPE helps you and your colleagues ensure the employer is honouring the collective agreement using the mechanisms (such as grievance filing) outlined in the contract. This will ensure fairness and accountability for you and your colleagues at work.
Union representatives will be available to you and your colleagues to help resolve workplace issues and ensure all memebers understand their rights and responsibilities under the new contract.
All workers can get involved in the union local to help represent their colleagues and help improve working conditions for everyone.
Ready to take action?
Being part of an organizing drive meant learning how to finally make the kind of difference I'd only dreamed about. Throughout our drive, I watched my co-workers come to believe that they deserved better and that it was within their power to make this better future possible.
- Phyllis