STM professional strike: essential services sufficient, Quebec labour tribunal rules

The Administrative Labour Tribunal has ruled that essential services will be sufficient during the professional strike scheduled to take place at the Société de transport de Montréal (STM) starting Tuesday night.

The union, which has 770 members, has announced an overtime strike that will run from Dec. 17 at 12:01 a.m. to Jan. 11 at 11:59 p.m.

This strike by STM professionals will therefore take place in part at the same time as the overtime strike already begun by 2,400 maintenance employees.

This will be the union’s first strike in its 31-year history.

In an interview, union vice president Benoît Tessier did not rule out escalating the strike in January if the overtime strike did not yield results in the union’s view.

This local chapter of the Syndicat des employé(e)s professionnel(le)s et de bureau (SEPB), affiliated with the FTQ, represents engineers, analysts, architects, and consultants who work in IT, planning, infrastructure, and finance, for example.

When the union announced its strike notice, the STM stated that “no impact on service delivery is expected” for users.

The STM and the union had already agreed on a list of essential services to be maintained, and the Tribunal ruled that it was sufficient to avoid endangering public health or safety.

As a result, the professionals concerned will continue to work their regular 36-hour week. No overtime will be worked, “except in the event of an emergency involving the health or safety of the population,” such as breakdowns or failures of computer systems critical to operations or safety, or critical breakdowns of infrastructure, the metro, or buses requiring the immobilization of the fleet.

The decision also specifies that “before calling in an employee, the STM must first verify whether the need can be met by a qualified manager with sufficient technical knowledge of the problem to be solved. If not, the union undertakes to provide without delay the necessary unionized personnel capable of performing the work required to deal with the situation.”

Two of the STM unions have reached tentative agreements, which have even been ratified by their members: the union representing 4,500 bus drivers and metro operators — the largest of all, which is a local branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) affiliated with the FTQ — and the union representing 1,300 administrative and technical employees — another local branch of CUPE.

Two unions are currently or will soon be conducting overtime strikes: the maintenance workers’ union, affiliated with the CSN, and the professionals’ union.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews