More than a month after voting in favor of a strike mandate, employees who work in SAQ branches risk putting their plan into action this week, Wednesday and Thursday.
“Unless significant progress is made at the negotiating table,” the 5,000 members of the Union of Store and Office Employees (SEMB-SAQ-CSN) will not return to work during these two days and will brandish their signs in order to express their dissatisfaction to the state corporation.
“Nearly 70% of SAQ employees are part-time, on call, and who never know how many hours they will be able to work during the next pay sequence,” said the union president, Lisa Courtemanche. , in a press release published Monday. It is unacceptable that a state corporation keeps so many employees in precarious situations, when it is possible, as we are demonstrating at the negotiating table, to consolidate all these hours in regular positions. »
“We have been informed of a possible strike by our store employees’ union (SEMB) on Wednesday and Thursday. Until then, all our branches are open and our teams are ready to serve our customers, for its part affirmed the SAQ, in an official reaction sent by email to The Press. We are currently focusing our energies on the discussions that are still ongoing. We were at the negotiating table (Monday) and a session is planned (Tuesday). In the event of a strike, our business continuity plan is ready to be deployed to offer our customers limited access to our branch network. »
If the strike is confirmed, the state company will list its open branches on its website, it was indicated.
Requests
In addition to better access to the insurance plan and the possibility of more training, union members also want to take care of in-store preparation of orders placed online, instead of everything being done at the Distribution Center.
Without a collective agreement for a year, the Union also signed an open letter at the end of March in which it affirmed that putting an end to the distribution center expansion project, estimated at 137 million, would allow the SAQ to contribute to optimization efforts, requested by the Legault government when tabling the most recent budget.
The union believes that this project is “environmental nonsense”. “For a citizen of Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean or for a resident of the North Shore, the order for a single bottle of crème de menthe placed on SAQ.com will be processed in Montreal then shipped, by truck, to at destination – without any regard to the fact that the same bottle is already in every neighborhood branch, throughout Quebec,” we can read.
It’s also “nonsense on a financial level: for several years, SAQ employees have been asking orders placed online to be prepared in the branch. The request is currently under discussion at the negotiating table: the in-store collection time will be much faster than the three to five day delay caused by shipping orders from Montreal,” estimates the union.
“The Montreal Automated Center (CAM) will provide access to all products marketed at the SAQ to our customers, regardless of where they are in Quebec,” wrote the president and CEO of the SAQ. state company, Jacques Farcy, in response to the union, in a letter published the next day. The CAM is the SAQ’s largest infrastructure project in the last 30 years. To call for scrapping would be to be deaf to recent developments in retail, but first and foremost it would be to brush aside what customers expect from their experience with us. »