The general union front is hardening its tone to the government, one week before the end of the general agreement of 600,000 public sector workers.
Unions plan to spread technical pressure to secure wage increases against inflation. The fight against the reduction will be the worker unions, which announced Sept-Îles in the first series of demonstrations across the province.
The city on the North coast was chosen for a symbolic reason: last year, for the 50th anniversary of the Commune union in 1972, a hundred workers gathered in Sept-Îles.
It is in the same spirit that the union ambassadors delivered their message on Friday.
“The presidents of our union have said that they are ready in several countries as much as necessary,” said Mathilde Fréchette, the national representative of APTS on the northern coast.
We can talk about civil disobedience. We can talk about the impact. If they returned to the 1972 treaty, the leaders were thrown into prison for their workers. […] It’s really important that we can fight to get access to better conditions,” he added.
Twenty or so union delegates showed up near the supermarket to demonstrate how rising costs have affected workers.
CSN, CSQ, APTS and FTQ figuratively called the President of the Board of Treasurers Sonia Lebel, as their mascot.
These unions call for a mechanism to protect them from the rising cost of living with salary increases based on the CPI ratio.
“The workers are asking us to defend ourselves against this inflation,” added the president of the CSN Cote-Nord Central Council, Guillaume Tremblay. As we have seen, with a salary increase of 6% in the last 3 years, these workers have been impoverished.
CSN, CSQ, APTS and FTQ represent 420,000 Quebec government employees.
