(Toronto) Metro grocery store workers in the Greater Toronto Area are preparing to strike as early as Tuesday evening as negotiations continue between the retailer and some 3,700 employees.
Employees at 27 Metro stores in the metropolitan area could go on strike as early as 11:59 p.m. Tuesday.
“We’re going to go all the way,” said Lana Payne, national president of Unifor, the union that represents Metro workers.
“(It’s) very, very crucial in these last 12 hours to try and push really hard for our members. And that’s what our teams are doing right now,” she explained.
Progress has been made since negotiations began on June 26, Ms. Payne added, but the union’s priorities remain the same at the table: improving wages and job quality, stabilizing working hours and improving access. health insurance and dental care benefits.
Unifor held a strike vote before negotiations began, garnering 100% support for industrial action in the event that an agreement could not be reached.
“The 100% strike vote showed the employer that our members mean business,” said Payne.
Metro spokeswoman Stephanie Bonk said in an email that the company “(is committed) to working with the union to reach an agreement that meets the needs of our employees while allowing the company to have the flexibility it needs to meet and exceed our customers’ needs and expectations. »
It’s a very different round of negotiations than last time before the COVID-19 pandemic, observed Ms. Payne.
“They’ve been through a pandemic, they’ve been through an affordability crisis,” she said of Metro workers. ” Many things have changed. »
The latest inflation data, released on Tuesday, showed that while the headline consumer price index slowed its annual growth to 2.8% in June, a far cry from more than 8% a year ago. year on year, food prices rose 9.1% year-on-year.
Food and housing, the two biggest costs for workers, have become increasingly large shares of their monthly expenses, Ms. Payne pointed out – the former as the cost of food continues to rise, and the second as the Bank of Canada raises interest rates to try to fight inflation.
“We’ve even had several of our own full-time members tell us, ‘we can’t even afford to shop in our own stores,'” she said.
The bargaining committee acknowledged that “this is a delicate moment,” Ms. Payne continued, amid more than a year of high inflation, rising interest rates and profits in the grocery sector. .
“The workers are saying very clearly, look, we have to be able to live and have a good job here. And that’s what we expect. »
This round of negotiations also precedes a two-year round of negotiations for more than a dozen collective agreements between grocers and Unifor members. Ms Payne said the union is trying to model its negotiations within the sector, in the hope that a good first contract will help it set standards for subsequent contracts.
“But that doesn’t mean the others will be easy,” she warned.
“We say enough is enough. This has to stop, we have to start improving (the conditions of) these jobs. That has been our goal at Metro, and it will be our goal throughout the negotiations with the grocery stores. »