Plante faces massive test with looming labour talks
Most of the city’s 27,000 workers have contracts in need of renewal
A key plank of Mayor Valérie Plante’s 2017 election campaign platform that pledged to improve relations with municipal employees will be put to the test next month when the city sits down to contract talks with most of its unions.
It has been quiet on the labour front since Plante took office nine months ago, but the collective agreements of most of Montreal’s nearly 27,000 employees have expired since her election, or will expire on Dec. 31.
And while union officials say they ’re keeping an open mind that Plante can present an antidote to four years of poisoned relations with her predecessor, Denis Coderre, some also hint that next month may change things.
“It’s for sure going to be a test,” said one union official, who spoke on condition of anonymity about the impending contract talks.
“Projet Montréal said in their program they ’ll respect union accreditation and will put in place policies to balance work and family. She (Plante) talked the talk, and now we’ll see if she walks the walk.”
Several unions said that Plante has yet to indicate how she intends to honour her platform promises to “make the city an exemplary employer,” favour in-house expertise and improve the balance between work and family life for municipal staff.
They also say that they haven’t yet been introduced to the mayor, or for that matter to her newly appointed city manager.
So it’s expected that what has or hasn’t changed in terms of the city’s approach to human resources management under Plante and her Projet Montréal party will only become apparent at the bargaining table.
Montreal police officers and school crossing guards are signed onto contracts that are good for another three years and two years, respectively.
But a far longer list of unions have contracts that are up for renewal.
They include the city ’s 2,000 professionals, who have been without a contract since January 2014.
As well, the collective agreements of the five unions representing firefighters, blue-collar workers, professionals who belong to a professional order, lawyers and architects expired on Dec. 31.
And come the end of this year, the collective agreement of the city’s largest union, representing whitecollar workers, will also expire.
Plante and her right-hand man, executive committee chairman Benoit Dorais, got a cautious thumbs-up from the unions in the spring when the duo announced they were ousting city manager Alain Marcoux, a Coderre appointee who was reviled by the unions.
Marcoux, who was viewed as an adherent of the same school of authoritarian leadership as his boss, had implemented cuts in the municipal workforce in a quest for “organizational performance” using the free hand he was given by Coderre to run the administrative side of the city.
Marcoux’s departure brought one immediate positive effect, said Hélène Benoit, president of the 42-member union of city architects, and that’s a more relaxed atmosphere at the city.
“His vision was very 1950s,” she said of Marcoux. “We were really very watched, controlled. Now we feel like we can loosen the tie a bit.”
But months after Plante’s election, Benoit said she’s waiting for something more substantive from city hall.
“We’re a bit on hold,” she said. Most union officials said they expected the Plante-Dorais team to show Marcoux the door given that they communicate drastically different views of human resources management. What was surprising, perhaps, was how long it took, they said.
Marcoux’s departure was announced in March, and he has only been gone from the city since May.
Marcoux’s successor, former Laval city manager Serge Lamontagne, was named by Plante in June and has barely unpacked his boxes.
“We haven’t seen any change in the position of human resources since Mr. Marcoux’s departure,” said Yvan Rheault, a vice-president of the union representing employees who belong to a professional order, known as the Syndicat professionnel des scientifiques à pratique exclusive de Montréal.
About 90 per cent of his union’s
500 members are city engineers.
“For the moment, we don’t feel the wind of change that we would have wished for.”
Rheault said his union is most interested in Plante’s promise to develop in-house expertise with the city’s employees.
So much work is outsourced that municipal engineers find themselves supervising engineers from firms contracted by the city rather than honing their own skills, Rheault said.
By most reckonings, it would be difficult for labour relations at the city to get any worse than they have been.
Coderre’s term as mayor was marked by angry protests by municipal workers, including one in which they trashed city council chambers in 2014, and by Montreal police officers donning colourful pants for three years in a protest against a new municipal pension law. The province passed the law at the behest of Coderre and Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume and requires workers to contribute larger portions of their salaries toward their retirement funds.
In fact, a coalition of municipal unions in Quebec is challenging the law, known as Law 15, as unconstitutional. About 60 days of hearings are scheduled in Quebec Superior Court starting in late September.
And for several unions, the wounds from the last round of bargaining are still fresh. That’s because that last round only just ended.
For example, Rheault’s union signed the contract that expired in December in June 2016. The union had gone more than five years without a new contract, and a settlement only came after the union’s first full-blown strike in its history.
Similarly, Benoit’s architects signed their last contract, which also expired at the end of 2017, in April 2016. It was retroactive to January 2012.
The school crossing guards just ratified their collective agreement in May following two years of negotiations. Yet they’ll be back at the bargaining table for a new contract before Plante’s four-year term ends.
Meanwhile, the city ’s blue-collar union, which is under trusteeship by its parent union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, is looking at the coming contract talks optimistically, said its chief negotiator, Hans Marotte.
“We’re at a crossroads,” he said. “At the city, they have someone (Plante) who says she’s progressive, so we’ll give her a chance. On our end, we want to make labour relations work. We’re offering to advance things.”
Marotte said the vibe at three preparatory meetings with the city’s negotiators was positive.
“So we’ll see at the negotiating table in September and October to what extent these negotiations are still tainted by the philosophy of Mr. Marcoux.”
Still, a law that was passed by the National Assembly in 2016 to govern the negotiation of collective agreements in the municipal sector limits how much time the Plante-Dorais administration and the unions have to find common ground before the Quebec government steps in to assign a mediator, an arbitrator and, possibly, impose a contract.
Law 24, which requires future union contracts to last a minimum of five years, sets a 150-day limit on negotiations with a union other than the police or firefighters, with the possibility of a 30-day extension. In the case of the police and firefighters, the municipality and union have 90 days before the expiry of the contract plus 150 days following the expiry to negotiate a settlement before the province steps in.
Technically, time is already up to negotiate with the firefighters and the other professionals union, and it will be up in mid-September with most of the other unions. (In the case of unions other than police and firefighters, the clock starts ticking when the right to strike or lockout is acquired, not when the contract expires.)
For now, there’s no panic on either side, the blue-collar union’s Marotte said. The city and the union agreed during their preparatory meetings that they prefer to negotiate, he said.
“We said as long as both sides are in good faith, and things advance, the law doesn’t exist for us,” Marotte said. “We put it aside, and we’ll see later.”
We’ll see at the negotiating table in September and October to what extent these negotiations are still tainted by the philosophy of Mr. Marcoux.
HANS MAROTTE, Canadian Union of Public Employees chief negotiator