The STM Strikes as a Result of Privatization
As of November, the unionized maintenance workers (Syndicat du transport de Montréal—CSN) of Montreal’s transit system began its second limited strike as a result of decreased wages and excessive employer expectations. Earlier this year, in June, the union had its first strike, which lasted only nine days. This second strike was expected to last throughout the entire month of November, but on November 11th, the union announced its gradual suspension of the strike. The CSN has been negotiating with its employer, the Société de transport de
Montréal (STM), and after an entire year of failed negotiations, has resorted to limited strikes to see that its demands are met.
The CSN demands a 25 percent wage increase over five years, claiming the last negotiated contract did not keep up with the rising inflation, which was 0.7% in 2019 and 2.4% in 2024. The union is also resisting its employer’s contracting of certain work that does not fulfill the STM’s core purpose of providing transport, such as snow clearing. In addition to these complaints, workers do not want to be moved around to different garages and want to be compensated for their transit time if they have to leave their home garage. The STM has taken these demands into consideration and has publicly responded to the CSN’s concerns.
The STM responded to the workers’ wage demand and has offered them a 12.5 percent raise over five years. The STM says it “must respect the taxpayers’ ability to pay, without having to cut service offerings”; to further back up this claim, the employer says that there would need to be an increase of about $330 million in the budget over five years. The STM had a structural deficit of $80 million in 2024, because of lower ridership (84.2% of the pre-pandemic level) since the COVID-19 pandemic and an increase of 13.8% in operating costs. Furthermore, the STM points out that the provincial budget for 2025-2026 allocated $258 million less than what it was counting on for Montreal’s public transit system; the transit authority has been asking for $585 million more in funding over three years. On the concern of work transfers: the STM describes it as "inefficient" to have employees clock in at their home garage, travel to the location where they are needed, work a full shift, and then travel back to their home garage to clock out. The employer wants the shift to start when employees punch in at the garage where they are needed. The STM and other larger transit authorities have also been demanding more funding from the federal government, arguing that public transit reduces traffic congestion, fights climate change, and makes life more affordable.
As outlined above, the difficulties on both sides of the negotiation are abundantly clear. The most critical factor in alleviating these challenges is the allocation of public funding. Are the funds being allocated fairly to public transit and other sectors? Moreover, are the funds that are being allocated used efficiently? This year’s budget has allocated far more funding to road maintenance as opposed to the share for public transport, a service which is used by more than one million people every day. This year, the government promised $30 billion toward the maintenance of the province’s roads, which is ten times more than what had been set aside for public transit. Beyond the allocation of public funding, the STM has been subcontracting work to lower-paid, non-unionized workers. In 2023, the STM signed three-year-long contracts with two separate companies following a call for IT services at $42 million. Last year, it spent more than $10 million on two contracts that will expire in 2027 for IT services regarding cybersecurity, which Lamont, the president of SCFP 2850, says could have been addressed internally within the STM. In fact, the STM has been pushing to remove a clause in the collective agreement that bars it from subcontracting out work that is typically assigned to its workers. Subcontracting work for lower wages that could have been done in-house is unfair to the STM’s workers. While having the work done in-house does not save money, it ensures that workers are paid fairly for the work they do.
The STM’s subcontracting is a direct example of the way privatization affects the rights of union workers. The subcontracting resulted in fewer funds to pay its assigned workers. The disregard for the fair wages of its workers is a direct display of how the rights of union workers are often taken for granted, leading to the workers taking drastic measures in order to be paid fairly. While the STM is responsible for the dissatisfaction of its workers, the 2025-2026 budget allocation is an overarching cause for the issue, since the STM estimated $258 million more than they received.
Edited by Kathleen Donnelly.