Grievance Software for Alberta Workplaces

Alberta labour relations in practice

Alberta is a mixed economy for labour relations. The private sector operates under the Alberta Labour Relations Code, while the public sector works with additional legislation covering health, education, and the broader public service. The Alberta Labour Relations Board hears certification, bargaining, and unfair labour practice matters. Most grievance disputes resolve through arbitration under the collective agreement, and Alberta arbitrators apply the same body of Canadian arbitration case law that practitioners across the country rely on.

Sertus is designed to reflect that reality. Each grievance is linked to the articles of the applicable collective agreement. Deadlines follow the agreement's own schedule. Arbitration preparation lives inside the case record — not in a parallel Word document. The platform is built by the co-author of Canadian Labour Arbitration(Brown & Beatty), the reference text Canadian arbitrators cite, so the AI is tuned to the standards Alberta arbitrators actually apply.

Alberta employers managing multi-site, multi-agreement bargaining units benefit from a single platform that can hold every agreement, every grievance, and every settlement in one searchable workspace. Alberta union locals replace the scattered spreadsheets and Word files that most grievance files still live in with a platform built for the job.

The resource sector shapes a significant part of the grievance caseload in Alberta. Oil and gas, pipelines, mining, and large industrial construction bargaining units run on rotational schedules — seven-and-seven, fourteen-and-fourteen, and camp-based shifts — that produce recurring disputes on overtime distribution, travel time, call-out, and crew assignment. These are fact-heavy grievances where the agreement language is usually clear and the real work is reconstructing what happened on a particular shift at a particular site. Sertus is built for that: evidence, schedules, and supervisor notes attach directly to the case, and the AI summarises the record so counsel can see the sequence of events without reading every attachment end-to-end.

The public sector is the other half of the Alberta caseload. The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees represents a large portion of the provincial public service and parts of the broader public sector, alongside United Nurses of Alberta in health and the Health Sciences Association of Alberta for allied health. Alberta Health Services, school boards, and post-secondary employers often run multiple bargaining units at one organisation, each under a different agreement and with different grievance procedures. Sertus keeps each bargaining unit as a separate object so a labour relations team managing several agreements at one employer can see grievance volume, resolution rates, and arbitration load broken out by unit — the numbers that tell a bargaining committee where the pressure really is.

Related reading

Explore the rest of the Sertus platform: labour relations software for Canada, grievance management, and the collective agreement navigator.

Last updated: April 2026