After a year and a half of strike, white smoke finally rose from the general assembly conclave of around 250 employees of the Société québécoise du Cannabis (SQDC). Almost 85% of them agreed with the recommendation of the chief arbitrator of the Ministry of Labor.
Since the employer also supported this recommendation, union members will be able to return to work in the coming weeks.
The strike affected just over twenty of the 98 SQDC branches, where employees are members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE-FTQ).
Wages are at the heart of the conflict
What dragged out the conflict was wages, said union consultant Daniel Morin in an interview with The Canadian Press. With the help of the mediator, we managed to bring the parties together by completely revising the salary scale to make it more advantageous for our employees.
He explained that working conditions, particularly with regard to working hours and precarity, had already been negotiated for several months. There have also been improvements on this page.
Mr. Morin stated that new employees hired at CUPE unionized branches of the SQDC will be paid $21 per hour upon hire, compared to $17.12 per hour in the final year of the previous contract, the expired in December 2021 The campaign for better conditions can be explained and defended really well, says Daniel Morin.
However, he recognizes that a year and a half strike is a difficult ordeal. It is never easy to strike over demands, but you must understand that we work as consultants at the SQDC, especially when you come in at a salary of $17 an hour and hours that severely limit the number of hours many can work The cost of living in 2023 is not doing really well.
No parity with the SAQ
On the other hand, one of CUPE’s stated goals was to achieve parity with the consultants of its sister state-owned company, the Société des alcools du Québec (SAQ). However, this goal could not be achieved because the SAQ pays its wine consultants $24.14 per hour at the door. Our members said that their work was similar to that of their colleagues at the SAQ and we were therefore seeking similar salaries and conditions. But what the mediator presented was a way out of the crisis. “In that sense, we were not necessarily aiming for salaries comparable to those of the SAQ,” Mr. Morin admitted.
The contract concluded has a term of five years and ends on March 31, 2027.
All SQDC advisors are required to complete the training and Daniel Morin says he expects all of his members to complete it within three weeks.
Only 24 of the 26 stores whose employees are affiliated with CUPE went on strike. The twenty unionized branches of the CSN were not affected by this work stoppage. Slightly more than half of the national company’s branches are not unionized.