Common Front members vote yes to agreement in principle in Quebec
Posted February 23, 2024 12:19 pm.
Last Updated February 23, 2024 6:15 pm.
Members of Quebec’s Common Front union have voted 74.8 per cent in favour of the agreement in principle with the Quebec government.
The Common Front represents 420,000 members in health and education. It’s made up of the Alliance du personnel professionnel et technique de la santé et des services sociaux (APTS), Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ), Centrale des syndicats du Québec (CSQ), and Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (CSN).
Union leaders held a press conference in Quebec City on Friday to make the announcement.
This will an end to all negotiations that lasted over a year.
“We’re proud of it. It’s been ratified that people talk, so they agreed with it, but we still have to work,” said FTQ president Magali Picard.
The Common Front’s demands were tabled in the fall of 2023 and they came to an agreement with the CAQ government in December 2023.
The new contract, which will run from April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2028, provides for increases of 17.4 per cent over five years.
“There’s still some of our members who are not very happy…nobody tells me that they have a problem with the raise of 17.4 per cent. It’s more the fact that a lot of our workers are not paid at their right level,” said Picard.
In addition, there is an inflation protection clause of up to 1 per cent for the last three years of the collective agreements.
“If the inflation is at five or six per cent in five years, so our people is gonna have 3.5 plus one per cent at the end of the year as a catch-up for the year, because we already tried to negotiate something to protect the inflation,” said Picard.
Despite its nearly 75 per cent approval rate, Lori Newton, president of the Montreal Teachers Association, says the agreement doesn’t encompass all the essential aspects.
“The other really important piece is our teacher specific tables where we also had proposed agreement and that element that was actually voted in with a much lower rate,” said Newton.
“The Common Front teachers voted less than 60 per cent in favor of that that table. That negotiation covered things like class composition workload elements that are specific to the work of teacher.”
In addition, Newton says, although the salary increase is one of the best she’s seen in her 25 years of experience as a teacher, it’s still not enough.
“It actually doesn’t enrich teachers a whole lot because that 17.4 per cent will probably just cover the cost of inflation, and we’re not actually talking about actually increasing the salaries beyond the projected inflationary rates.”
This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews.
