The 1,800 engineers of the Quebec state, who had suspended their strike, will resume it next night, unless there is an agreement by then to renew their collective agreement.
Posted yesterday at 4:46 p.m.
Hope remains, since negotiations were still underway late Tuesday afternoon with the Treasury Board.
Unless there is an agreement or a promising advance, a new indefinite strike will be called at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday night.
The Professional Association of Government Engineers of Quebec (APIGQ) began a walkout on April 23. Then she interrupted him after a month to resume negotiations with the Quebec government.
“We gave negotiations a chance. It had been a month on strike. After a month of strike, each of the parties must reposition themselves at some point. We decided to leave seven days to take some pressure off each of the parties and get back to the negotiation table and focus on the real issues,” explained Marc-André Martin, president of the APIGQ, in an interview.
Remuneration remains at the heart of the dispute. The APIGQ considers that there is too great a wage gap between them and engineers in the municipal sector or other engineers in the public sector.
Quebec had already said that it had presented a significant offer in order to come to an agreement with its engineers.
Of the 1,800 engineers employed by the State, 1,200 work for the Ministry of Transport. The others work in the Ministry of the Environment, then in the other ministries.
Another engineers’ strike would affect the supervision of construction sites, the authorization to launch a site and the negotiation of contracts with consulting engineering firms.