(Montreal) As coordinated negotiations of collective agreements for 30 Quebec hotels begin, the Greater Montreal Hotel Association warns union members that the state of the industry has not returned to what it was before the pandemic and that their working conditions are already very good.
The Fédération du commerce, affiliated with the CSN, has just launched coordinated negotiations for 30 hotels in the regions of Montreal, Quebec, Estrie and Saguenay—Lac Saint-Jean. And the appetite of union members is great: they are demanding 36% increases over four years, including 15% from the first year.
These union members are calling for salary catch-up, believing that hotels have regained momentum since the pandemic and that room prices have increased since 2020.
At the Greater Montreal Hotel Association, which represents several of the hotels involved in this negotiation, the president and CEO, Éric Hamel, believes that there is “nothing for us that justifies having a speech that says that the hotels are doing very well and everything is back in good shape and we are in a prosperous environment.”
He emphasizes that the year of comparison should not be 2020, since the pandemic then hit the hotel industry, but rather 2019. And, according to him, the occupancy rate of hotels in the greater Montreal region in 2023 was still 5% lower than it was in 2019.