Union leader in struggle to head off rebels

Confrontational antics alienate city and workers

• Montreal’s unionized blue- collar workers have shown a high degree of tolerance for unlawful behaviour in the past. When pi g manure was dumped in the hallway of an elected official’s apartment building, when the equipment of non-unionized contractors was vandalized, when a wildcat strike left sidewalks slick with ice, it was all part of the larger struggle.

The union’s headquarters even feature a Stalinesque bust honouring f ormer president Jean Lapierre, who was jailed for leading a 1993 charge on city hall that ended with the doors breached by a battering ram.

But Chantal Racette, a disciple of Lapierre and the current president of the union representing 6,500 municipal workers, is finding members are running out of patience with her confrontational ways.

In an effort to squelch a s i mmering r ebellion, Racette, elected president in 2015, called a snap confidence vote last week. She received 66-per-cent support and declared it was time to get back to work defending her members. “It’s fantastic,” she said.

Dissidents on the union executive say the exercise was a farce, however, and they are vowing to continue a campaign to remove Racette from office before her term ends in 2018. With just one polling station for the entire city and members not permitted to vote during working hours, only 14 per cent of members voted last week. The national union, CUPE, decreed that the results would be considered an informal consultation, not an official confidence vote.

The past year has brought a string of bad press for Racette. The final straw for many of her members was a report in the Journal de Montréal last month revealing that she was suspected of ordering the surreptitious installation of GPS tracking devices on the personal cars of two members of the union executive.

The two directors complained of harassment, but Racette’s office told the Journal she simply wanted to ensure they were not overfilling the union for mileage. After news of the spying attempt, 50.6 per cent of members expressed their lack of confidence in Racette at a Dec. 10 general assembly, but she dismissed the vote as symbolic and refused to step down. When she was elected in 2015, replacing Michel Parent who had been president for 12 years, Racette was seen as a trailblazer, the first woman to hold the post.

In 1989, at the age of 21, she had become the first woman to drive heavy machinery for the city, working at a municipal landfill.

As she worked her way up through the male-dominated union, she encountered resistance but found an ally in Lapierre. She told La Presse last year that after Lapierre stood up for her early on, “I always got the red carpet treatment from the guys.” When she ran for president, she promised a return to the aggressive tactics of Lapierre, who was president from 1985-2003.

The public got a taste of her leadership style in December 2015 when she defied a court order and convened a weekday membership meeting that amounted to an illegal strike. A court last week issued $103,000 in fines for contempt of court in connection with the walkout, ordering Racette to pay $ 50,000, the union to pay $ 50,000 and three other union officials to pay $1,000 each.

Last February, the Journal de Montréal reported on a membership meeting during which Racette lashed out against a judge who had ordered the union to pay $ 2 million in punitive damages for an illegal walkout in 2004 that turned downtown sidewalks into skating rinks.

The union sought to delay payment of the damages, equal to roughly 30 per cent of its annual $7-million budget, but in May the Quebec Court of Appeal told the union to pay up immediately.

The appeal court cited the union’s “great indifference toward respect for the law and the rights of citizens.”

In years past, that indifference was never a major handicap for a powerful union that acted as if it were above the law. Racette is learning the hard way that times have changed.