Olympic Park workers give themselves a five-day strike mandate
Posted March 20, 2025 9:28 am.
After negotiations that have dragged on for more than two years, nearly 200 workers at the Olympic Park have given themselves a five-day strike mandate this week.
The mandate, adopted by 96 per cent of workers, comes less than two weeks before the opening of the Olympic Stadium Sports Centre.
In summer of 2023, a strike was narrowly avoided after an agreement was reached on the non-monetary issues of their collective agreement. The employer and the union had agreed to resume wage talks after the public sector negotiations.
“In a dramatic turn of events, when it came time to resume negotiations, the employer did an about-face and asked to renegotiate a large part of the agreement that had been agreed on less than a year earlier. The Olympic Park unions felt betrayed,” says Nouhoum Doumbia, president of the Union of Technical Offices of the Olympic Park, in a press release.
Olympic Park management and the Treasury Board are now asking for more flexibility in the collective agreement. This flexibility would result in a precariousness of working hours and a series of setbacks in working conditions, according to the unions.
“The unions’ concern is that the precariousness of schedules affects the work-family balance. In the long term, we risk losing valuable expertise in the maintenance of our stadium and its park,” adds Kathrin Peter, Vice-President of the Fédération des professionnèles de la CSN (FP-CSN).
“The Olympic Park is the beating heart of Montreal, but for its modernization to go smoothly, its workers must be treated with the respect they deserve,” concluded Dominique Daigneault, President of the CSN’s Conseil central du Montréal métropolitain (CCMM-CSN).
The strike mandate concerns many trades, including administrative and technical staff, building maintenance staff and professionals such as engineers.
