Bus drivers and metro operators at the Société de transport de Montréal (STM) may go on strike this weekend. This decision was handed down on Wednesday night by the Administrative Labour Tribunal.
From 4 a.m. on Nov. 15 to 3:59 a.m. on Nov. 17, STM services will be completely suspended, with the exception of paratransit services, if no agreement is reached between the union and the employer.
While drivers can go on strike, maintenance workers have been discouraged from doing so.
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Service gradually returned to normal on Wednesday after the maintenance workers’ union, which had been on strike since Nov. 1, suspended its strike in anticipation of government intervention.
“We have lost an important lever” with the law that will allow Labour Minister Jean Boulet to end a labour dispute and impose arbitration, or even bring forward the effective date of this law, explained Bruno Jeannotte, president of the union, in an interview on Wednesday.
But “we haven’t exhausted our means of pressure; just because we called off this strike doesn’t mean we’re giving up, on the contrary,” warned Jeannotte.
“I think that if we had rushed headlong into the special law, we would have found ourselves in a situation where we would have been tied down, in the sense that we would not have been able to strike. In fact, our right to strike would have been taken away from us for the duration of the arbitration,” the union leader continued.
And dispute arbitration can take several months, even a year, he points out.
“We couldn’t maintain a strike if there was no movement at the negotiating table,” and, according to him, the employer was hardly budging on the two main issues, namely wages and subcontracting, knowing that Minister Boulet’s intervention was approaching.
However, there has been progress at the negotiating table in recent days, he said.
The 2,400 maintenance workers began a strike on the evening of Oct. 31. It was scheduled to continue until Nov. 28, before being suspended late Tuesday evening, after a dozen days of walkouts, with only essential services provided during rush hour.
As for public transit services, the STM advises that customers will be able to use the network at any time, but that a return to normal service will occur gradually throughout the day. Regular service will not be fully restored until Thursday.
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews
