“The positions are very far apart” between the province and 12,000 CPE workers.
About 12,000 workers in Quebec public daycares (CPEs) will be asked to vote on a strike mandate in November.
The mandate requested by the unions of the Fédération de la santé et des services sociaux (FSSS), affiliated with the CSN, is for five strike days, to be exercised in blocks of days or individually, but not in half-days.
The meetings to vote on this strike mandate will be held Nov. 2 to 15, Stéphanie Vachon, representative of the CPE sector at the federation, said in an interview Tuesday.
If strike days were indeed called, they could therefore take place as early as the end of November.
“We find it a shame to have to go there. We say to ourselves: the staff shortage is so great. Right now, the government should ask us what it can do to keep the staff in place. We don’t see why we need to mobilize, but we have no choice but to go there,” Vachon said.
“We hope that this will put pressure to obtain more dates (for negotiations), more serious discussions and a commitment from the employer to really resolve the staff shortage in the long term,” she added.
Quebec submitted its offers to CPE workers last April. The president of the Treasury Board, Sonia LeBel, had said she wanted to wait until all the main unions had submitted their requests before submitting her offers.
The province is also struggling with a shortage of educators in daycare services and, for this reason, it is trying to optimize the use of those who are already in place.
Salary, leave and workload are among the points in dispute. Vachon said Quebec is offering a 12.7-per-cent pay increase over five years, while it recently settled with public-sector unions for 17.4 per cent over five years.
However, negotiations have not broken off. Further talks are set for October and November.
“We have agreed on small things,” Vachon said, but “the positions are very far apart.”
The FSSS does not represent all workers in CPEs; others are unionized with other organizations or are not unionized.