CUPE is the union for Retirement Home workers:
CUPE is leading campaigns for higher wages, job security, and real solutions to the staffing crisis to guarantee timely, high-quality publicly funded and publicly delivered healthcare in Ontario Retirement Home facilities.
CUPE Retirement Home workers have negotiated:
- Precedent setting wage increases that other unions try to emulate. CUPE set the pattern for wage increases in the sector, winning 9.5% increases over the life of their collective agreements.
- The best job security protections of any Retirement Home union in Ontario
- Clear and transparent seniority-based posting and hiring processes that prevent management favouritism and discrimination
CUPE is Canada’s largest union with 800,000 members. We are also Canada’s largest health care union with over 90,000 members in Ontario’s hospitals, long-term care and retirement home facilities, home care and emergency services. At CUPE, the members are in charge, electing your own leaders and setting priorities for negotiations. Members decide priorities – and are supported by legal, research, organizing, and communications resources. And if you have to fight, you’ll have all CUPE members standing with you and can access the incredible resources of the union.
Common Myths
Retirement Home workers are signing cards to build the collective power to win job security, fair job posting and hiring processes, just-cause protection, health and safety protection and a stronger voice at work to address concerns around workload and staffing. Whenever workers organize real unions, it is common for the employer and fake unions like CLAC to spread a few common myths to try to scare workers from organizing.
MYTH: CUPE is too big to care about the smaller workplaces like this one.
TRUTH: CUPE fights for our members no matter what. In November of 2025, a small 35-member local at a Peterborough Retirement Home was facing a potential winter strike because their employer wasn’t negotiating in good faith. CUPE mobilized it’s resources and launched a strike averting campaign for the local, which forced the employer to come back to the table and get a deal.
MYTH: “If you switch unions, you will lose everything you have under your current CLAC agreement.”
TRUTH: CUPE has a no concessions bargaining policy. That means we never bargain away hard-won rights you have in your collective agreements to save face with the bosses. With CUPE, your working conditions can only ever improve.
MYTH: If you switch to CUPE, you will lose your CLAC Pension.
TRUTH: The money you have in your pension plan with CLAC is your money, no matter what union you are with. With CUPE, you have a superior pension, with real security for your retirement. Check out the “What About Pensions” entry on the Compare Your Options page of this website to learn more SECTION>.
MYTH: “CUPE takes too long to bargain collective agreements, causing retro payments with massive withholding taxes.”
TRUTH: CUPE sets the pattern for Long-Term Care and Retirement Home bargaining in Ontario. When employers try to use delay tactics to slow down bargaining, CUPE runs effective, member led campaigns to pressure the employer to come back to the table and get a fair deal for our members. We will never negotiate away your hard-won rights to try and save face with the employer, so wage increases and improvements to benefits are always better than they were before. With CUPE, you never have to settle for less.
MYTH: “The union” will come between you and us, and hurt your positive relationship with the retirement home administration” OR “The union” will make changes to your job in ways you don’t want, and you won’t have a say; you will lose your ability to negotiate one-on-one
TRUTH: In CUPE, there is no “union” separate and apart from you and your co-workers. With a union you and your coworkers are united and stronger together, because united you have more power to win the changes that YOU decide YOU want to win together. How well does one-on-one negotiations between a worker and their employer work anyway? Not usually very well, especially on the big issues.
MYTH: “You will pay higher dues and lose more than you gain”
TRUTH: With CUPE, members vote on their dues. Union dues with CUPE vary between 1.5% and 2% by local on average and are fully tax-deductible. CUPE local 4000, the dues are LESS than the average. Check out the Compare your options” section of our website to compare how your dues compare. Dues are the resources that workers pool together to build strong campaigns and contracts that win improvements to wages, staffing, benefits and working conditions. Long Term Care and Retirement Home workers win routinely 9.5% increases in their collective agreements, huge increases to shift and weekend premiums, among many other improvements. Dues were the resources they used in their campaigns when the employers refused to negotiate real wage increases.
MYTH: “CUPE forces workers to go out on strike”
TRUTH: Workers never go out on strike without a vote – it’s a collective decision to use union power to win. In the Retirement Home sector, the right to strike is usually replaced by binding arbitration. In instances where workers do have the right to strike, CUPE only supports strikes where the local members have voted in favour of strike action.